I was in an abusive relationship. Not physically abusive. But abusive nonetheless. My partner was controlling, manipulative, and disrespectful of boundaries. When I would express that I wanted to change something, I’d get one of several responses.
The first was a trauma reaction of her own — she’d take what I said to the furthest extreme and base her reaction on that. “I want to stop treating time as implicitly belonging to one another, but to deliberately dedicate time to one another. Don’t assume we’re doing something after work, or that we’re having dinner together, and instead ask if the other would like to have dinner together or do something after work.”
Now, when I first expressed this thought, I had actually just read this article and realized that some of these things applied to us. So I sent her the article and sat down to talk about it after she read it. She shut it down with “I don’t like it” and refused to elaborate.
The second time, I opened with this one point, and addressed how it made me feel when time was assumed to be available to the other person. When I assumed her time was available and it wasn’t, it left me feeling disappointed or hurt. When she assumed my time was available, it made me feel like I couldn’t make other plans. I explained that there were times where I had been invited to a friend’s house after work, and was thinking about it, and she’d ask me what I wanted to have for dinner, which made me totally close down thoughts about other plans.
So I thought I’d explained this in a reasonable way. I explained how it was affecting me. I explained how I thought the deliberate allocation of time would bring more focus to our shared time, causing us to make plans instead of just sitting around showing one another memes on our phones. I explained how it would make me feel better. The answer I got was, “I’ll just assume you’re always busy, I’ll make plans every night with other people, so I’ll never be home and we won’t see one another.” By this point in the relationship, I’d gotten this sort of reaction often enough that it just frustrated me and I abandoned the discussion.
The next time I brought it up, I more or less said the same thing, but this time I was dating someone else and had de-escalated the relationship to a friendship and live-together situation. The response that time was, “You’re going to run off every time she calls, whether we have plans or not,” “You’re going to be off with her constantly so we’ll never see one another,” and something between a request and a demand for my time for literally every upcoming event she could think of or find online that she was remotely interested in. I tried to clarify and reassure, with the first two responses, but by the time we got to the third, I could see that the discussion was no longer in good faith. By this time, however, I wasn’t interested in her comfort level. I just told her it was what I needed and it was how I was going to handle my time from then on.