Dating Blogger Amy: “The Rise and Fall of Evil A”

I ended my longest and most turbulent relationship in May. By breaking up with my ex, I regained control of my life and improved it exponentially. After 2.5 years of verbal and mental manipulation and abuse, which turned physical, I emerged the happiest and most confident I’ve ever felt. If you question your current relationship in any way, this post is for you.

I met my last boyfriend at NYU when I began my freshman year. I should have had an inkling of how rocky our relationship would be considering the circumstances under which we got together, which involve an ex-best friend of mine, Anna.

I met Anna my first night at school. We went dorm-room shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond, we partied together, we studied in the library together. I knew Anna had a boyfriend in college in Colorado but she also had a severe crush on Evil A. She had sex with him one night during our first week living in the dorm and developed an unhealthy emotional attachment to him. She also took a hefty dose of anti-depressants, which I believe only worsened her problems.

I was attracted to Evil A myself, and a month or six weeks into school we kissed while smoking a bowl alone in his dorm room. I didn’t tell Anna and tried to ignore my feelings for Evil A. But everything changed when Evil A and I took a trip to Boston together to visit our respective friends at Boston University.

I had been trying to suppress my attraction to Evil A since I knew Anna was secretly in love with him. But when we were driving to a movie theatre Saturday night in Boston, Evil A and I started making out and couldn’t stop. We made out during the movie, after the movie, on the entire bus ride back to New York and for hours after we returned.

A few hours after we got back we decided to make it official—and keep it a secret from Anna, which was no small feat considering she lived four doors down from Evil A.

After two weeks, Evil A and I decided we needed to figure out a way to tell Anna—my best friend and one of the few girlfriends at NYU whom I did not want to lose—we were together. Evil A went to her dorm room one evening with the mutually agreed upon purpose of telling Anna he did not have feelings for her and was interested in me. We would ease into telling her the real news after we saw how that convo went.

Evil A supposedly asked her how she would feel if he asked me out. Anna had a violent mood swing, started yelling, and tried to kick Evil A out of her room. Evil A blurted out, amidst the storm, that we were together and had been so for two weeks. Her downward spiral quickened, consisting of free NYU Health Center counseling, meds, and fucking the grossest guys imaginable.

My downward spiral had just begun.

At the beginning of my second semester in college, Anna and I stopped speaking. I became more and more emotionally distraught. She was my best girlfriend in a new city with lots of dark cracks that I continued falling into. I had no one to catch me or pull me out except for my new boyfriend, Evil A.

Evil A convinced me everything would be ok. He told me two weeks into our romance he loved me and saw himself marrying me. I did not reciprocate immediately but thought I felt the same way. Maybe I did. Maybe I was just afraid I would be alone in a big, scary city.

I became dependent on him for companionship. I see now, things could have unfolded entirely differently. We could have eased into breaking the news to Anna as I had originally wished. Instead he mentally manipulated me into believing I didn’t want to be friends with her, did not help or encourage me to repair this very important friendship, and it dissolved.

As our relationship progressed it felt increasingly passionate. I became depressed when I realized I sort of only had Evil A and no good girlfriends (it’s hard to meet people an NYU, especially when your first roommate and everyone on your floor—in my case—is a total freak). I started getting psychotically jealous of the most insignificant shit—past girlfriends, female classmates, girls he’d merely kissed. Evil A only perpetuated my mental discomfort, which worsened so gradually, I didn’t realize the spell I was under until it was too late. I believed Evil A could do no wrong. I believed he was looking out for my best interest. I believed and believed in everything he said and did because I thought he loved me, I thought he would sacrifice himself for me.

So I was concerned when he began having “blackouts” during heated arguments or emotional talks. He became unconscious, his body limp, his eyes rolled back in his head, his jaw limp. I would try to pick him up and move him to his bed and did whatever I could think of to snap him out of it, while crying hysterically wondering if I should call the hospital. Sometimes I would ask him to squeeze my hand if he could hear me, and he would actually respond. I’d flick the lights on and off desperately looking for something that would make him come to.

After a few of these incidents, he confessed these “blackouts” were a product of all the acid he took in high school at a frequency of once a week for a year. The blackouts persisted and always happened when I was in hysterics because Evil A had threatened to break up with me.

One severe fight and blackout took place my sophomore year. I can’t remember why it started but Evil A stormed out of our dorm room and left me in face-numbing tears. When I finally got him on the phone he called me a “fucking crazy bitch” and told me to move all my stuff out of his room by the time he got back. I called him repeatedly and he wouldn’t answer, which only made me more hysterical. I called my parents unable to speak the sobbing was so intense.

Evil A returned sooner than I expected and went immediately to take a nap. I nervously lied down next to him, and he awoke in an hour. He walked into the kitchen.

“Man, what time is it?” he asked.

“Holy shit it’s 5:30? What day is it? I feel like I’ve been sleeping for 20 hours,” he said, almost laughing.

“Ummm, it’s Saturday, Evil A,” I said. “You just took a nap.” I, freaked out by my boyfriend’s apparent amnesia, pulled him into our bedroom away from his roommate.

“Evil A, we just had a huge fight. You told me you wanted me to move out and you were going to break up with me?”

“Are you serious? Awww, baby…” he said. He didn’t remember any of it. I was scared, but hey, he did have an apparent medical condition of blackouts.

We fought all the time. Our second year in school was especially bad. I was essentially living with Evil A since we were in the same building and I had copied a key to his room. He had a spacious one bedroom and I had a studio with another weird, depressed roommate who burned herself.

I stayed in the relationship despite how emotionally unhealthy it was because I grew dependent on him. I stopped wanting to have sex with him. He made me feel like a bad person when I worked as news editor at NYU’s school paper, Washington Square News and spent a lot of energy on the paper. I’d go to school (I had a full schedule), put in eight hours at the newsroom, often leaving around 1 or 2 a.m., did my homework whenever I could work it in, and I was supposed to go home and want to have sex with my abusive, manipulative boyfriend?

We moved into an apartment our third—and my last—year at NYU. Best Friend and another friend of ours, Jay, shared a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with us. I wasn’t sure I was ready to move in with him and in fact developed a kind of serious crush on EVon during my last summer at home before the big move. My feelings for EVon freaked me out since I was supposed to move in with Evil A in weeks and felt I had no choice but to go ahead with it, especially since Best Friend and Jay were involved.

So I moved in with him planning to iron out all the wrinkles in our relationship and eventually marry him. But our fights just continued to worsen. They even got physical.

On the day of the holiday “Ice Party” Best Friend and I had been planning for weeks, she asked me point blank why I put up with all of Evil A’s shit. We were setting out for gourmet cheese at Whole Foods, and Evil A was resisting my request for him to clean up his shit in preparation for the party. On the way down from our sixth-floor walk-up I said, “He had better clean his shit up ‘cuz I do not want to do it myself.”

“Yes. He had better clean his shit up.” She paused. “All he does is blame everything on you, Amy. Honestly I don’t know why you bend over backwards for him all the time. He tells you all his mess is your mess, and it’s not. Living with you guys I see so much more. And I wasn’t going to say anything to you but I can’t stand it anymore,” she said firmly.

“Honestly, Amy, you are so smart, and so sweet, and so pretty and you could be treated so much better. And it’s your relationship, and I know mine isn’t perfect, but I just don’t understand why you put up with his shit.”

“What shit?” I said meekly.

“What shit? What shit?!” She spun around in the hallway to face me, her arms out to the side. “He calls you a bitch all the time, he always tells you you’re stupid, he doesn’t read any of your articles, he tells you to clean up ‘your’ mess, which is actually his mess, and his desk is, like, twice as big as yours in that tiny bedroom, and he never even uses it! I mean, don’t you think that’s symbolic of your relationship—him with that huge desk and you crammed into that little tiny desk?!”

I was stunned by these comments. They were exactly true.

Best Friend also thought Evil A’s acid use was fabricated. One night when she and I were staying in the dorms over the summer, Best Friend came into a small amount of acid, which we took together. We didn’t quite trip but it fucked us up. Evil A insisted on coming over to our dorm room that night, as he usually did with his computer, to do work. He and I were in some sort of fight, and he sat, glued to his laptop, at our little table while Best Friend and I had fun on acid and smoked weed. He seemed to have no clue what we were on which led Best Friend to believe he was full of shit.

After the Ice Party Best Friend and I went out to one of EVon’s parties. (I wanted to see him because I had a crush on him.) I came home in a fit of rage because it dawned on me how much of an ass hole Evil A was. I was livid that he had made it so difficult for us to prepare for our Ice Party.

Evil A was sleeping, and I stormed in and yelled at him. The fight got physical and I recall kicking Evil A in the stomach with my stiletto and then being thrown across the living room. The fight culminated when he dragged me across the floor by my ankle to the kitchen where Best Friend was standing. I was in tears and she scooped me up and took me to her bedroom.

After the tussle, I was bleeding in three places: my big toe, my nose, and another place I can’t quite recall. Best Friend comforted me and I fell asleep wondering how I would fix this mess of a relationship. I should have been thinking about how to end it. But Evil A had me under such a spell that I knew the next day we would make up anyway. I knew Evil A would have to profusely apologize and make promises to prevent another blowout. I figured that after I had sufficiently scared him into thinking I’d really dump him, he’d realize I was serious and it would be ok for our shitty-ass relationship to continue.

So we made up and our horrible fights continued. The last one came on one of my last days of college in April. I was winding up a very stressful internship and four classes. I finished a final exam and celebrated by getting a massage.

When I got home Evil A was out at a bar with Jay. I had told Evil A I was planning to pick up some weed but didn’t feel like going through the hassle that night. So I told Evil A I wasn’t going to get it. He got angry. I told him if he wanted it so badly he could get it himself. So he came home so we could “call together”—really so he could supervise me placing the call.

I refused to pursue it, just wanting to relax after a month of sleepless nights (due to my bedfellow’s bed-hogging) and constant reporting and writing fueled by at least four Red Bulls (on top of my usual dose of caffeine) every day to get myself through it.

Evil A started yelling. I sat on the couch, knees to my chest, while he stood over me yelling in my face. I wanted to snap him out of it so I tried to push him aside since I was beginning to fear for my safety. He retaliated by hitting me in the face. Hard.

I shrieked at the top of my lungs and went to a mirror. A large dark purple bump had arisen to the left of my left eye along with fiery pain just seconds after the hit.

I went to my girlfriend’s apartment that night. Evil A left ours the next day to spend some time at his parents’ house. I knew I had to break up with him. I didn’t understand immediately that he should be the one to move out, a product of 2.5 years of mental manipulation and abuse—crazymaking. But Best Friend told it like it was: he hit me, he had to go.

So I broke up with him and kicked him out. After he moved out I told him I needed to have no contact with him so I could think independently. He called me and emailed me incessantly. I replied to his emails until I realized that we were going around in circles and he was just antagonizing me. His pettiness didn’t deserve my mental energy anymore and I would not let him put me back in the place I was when dragged me across the kitchen floor and gave me a black eye.

I didn’t answer the phone. I refused to put myself back in a position where he could manipulate me again. It wasn’t easy, but I stayed strong.

At last he insisted he had to tell me something and he didn’t want to email me, he wanted to tell me over the phone. I told him he could call me but I might not answer. So he called, but I couldn’t pick up the phone. At last, he sent me an email with his urgent message.

He told me his blackouts were a lie. All of them. All the amnesia, every incident (at least six or seven) I witnessed or was told about, was total fabrication. Never, he revealed, had he taken acid.

The day after he hit me in the face, he had told me more absurd lies. He said that night after I left, he fell asleep on the roof, woke up, and almost fell off since he was so upset and disoriented by our fight. All lies.

At this point I wasn’t that surprised. I didn’t cry. I felt numb and angry. But I vowed to never put myself through that shit again. I will never be in a relationship unless I am one hundred and ten percent glad to be in it. No constant bickering, no verbal abuse, no physical abuse, no feeling undervalued, no cheating, no lying, no questioning how much my partner cares for me.

I started seeing a therapist to make sure I never put myself through this hell of a relationship again. She has helped me tremendously. With her help I finally faced life as a single girl. You’ve read about my crazy, fun escapades in these columns, but it took incredible strength to get to this point—to leave my comfort zone and experience the world the way I want to experience it.

It’s been eight months since my black eye. I’m still single. I’ve never felt happier or more empowered. I strengthened my friendships, made new ones, found my confidence, and started seeing guys that treat me well. Evil A called me a couple months after our breakup, and I answered to see what he wanted. He told me my voice sounded different, which I’m sure it does. I’m a completely different person, finally happy, finally in control of my life.

If any of this is symptomatic of your relationship, ask yourself why you’re in it. Your life is in your control and you don’t need some loser bringing you down. I’m proof.

Besides, being single fucking rocks.