Ugh. Much of this, as ever, is me trying to get my head straight; feel free to ignore me if you like.

So Damien’s tried to call me twice; I ignored it both times. I don’t want him being all nice to me to do what it normally does: undo the decision I made in light of last night. But he still texted me:  “When you next coming down love I miss you loads I mean a lot too :(“  And I kind of feel bad, but he has had so many chances and last night pretty much was the final nail in the coffin. I had been seriously on the fence, feeling like it was the right thing to do, but not wanting to do it, sort of thing. But the way he treated me last night (context: 1 and 2), now that was either the booze talking (but he swore blind he’d only had one, so if he was drunk then he’s back to lying to me again) or he was demonstrating that he has very little (if any) respect for me.

So, in short: he was either lying or being disrespectful. And if it was the latter then he was sinking really low in using The Bad Thing to steer me off course, because I do believe that anyone who had their full capacities (as he insisted he did last night) could see where the conversation was headed and as the jump to talking about that was so non-sequitor that it cannot have been natural (I very nearly snapped: “what the fuck does this have to do with what we’re talking about?!” about 3 times, but he was crying so I held back) - so then this suggests some very clever deflection on his part.

At least I have an even stronger stand on things I want out of relationships in the future: honesty, respect and compassion will be re-highlighed in an even more neon shade of yellow. And faithfulness, but you’d think that went without saying.

The fact of the matter is yes he’s being lovely and sweet and everything*, but I can’t keep falling for shit like this. Every time I’ve come close to dumping him, he’s suddenly turned into prince charming. So I relent… and then a few weeks later we’re back where we started. Like November: I’m certain he did something on the 4th; his story has changed that many times, and he got all angry and defensive and practically threatened to kill himself when I suggested that something untoward might have been going on. There was a frosty couple of days wherein I tried to decide what to do but I ended up thawing and staying with him; we had a lovely couple of weeks together, he was really lovely on my birthday and so on. Then, a week after my birthday, he pulled a vanishing act (and knowingly ruined a rare visit to Robyn in the process). And I don’t want to be stuck in such a vicious cycle any more. It just isn’t worth it. I am too old to put up with this bull shit: too old to be basically treated like a kid (because that’s how this lack of respect makes me feel), and too old to be wasting my “Young Adult” years on a relationship that causes a fuckton more drama and misery than it is worth.

This needs to stop now. It isn’t fair on either of us to drag this out any more; it’s already died a death over the last five months. I regret not ending it when I had the inclination: back in August (after he cheated) or back in November. I don’t want to be being a misery guts in April or whenever and thinking “I fucking hate this; I wish I had had the balls to go through with it in February”.

I know I’m making the right decision; the idea of spending Valentine’s Day with him makes me feel sick: a heady mixture of guilt and dread and fear. No one deserves to feel that, and no one deserves to have that felt about them. It’s fairer on both of us that this ends now.

Even if it does mean I can never go drinking in SNAFU again… :p

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*He often is the night after a disappearance, hell the morning after (it later turned out) he’d cheated, he was downright charming for a whole week. He turned up at my house at 7 in the morning to buy me breakfast & eat it by the lake… then again that might have had something to do with the fact that she lived in the village next to mine at the time…