I’ve been in an emotionally abusive relationship for the past few months.

It started out great, and I honestly thought I had the most perfect girl in the world. I met her on tour, and we had the most passionate and intense time together and i couldn’t believe how amazing she was. I moved the heavens to bring her to England, to secure her a job, and we lived in total bliss for months. I’d never met a girl so devoted to me, and we made so many promises and plans that I believed we would be together forever.

It was everything I never knew I wanted.

We both drive trucks. We both knew sometimes we wouldn’t be able to do the same job together, but we’d video call for hours every day if we worked apart. For hours. She was besotted with me, and I felt complete with her.

But then she went on a tour which separated us for close to 3 months. As she was about to leave she was almost in tears, not wanting to go. I reassured her, told her to think of the money, that we would be back together sooner than we thought.

If I could turn back time I wouldn’t let her go. I would keep the perfect relationship we had, I would keep the girl she was.

For two months we were good; video calls all day and night, promises of the future, and I would buy her little gifts for when she came home. I also secretly started planning an engagement surprise; a proposal on the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janiero. She begged every day for us to get married. I’d never had someone want me so much.

But being apart so long affected her. She would become sad in our calls, but I’d always make her smile and keep her spirits up. She was always a bit of a drinker (she’s eastern european) but suddenly it was becoming more and more frequent. Then her drinking started to cause her trouble in her work.

She called me one day, around 3 months ago, and as she spoke to me she was crying, but she didn’t realise. I knew what it was.

She wiped away a tear she didn’t know she had. She was confused.

“You have depression,” I said. The ache of being away from me had taken a heavy toll on her.

For the next few days she’d drink and call and cry, and I’d talk and smile and give her strength, but her cycle was unstoppable, and she descended into hell.

I felt helpless. I was on another tour, unable to hold her and help her and be with her, and it was then that I forgot to look after myself.

And it was also then that things started to change between us. She would become angry at me, something I’d never experienced with her before. I put it down to her drinking. She would shut me out, not talk to me for hours, especially when she was hungover and would sleep all day.

After she would feel remorse, and apologise to me profusely, tell me she would never drink again, never hurt me again. And then she would have a beer. Just the one. And then the next day it would be champagne, and then the next day she’d get smashed and we’d go over all this again. And again. And again.

What happens on tour stays on tour, but she got in so much trouble I was having meetings with my firm in England about the damage and problems she was causing in Germany, in Finland, in whatever country she was drinking in. I fought for her and defended her and helped her keep her job, and all the while she would drink and belittle me and hurt me.

The low point for her was when she’d call me, drunk, and tell me she wanted to kill herself and I’d be on the phone to her for hours, talking her down, reminding her that in a few weeks we’d be together again. I helped her. I got her through a bad time. I didn’t see my own approaching.

Then one day she ended our relationship with a text. I was heartbroken. We were only a few weeks away from being reunited. Then she called me for hours again like nothing had happened. This would also mark the first time she would say if she hadn’t gone on that tour we would still be together. She would repeat this a hundred times over the next few months until the final confrontation between us.

Then she started dropping bombshells on me. Telling me to pack up everything of hers in our home and send it back to her country. She’d drink again, hurt me, sleep, apologise, and I’d go into work again to defend her and promise them that she wasn’t a problem, that she would be ok. I just needed her with me and I could save her.

She’d call me, tell me she didn’t love me, but she did miss me, and she had feelings for me. She’d drink, hurt me, want me, hate me.

She came back to England. She got out of the truck, hugged me, kissed me hard. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We went home, we made love. I took her to her friend who lived near the airport she was going to fly back home from in a couple of days.

I thought maybe that was it for us, but hoped after some time with her family she would realise what we had. Maybe once she was away from the job and the drinking she would want me again.

Instead she wanted me the next day, right after ending our relationship on social media. That had broken me again, but she begged me to see her, immediately, so I did. It was midnight and I drove over an hour to her, and when I saw her it felt right. She couldn’t keep her hands off me, she told me she never stopped having feelings for me, that no one had ever made love to her like I had. We were in each others embrace for over a day. We fell asleep together, and when we woke up we were still wrapped around each other. We hadn’t moved all night.

We made love again. “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

“I’ve never felt this way about anyone,” she said.

“Look in my eyes, you can see my love for you'” she said.

“If you hadn’t helped me on that tour I would have killed myself,” she said.

“Can we get an apartment together?” she asked and I said yes.

“Can we try for a child?” she asked and I said yes.

Before we said goodbye, she told me we’d be ok, that she would see me again in four weeks and we would work it out. My heart found the familiar strength that only she could give me.

She landed in her country. On a whim I asked if I should fly out and join her, and she excitedly said yes. I was at work, so I cleared it with my boss who gave me extra time to spend with her, and then I called her and told her the good news.

“Don’t come here,” she said. “I don’t want you.”

As stunned as I was, part of me also wasn’t surprised.

“But…what about our child? The apartment?” I asked.

“I just wanted you to fuck me,” she said. “Our sex is the best I’ve ever had.”

We didn’t speak for a day and a half after this, which was the longest time we hadn’t communicated since starting work together.

And then the calls would start again.

“I miss you,” she’d say. “I’ll see you in a few weeks. We will be ok.”

Of course she was drunk when she said these things. And she was drunk for five days, so for five days we had a good relationship, and then when she stopped drinking she didn’t want to know me.

And I was sick. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t sleeping. I felt the depression that I saved her from take me, and I sank lower and lower. My days would hang on whether she was nice to me or bad to me. One word from her and I’d be high or I’d be desolate. I’d wake up every day, soaked in despair, knowing that she was probably going to break me again.

And she did. She always did.

“I’m going on a date,” she said.

My heart tore.

“I thought we were working things out?” I said.

“I need a maaaaaan!” She laughed at me.

Darkness wrapped around me.

I told her that it hurt but was good she told me, and now I would go and we wouldn’t speak again. That maybe we could do the upcoming tour as friends, but right now, for my sanity, we would have no contact, because I was starting to make plans about forwarding all my money to my kids and ending my pain. I was hanging on by my fingernails.

Crazily, we then talked more that day than we had in weeks. Deep conversations, about us, about love, about how she knew we would end up as lovers again in a few weeks when we toured. She cancelled the date, said that she couldn’t go on it because of “us”.

For the next few days we were tight once more. She said she now understood how sick I was, and she promised never to hurt me again, that she was my best friend.

It lasted 3 days.

She called me yesterday morning. She’d had a sore throat (due to being sick from drinking) and she was going to her friends but she wouldn’t drink because she didn’t want to.

She went quiet on me for 6 hours and then called me, paralytic, throwing up between her words.

I told her I’d been worried sick, that she knew I wasn’t well, and needed her to be ok.

She laughed at me.

She hung up on me.

Then she sent me a video, saying “I love you and I miss you”…but it didn’t feel right.

I called her.

“You love me and miss me?” I asked.

She laughed. “The video wasn’t for you,” she said.

“Who was it for?” My heart was dying.

“It was for the man I kissed on the tour,” she said. “He is my boyfriend.”

I was hurt, but I also wasn’t stupid. I knew about this incident because when it had happened she’d called me straight away, in tears, beginning my forgiveness.

“You said you never spoke to him again?” I said.

She did her thing of not answering directly when she was on the spot, which usually meant she was caught in a lie.

“You last saw him two months ago,” I said, “and he’s away on tour for another five months. So when exactly is this relationship between you happening?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “he is my other boyfriend.”

“OK,” I said, “well I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him that you and I are still fucking and all the things you promised me.”

She laughed at me. “I tell him everything. He knows we have been together.”

And that’s when I knew she was lying, lying with the simple aim of hurting me, of destroying me. That’s when I knew this had to finish. That’s when I knew that if I didn’t cut my ties with her I wasn’t going to survive her demented games.

If she was in a relationship, sending me this video was a calculated and viscous thing to do, to inflict harm upon someone she knew was barely hanging on.

If she was lying about the relationship, then sending me a video like this was an act of malice. Either way, what she did, she did to crush me.

She called me again. “Look! My mother is making our traditional food and I wanted to show you!”

That’s how ridiculous she was. She ignored the pain she caused me and pretended nothing had happened.

I didn’t let it slide. “So you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” she shrugged like it was nothing, like my pain was nothing. She hung up. She sent me video and voice messages telling me I was a child and her boyfriend was the one for her.

I blocked her. I didn’t do it lightly. It broke my heart, but the person she had become is not who I knew, who I changed both our worlds for. I stuck my neck and my reputation on the line for her, and she never appreciated anything I had done. Instead, she’d become a withered, horrible alcoholic, who would inflict pain on me to make herself feel happy.

There is so, so, so much more to this story. I have screenshots, videos, and pictures of the manupulation and abuse she forced upon me, picking me up like a toy, throwing me away like rubbish. I’ve forwarded everything to those I trust the most…just in case.

I’m not well. I’ve been bad before but this is different, something deliberately caused by someone I trusted with all my shattered heart. But now it has to end. I know that by writing this, it is my way of finishing the relationship between us forever, because there’s no coming back for us from this.

But then there shouldn’t be any relationship between us after what she has done to me.

I’ve been asked multiple times why I never walked away, left her to her own demise, and I reply that I can’t because the girl I knew, the girl I loved, was the most perfect girl I’d ever known, and I believe the relationship we had would be there again, if only we had time together…

I’m weak for her, and 3 days ago, in a moment of candidness, she admitted that she likes having this power over me. And then she’d be back to her scathing self, telling me that I only thought our relationship had been good, that it was full of problems I had just never seen.

“No,” I said, “we were amazing together. Hannover is where we began, and Amsterdam was the best days of our lives.”

“We broke the hotel door having sex,” she smiled at the memory.

“And Berlin was where I really fell in love with you,” I said. “We had more passion and adventure in our time together than most people do in a lifetime.”

She lowered her eyes, said quietly, “we had the best times,” and I caught a glimpse of the girl she once was.

And then she was gone, and the monster replaced her, telling me about all the random men that messaged her every day, wanting her.

She has serious mental issues and she needs help. She isn’t a good person anymore. She has a drinking problem. She’s got a really bad reputation at our company, despite me fighting for her, but I’m not going to defend or protect her anymore. Without me she has nobody to help her.

And maybe this does come off as me being an bitter ex, but I’m not. I’ve had her friends and family contact me, worried about her drinking, telling me to be strong and maybe when she is well we can fix things between us because I was the best man she ever had…but the damage is too great.  

If I could go back and stop her going on that tour, I promise you we would be fantastic right now, possibly planning a wedding, moving to another country…anything was possible and achievable when we were with each other. As she had once said to me, “nothing can defeat us, as long as we stay together”. I still believe this.

I can’t end this with anything profound, because there’s no good ending to this story, no resolution. The best ending is that I come out of this intact, fix myself, stay alone. But I know, and I cry as I write this, that if she clicks her fingers I’ll be at her mercy once more. I can’t escape, and she knows it.

And I know she’ll hate me for writing all this, but it might help her see what she’s done to me.

Maybe it will fix her.

Because it’s too late to fix us.

UPDATE: The boyfriend story she spun me was a lie. She made the video, sent it to me, and then barraged me for 24 hours about it. What her end game was for this, I’m not sure, but I have an idea. She knew I was on the edge, barely clinging on, and now she’d come to break my fingers. She’s vile when she’s sober, but she’s evil when she’s drunk.

We had the final interaction between us today. We talked the old school phone way, and the hatred and venom in her voice made it clear that she was done playing with me, but it was also an admission of guilt and embarrassment from her, because she knew I’d caught her red handed in her “boyfriend” lie. He must’ve contacted her after I called and text him,  demanded to know what was happening, and why was he being dragged into it. This is the reason she had blocked me on socials without any of her usual angry outbursts, because she’d been found out and ashamed.

And then she launched into a tirade, screamed at me, “why do all my boyfriends end up going fucking crazy at the end of the relationship?”

I told her if she hadn’t figured it out by now, maybe she would the next time. Or the next time. Or the next.

She yelled at me again. “This is all your fault! If you hadn’t made me go on that tour we would still be together!”

She said that being with me was the biggest mistake of her life, but now she was strong again, that she was better than me, that she deserved so much more than me…me who had loved her, who had fought for her, who had saved her, who had almost died for her.

And what did I do in that last phone call where she called me “weak”, “pathetic”, and “worthless”?

I said I was sorry.