I Replaced Most of the Words in My Vocabulary to “Sorry”

Everything was great at first. He was funny, caring, genuine, and seemed to be an all-around good guy.

We spent a majority of our free time together. My friends liked him; he liked my friends. I liked his friends, and they seemed to like me. My family liked him and I got along well with his family. The first six months of our relationship was a dream. He was the perfect combination of a gentleman and a guy I could joke around with. Until one day, he wasn’t.We were on a walk together, something we did often, and I was giving him a hard time. We frequently joked around with each other. This time he did not joke back, he did not laugh, he went silent. He walked me home. I tried to ask him what was wrong, why he got quiet, and why he was upset. He told me to shut up and didn’t say anything. He left my house without saying goodbye. Upset and confused, I went to a friend’s house. I was there until around 9:00 that night. When I got home, I tried calling him. There was no answer. It was around 10:30 when he finally called me. He asked me what I had been doing, and I told him. He was furious with me. He said he couldn’t believe how inconsiderate I was and how dare I go to a friend’s house when he was clearly upset. He told me, “What kind of person just goes on with their day knowing how upset their boyfriend is?” He said it was obvious that I didn’t care about him, and how he deserved a better girlfriend, that I was lucky he kept me around.I was so upset. I felt terrible. I didn’t want to loose him. How could I have done something to make him feel so badly without actually doing anything at all? I said sorry, asked him to forgive me, and he said he would talk to me tomorrow. So I went to sleep, wondering what happened, and what went wrong. He had never been that way before. He didn’t say anything about it the next day; things were just as they always had been. And they were for a quite a while after that.

He told me, “What kind of person just goes on with their day knowing how upset their boyfriend is?” He said it was obvious that I didn’t care about him, and how he deserved a better girlfriend, that I was lucky he kept me around.

A couple months later, he was at my house. I was still living at home, and my parents were old-school in some aspects, one being that he had to leave by a particular time at night. We were having a good night, and everything was normal. We said our usual goodbyes and he left. Though he had to leave, I was able to go to a female friend’s house. So I did. It was Friday night; I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. He called me when he got home. I told him where I was and what I was doing. He hung up on me. I tried calling him back twice. He answered on the third call and told me to call him when I got home and hung up. I went home not long after that, and called him when I arrived. He told me that I was a “shitty girlfriend” because he was not the last person I talked with before I went to bed. He said he was “sick of the bullshit that friends don’t matter” for me to be with, but he did. He told me I had no business talking to anyone else that late at night, and if I wasn’t with him I should just go to bed.  I said sorry over and over. I was crying, I couldn’t understand why he would cuss at me the way he was, why he was so upset over something that had happened many times before, or really anything else that was going on through that phone line.This was the start of the very long, very steep, hill our relationship tumbled down. Sitting here thinking about it right now, a few thoughts are running through my head: I was pathetic. How could I just let him talk to me like that? Why didn’t I walk away the first time he talked down to me? How embarrassing.

This was the start of me questioning my own self-worth. It was the start of me believing him when he said that I was not good enough for him. It was the start of me doing whatever I was told because I was so sure I would never get any better than him.

The person whoI am writing about feels like a stranger now. I can still feel everything I felt then, but picturing it in my head just doesn’t feel right. It’s like watching a movie and yelling at the TV for somebody to do something that you know would work out better, but they don’t listen. Though I feel these things, I know that I was not stupid, I know that I should not be embarrassed. I know that the beginning of the bad times I’ve just wrote about were also the beginning of a long time of manipulation. This was the start of me questioning my own self-worth. It was the start of me believing him when he said that I was not good enough for him. It was the start of me doing whatever I was told because I was so sure I would never get any better than him. I was sure he was the only one that would deal with me. It was when I replaced most of the words in my own vocabulary to “sorry.” At this time, all I was beginning to see is that I nothing without him.