My history with David spans roughly a couple decades (I met him in high school), and it has never been a clean story. But the last decade it’s more like a glitching video—the same chapter starting over and over, never quite finishing, never resolving into something real, just stubbornly refusing to end.
When we reconnected about ten years ago, he set the stage entirely on his terms. It was heavy on the texting, highly sexualized, and aggressively intimate. It made my skin crawl a bit; I was entirely uncomfortable with that frame. To keep the peace and manage the imbalance, I let the connection become transactional. It was a compromise to keep talking, sure, but it felt awful. It left me feeling small, uneasy, and reduced to a function, rather than a person who was chosen or respected.
In psychology, they call this objectification theory—the clinical way of explaining how being treated as a body instead of a human being breaks you down, breeding deep shame and a fractured sense of self. But living it didn’t feel like a theory. Being cast in a sexual role I never auditioned for, while everything else about who I was got completely ignored, felt like a quiet, systematic erasure of my personhood.
During that period, David was a chaotic mess. He was drinking heavily and spinning in and out of a volatile relationship with a woman named Kailee. I tried desperately to anchor us. I begged for actual friendship, for shared activities, for him to just show up for me outside the four walls of his house.
His response wasn’t a gentle rejection; it was a sledgehammer. He told me flat-out that he couldn’t be my friend because he only saw me as a prostitute.
That moment became a permanent scar. Not just because the words were cruel, but because they confirmed the ugly truth I had been trying to ignore: He didn’t see me as a whole person at all.
The Agony of the Orbit
After that, the loop locked in. I would try to rip him out of my life—blocking numbers, walking away, going cold. But like clockwork, after a predictable interval, he’d pop back up. He was relentlessly persistent, and I was perpetually reluctant. I’d stay completely quiet unless he pushed his way in, but when he did, the connection would restart with terrifying ease. We’d fall right back into our familiar banter, completely bypassing any reckoning or repair for the wreckage he’d left behind.
When I finally asked him directly if he ever imagined us actually dating, he laughed it off. “We wouldn’t get along at all,” he said.
Looking back, what kept me trapped in his orbit wasn’t a weakness of will—it was psychological conditioning. It’s what researchers call “traumatic bonding.” It’s the incredibly powerful, almost addictive emotional attachment that forms when a relationship is fueled by a massive power imbalance and unpredictable “good-bad” treatment.
It turns out that breadcrumbs of warmth, spaced out randomly between indifference and outright harm, don’t make you want to leave. They act like a slot machine. They wire your brain to keep pulling the lever, waiting for the next “win,” making it agonizingly hard to walk away.
The Illusion of Change (and a Lot of Trash)
Years passed. Then, last December, the ultimate plot twist arrived: he reached out wanting to “date.”
I literally laughed out loud and told him to stop texting me. I didn’t block him, but I ignored him for months. He kept texting weekly anyway, a stubborn metronome in my inbox. When the radio silence didn’t work, he messaged me from a completely different number. That broke my resolve, and I answered.
This time, he brought a new script. He presented himself as a reformed man: sober, emotionally evolved, claiming he liked me and always had. It was framed as a beautiful fresh start, and it targeted a quiet, vulnerable hope inside me—the wish that this long, exhausting history might finally turn into something worth having.
But the red flags started waving almost immediately, and his enthusiasm was aimed entirely in the wrong direction. He started buying sex toys, lingerie, and books about sexuality with an eagerness that felt less like intimacy and more like he was shopping for a fantasy version of me.
- I threw them in the trash.
- He bought them again.
- I threw them out again.
- He did it a third time.
He seemed genuinely proud of his own persistence, treating my hard boundaries like a logistical hurdle he just needed to out-smart. That energy—that willingness to spend money and pursue me in one narrow, physical direction—never showed up where it actually mattered. He still couldn’t be bothered to show up on time, follow through on a single plan, or pay attention to what I actually needed to feel safe.
The Same Old Script
The “dating” phase didn’t replace the old pattern; it just highlighted it in neon colors. He was flaky, canceled constantly, and defaulted to only seeing me at his house. The canceled plans piled up. The indifference accumulated. Spending time with him started to feel like a betrayal of my own self-respect, so I stopped saying yes.
On my birthday, he argued with me throughout the day, brought absolutely nothing—not even a token card—and left me feeling like the day was an emotional hit I needed to recover from rather than celebrate. Not long after, he spent an hour gushing about the thoughtful, generous gifts he gave his employees, completely blind to how devastating that sounded to a woman he was supposedly trying to win over.
Then came the secrets. He had planned a massive trip to Japan months in advance. Then via social media I discovered Ellen (a woman who has sexual text history and lived with him before so who knows really) accompanied him, he admitted that if I hadn’t found out on my own, he never would have told me and that she only went because she had the money to. Transparency wasn’t a gift he offered willingly; it was a concession he made only when he ran out of places to hide.
When I finally laid it all out on the table—the trip, the flakiness, the years of damage—he fell back on a performance I knew by heart. He shifted between defensive walls and dramatic self-flogging, calling himself a “piece of shit.” He apologized profusely with his mouth, while changing absolutely nothing with his actions.
Relational psychology validates what I felt in my gut: apologies without behavioral change aren’t healing; they increase distress and confusion. Harm followed by a sorry, followed by the exact same harm, isn’t repair. It’s just a continuation of the injury.
The “prostitute” comment is the ghost that never stopped haunting us. He apologized for it multiple times over the decade, but his behavior never once contradicted what he meant by it. Eight years later, it still stung with the exact same sharpness.
Quitting the Orbit
Through all of this, one rule remained unbroken: I never chased him. If he didn’t text, I didn’t text. As the “dating” unraveled into the same old arrangement under a shiny new name, I pulled back even further. I wasn’t playing hard to get; I simply didn’t want to be in the room anymore.
If I stayed loosely connected, it was out of a desperate need for closure—a desire to look him in the eye and say clearly, completely, this is what you did, and this is what it cost me. But every time I tried to have that grown-up conversation, the outcome was identical. He refused to engage, choosing instead to ask, “Why do you keep coming back?” as if my struggle to leave somehow wiped his slate clean.
This is not a story of mutual harm. Looking back, I can identify nothing I did to him that comes close to what this decade has cost me.
The injury wasn’t a dramatic, explosive ending. It was the quieter kind. The slow-burn pain of being pursued just enough to keep you hooked, but never being valued enough to be treated with basic consistency, honesty, or care.
Our dynamic didn’t fail because we were incompatible. It failed because it never was.
