I dated a boy this year who was more difficult to understand than any girl I’ve ever dated. He always wanted to be with me, which isn’t a bad thing, I guess, unless you’re in school, and you’re trying to focus, and he’s starting to become controlling and clingy.
It started slow, with hugs every time I would walk to my other classes, and that was sweet. Then it grew to ten hugs in half an hour of seeing each other. And maybe it’s because I’m gay and didn’t realize it yet but he just got on my nerves all of the time.
When we had only been dating for a few weeks, he said
“I love you”
And I told him I didn’t love him back. I said it was too early and we were young and I was still figuring things out. He said
“I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until you get used to it and say it back”
I couldn’t seem to explain to him how angry that sentence made me, or how toxic it sounded, and he continued to tell me, at least five times a day
“I love you”
I had not told my first girlfriend that I loved her, ever. I hadn’t told my second girlfriend until we’d been together for three months. I guess I should have told him then that we had to break up, that it wasn’t working. Instead, I gave in, I said
“I love you”
back to him. And that made him happy, but it made my insides coil every time I thought about him. Still, I did not break up with him. I thought I needed him for some reason. Because as much as I hated it, he did tell me he loved me, and I hadn’t heard that in a long time.
So when he began to say things like
“My girl”
Or
“She’s mine”
Or calling me
“Babe” unironically,
I let it go. I thought it’s just a show of love. When I did tell him not to call me babe, he called me that the next day. He never seemed to remember when I told him things like that.
But he did tell me he loved me, however cheap those words were. I didn’t think about the fact he’d probably said that to his other eight girlfriends before me too.
The day I broke up with him, I told him I was still trying to figure out my sexuality. He replied,
“Fine, it’s not that big of a change anyway, from pan to gay, we'll just rewrite that in the books”
And that was when I knew that I was doing a good thing in breaking up with him. Because that relationship was not healthy, and I wasn’t happy.
He and I are still friends I guess, but not really. We don’t talk anymore, and I think that was always a problem we’d had.
