Is my bf toxic?
Ive been with my boyfriend for 2.5 years now, we've known eachother for 3 years.
He is the love of my life and I can't imagine life without him. We live together and neither of us work right now so we spend basically all of our time together. I can't work for medical reasons at the moment, and he seems to have issues maintaining jobs due to poor attendance.
I try give him the benefit of the doubt most of the time and understand that he's depressed and try to be empathetic since I know what that's like. However, lately I've been questioning if this is a healthy relationship. Here's why:
•Avoids everything- When I say EVERYTHING I mean as much as possible. He avoids job searching/going to interviews, making important phone calls (such as to figure out taxes or such), doesn't reach out for mental health support, doesn't reach out to his baby mama to contact his own 5 year old son, and hardly helps out with cooking and chores unless I nag and nag and nag and then he eventually does it (angrily and with a bad attitude). If I bring any of these things up or even try help/offer to help I'm the bad guy for "always stressing (him) out so much".
•Spending- When he was working and I was in college, whenever either of us got money he immediately would want to order take out or get some game or model he's been wanting. Leading us to overspend and not have enough to pay all our expenses. He hasn't made or recieved any money of his own since August. So for bills and rent we were fully dependent on my student loan (until it ran out) and then government assistance (which doesn't even pay enough to cover even rent alone). Needless to say finances have been extremely hard. We are now in debt to our landlord and behind on other bills.
•Has to get his way- if he doesn't he explodes with anger, telling, cursing, stomping around, sometimes throwing things (not at me thankfully). He guilt trips me into letting it happen claiming "I never get to do/the things I want, what's the point of this anymore, I can't be happy so I should just stop existing."
•Arguments- he has to be right about everything and will spend half an hour or longer trying to prove me wrong.
•Cant be alone- if/when I go to a friend's house or to visit my family he texts me the entire time I'm there and will keep telling me how much he misses me and wants me to be back home. He tells me he gets really down and has s****al thoughts when I'm not around.
Now here's a big one...
•Controlling/needy- This will need some context. I have a best friend, we've been friends for a year or two now. She's my only friend, but my boyfriend doesn't like her at all. In fact I'm pretty sure he hates her. He says it's because she's ditched me at bars lots of times in the past or gotten me into sketchy situations where he's then "had to save me" from. But even though my friend and I weren't planning to go out drinking as we haven't in a while now because of life circumstances, the last few times I've gone to her place I recieved texts from my boyfriend saying how he doesn't trust my friend at all and demanding me to come home immediately/asap.
Additionally my friend likes to call me a few times a day to talk. During these calls I try listen to her and my boyfriend when they're speaking and answer both of them as much as possible, trying to split my attention 50/50 while on call. Apparently this is a HUGE issue to my boyfriend, and means that I'm prioritizing her over him somehow. Even though my friend and I call for just a little bit, and the rest of the day I spend with my boyfriend. He now dislikes her even more because he read messages between her and I when we were talking badly about him (the reason for this though was because he took my phone while I was in the middle of talking to my friend called her a c word and hung up on her).
He ended up giving me an ultimatum; him or her. Something I'd never want to choose. He kept guilt tripping me saying that if it were him and I didn't like/approve of one of his friends he'd remove them from his life right away, even if it were his family.
So I listened to him and blocked my one and only friend. When I told him I blocked her, he started acting all upset, curled up in bed and hardly talked. He said he feels like a piece of crap now, and I basically had to comfort him..I woke up to a bunch of messages from my friend on a backup account she had saying how I'm the worst best friend in the world , that she hopes my boyfriend stops existing, that she will never forgive me and hopes the worst for my relationship.
I feel awful. I feel sick. I now have no friends and my boyfriend's a controlling deadbeat. I don't know what to do in this situation.
@katrebekah
Hello there!
You are the expert on your relationship and therefore we can't say if he is toxic or not. Altough you can look at different aspects in his behaviour that is "considered to be toxic" and see if there is a pattern of disrespect emerging from them.
Navigating relationships and knowing if they are healthy or destructive (toxic) can be a real hassle and can take a lot of energy from us. If you need to talk to someone about how to deal with relationship stress you can browse the listening page here: https://www.7cups.com/BrowseListeners/