Is She the World's Worst Girlfriend?

In this week’s unfortunate Ask Polly column a letter writer explains that she is being stalked and abused by an ex-boyfriend. Polly tells her to get over her feelings of shame. As always, Polly is grievously wrong. In an age where we have been told to become more attuned to the abuse that men visit on women, we have a case where a man is abusing a woman… and where Polly tells the woman to think about her flaws.

You see, the letter writer left her boyfriend for another man. As bad as it all was with the first boyfriend, things have been far, far better with the new boyfriend. She says that she suffers from mental illness, but we do not know which one or how it is being treated. She mentions IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, so perhaps that is what she is calling a mental illness.

Here is the first half of her letter:

I was in a relationship for four years. I am 31, he is 36. I was unhappy, he was unhappy, but we were scared of being alone I guess. I don’t even know what went wrong, really. We had some beautiful memories. We were very close. We went through really hard times together. But at times he made me feel weak and unlovable because of my mental illnesses. He believed if I couldn’t be happy with him, then I’d never be happy with anyone. We had explosive fights. I stopped working completely because my confidence was so low, and then I let myself depend on him financially. My friends and family hated him. I didn’t think I could do any better. I was so depressed.

But then something happened. My crush from college (for over the last ten years, nonstop) asked me to leave everything to be with him before we even shared our first kiss. He just knew. I just knew. No doubt about it. I left my then-boyfriend the next day. I lost my financial security, my home, my dogs, all of my belongings. It was hard but I knew it was the right thing to do. The new guy wasn’t scared of the pressure. He was ready for it. And thankfully it worked out perfectly. We fell madly in love, and now we live together. He’s the love of my life. I even have a job! I’m not doing great financially but I’m supporting myself for the first time. I never knew such happiness was possible, not for someone like me anyway — someone as weird and difficult and emotional and sensitive as I am. I’m healthy. I got my ambition back. I’m in love. Life is so much easier now. I don’t bear many traces of mental illness anymore. Even my IBS has gone! Just like magic. My friends and family love my boyfriend.

Now, her ex-boyfriend has set out to try to destroy her. He cannot stand the fact that she made him look bad and he believes that destroying her happiness would allow him to save face. The person feeling shame is the ex-boyfriend. The letter writer has nothing to feel ashamed about—after all, she did not cheat on him.

She continues:

But obviously the ex is angry. So angry! It was a year ago and he won’t give me my things back (and I really need them — why is he hanging on to all of my things still?!), spreads nasty rumors about me, divulges very personal things about me, gets mad at our mutual friends for still hanging out with me. I tried to meet up in person but he ignores my emails or answers with cutting one-liners. The last thing he told me in person was “I was only with you because of your looks and now that you’re 30, you’re useless!” Great. I always knew he hated women.

I feel like a boring urban legend, the “Long-Term Girlfriend Who Left the Guy Who Paid for Everything for a Younger Hotter Cooler More Successful Guy,” one that he feels the need to tell everyone. I get it. I’d be bitter, too, if I were in his shoes.

Apparently, she is incapable of ignoring him. I don’t want to be overly obvious here, but if he is holding on to her possessions, she needs to see a lawyer. She should not be dealing with him in person or through friends. She should have him charged with theft, for stealing her possessions. The correct approach to the problem is for her to expose him for the degenerate that he is. Since she has not thought of this solution-- Polly doesn't either-- she feels empathy for him.

As you know, and as I have often warned you, empathy is a trap. It is bad news. Now, we have a woman who is deeply empathetic and who feels her ex-boyfriend’s pain. She is allowing it to destroy her current relationship. Polly thinks that they both need therapy, so you know that therapy is the problem not the solution. As I said, she needs to talk to a lawyer and to have him served. Perhaps an order of protection would be useful. I am recommending public exposure of the bad news boyfriend.

The letter writer continues, explaining that she is incapable of dealing with the situation. She is incapable because she seems merely to have her emotions:

But I hate being hated. He’s full of hatred. He hated all the ex-girlfriends who dumped him. He stalked them obsessively on Instagram, every single day, and wasn’t embarrassed about it (even girlfriends from five years ago). He probably does the same to me. He hates random people he’s never met but who threaten his confidence in some way. He’s an angry, bitter person with a huge ego. It frightens me to be at the receiving end of his hatred. But I’m sorry. I feel guilty. I wish my current happiness didn’t result from leaving him and thus breaking his heart. It makes my happiness and my relationship feel illegitimate.

And, of course, he keeps doing it because it works. She does not like being hated. Who would? She thinks that she has broken his heart… which is idiotic. She is allowing him to destroy her current relationship… because she sees it all through the prism of therapy.

He makes me angry because his reactions taint our happy memories. Because he’s robbing me of four years of my life. Because he makes me doubt that I deserve happiness. Because I couldn’t get closure as he never wanted to talk things out calmly. Because I’m scared to bump into him and I avoid going to the places I love the most. Because he never admitted that the fact I left him for someone else hurt him. Instead he said I’ve hurt him by making him unhappy for four years, as if I was the one keeping him captive. He makes me angry because he’s said such hurtful things and I can’t get them out of my head. He’s keeping me stuck. Maybe I’m the one keeping myself stuck. I know he loved me so much. I know he thought we would end up together. But I had to leave!

She has gotten to the point of believing that his hate is a sign of how deeply he loved her. It isn’t. It’s a sign of his own shame and his own inability to believe that he just got dumped for a better man:

And yet I have to admit, his hate is so visceral, it’s validation that he did love me and maybe still does. It’s when I leave the men I am in long-term relationships with that I realize how much they do love me. It happened the last four times. I wish I weren’t like this. I wish that I could completely take in my current boyfriend’s love for me without wondering how destroyed he’d be if I left. That’s probably why I compete with my boyfriend’s exes. I can be the love of someone’s life, but am I really anything until I have broken their heart into little pieces and made them cry for months on end? I know this doesn’t make much sense with everything I wrote above.

I know my ex knows how much I hate being disliked. So it’s his last power over me. Keeping my things, turning people against me, tainting my reputation, not forgiving me. How do I let it go? How do I forgive myself even if he doesn’t? How do I give myself closure? Should I tell him all these things and acknowledge his pain even if he’ll probably never reply? Also, I don’t want him to think I’m obsessed with him!

She signs it: Worst Ex-Girlfriend Ever

Again, she needs a lawyer. If he is tainting her reputation, she might have grounds for a lawsuit. Perhaps the threat will bring him to his senses.

I am sure you want to know what Polly thinks… though, obviously, she does not know how to think. As a casualty of the therapy culture she proposes that WEGE is feeling pain because she feels responsible for hurting her ex.  And because WEGE knows that there is something wrong with her:

You’re living inside his twisted perception of you, and he’s living inside your rejection. You wouldn’t be obsessed with this if you didn’t suspect that there was something wrong with you. Your shame and your unexamined compulsions are teaming up to haunt you, but you’re only seeing them through the prism of your ex’s ego-driven fixation. And by the way, his fixation isn’t proof of his love. It’s proof of his damage. His ongoing rage boils down to “How dare that unstable, useless, over-the-hill woman get the best of me!”

And now you’re honoring his narcissistic rage by calling it love, and you’re refusing to honor your very sane act of self-preservation in leaving him by calling yourself selfish. The only thing that was impulsive about your exit was that you leaped straight into the arms of someone you didn’t know that well, and you left your dogs behind. (Sorry, I’m still worried about those dogs. How do you walk out on your dogs like that?!!)

But the way you’re translating these natural feelings — anger, confusion, guilt — into self-recrimination suggests that you don’t understand what you’ve been through, who you were then, or who you are now. 

If the man is holding on to her dogs, we sympathize with Polly's interjection: how did she leave without her dogs? But, we recognize that she needs a lawyer or the police to recover her pets. Isn't there a law against dognapping?

Effectively, there is nothing wrong with WEGE. There might be something wrong with Polly, for being incapable of thinking her way out of therapy culture dogmas, but WEGE cannot deal with the problem by herself. She needs professional, legal help.

Obviously, Polly recommends that WEGE introspect… which will only make it worse:

By viewing your ex as loving you like crazy (as opposed to just being enraged by the fact he couldn’t control you) you’re also going to see yourself as someone cruel who trampled on that love. You’re going to worry that you’re capable of doing that all over again, even to someone as great as your current boyfriend.

In order to nurture a long-term relationship, you have to have faith in yourself. When you doubt yourself or question your motives or choose to use someone else’s rage as a prism for your shame, you erode your faith in yourself and damage your ability to live in the present and be honest with your current partner.

So, we have a victim of stalking and abuse. Polly’s answer, in the age of #MeToo is for the victim to examine her own flaws.

In order to stop fixating on your ex and his gossip, you (somewhat ironically!) have to LOOK DIRECTLY AT your disordered perceptions and your damage and your true, real flaws.

Beyond appalling, don’t you think?