I am on the spectrum and i spent years reading advice columns to understand things like this, but sometimes i still don’t get social rules. Is this really never okay to say about a person’s partner no matter what they did to you? this story sounds insane to read back to myself but i was frog in slow cooking pot.

i (nb) was dating someone for ~2yrs, the longest relationship of my life, we met in our late 20s. i’m not polyamorous, but still spent a lot of time with his bf who groomed him at 16 vs 21. In their relationship, he did the domestic labor & carried the mental load, while his BF worked & controlled the finances. I want to believe what happened to me was not on purpose, they simply didn’t realize I was basically being treated like his BF’s tradwife. Society told him he’s not allowed to be feminine and do women’s things, but he felt safe & comfortable & affirmed being his BF’s tradwife. Great, wonderful, subversive. But it doesn’t explain why either of them thought I would like to be sisterwives with him, meanwhile his BF is literally just some guy. not my boyfriend, i did not get whatever benefits out of the situation that made it fair between them. I would say, please remember the power imbalance, please remember the campsite rule. I would point out how i was being treated unfairly, like i would directly but gently ask his BF to help me clean up after i cooked for us, or ask for reciprocation because i was being used sexually by his BF, and both of them would ignore me.

The person i was dating took off across the country to go on a hike for 6 months. Looking back i was taken advantage of by his BF during this time in every possible way. I supported him because i loved him as a friend, & i could see him struggling w/o his partner there to predict his needs. Although i saw him as in exactly the same situation i was, it is my nature to support those i see struggling even if i am too. He was happy to take all that I had to give, but whenever i needed anything in return, i had to beg him for it only to get next to nothing in return. Like whenever i needed someone to talk to, he would not react, like leaving me on read for a day when i told him my mom was in hospital, & when i asked him if something was wrong, it turned again into me comforting him over his continuous struggle, & he never acknowledged about my mom. I would remind him repeatedly about my boundaries/non-negotiables around sex, & he would keep forgetting all of them causing me physical pain and threats to my health. I never had a UTI before until I had 4 that sent me to the ER because he kept forgetting my boundaries. I had multiple gentle confrontations with him, & he said he understood me, then kept doing all of the things. I never got mad at him or expressed anger bc i believed none of it was malicious, but rather he was not used to having to remember things bc his partner always took care of everything. I always delivered feedback the way i wish to receive it, bc i get overwhelmed by secondhand negative feelings if i use a direct tone/language. The person i was dating returned home. Eventually, i lost my patience at his BF in front of him: while i never raised my voice or belittled his BF, i began to express a degree of emotion in my tone and spoke plainly & directly rather than gently & empathetically.

After a month, I came to him in tears about how i was burnt out & exhausted caring for his BF, who still simply wasn’t thinking about me unless specifically & repeatedly reminded to. plus he was often not thinking about his own needs bc he was accustomed to that being done for him. So it was exhausting being around him for long periods bc i cannot turn off my attention and care towards a person in need in front of me. I said: “[your BF] treats me the same way he treats you, except it is not fair to me, we don’t have the same relationship you have that makes it fair to you.” and i said, it felt like i was putting up with his BF to get to be with him. I came to him because i didn’t know what else i could do, and while i did not explicitly ask for his help i thought he’d hear me and maybe he would try and help his BF remember my boundaries or help his BF get a better sense of what is an equal share of labor.

i kept being kind to his BF to the best of my ability, but i did get frustrated and express some emotion at him a few more times. Like the time he washed two dishes & didn’t understand why i was unappreciative. I told him, “you were relaxing on my couch for an hour while i cooked you dinner. you did not spend an hour cleaning up, because i spent any downtime i had tidying up. I could have left you an hour of cleanup, but i did not.” Another example is when i joked to his BF, “That was clever of you not to save enough time this morning [to clean up from the dinner i cooked for him last night before his prescheduled departure from my house at 11am]. he was hurt and upset by this, and his partner chastised me over implying he was doing it on purpose. i wasn’t meaning to imply his BF did it on purpose, i sought to casually remind him again that while he sits there relaxing all night & all morning, i am sitting there on edge wondering if i will be left with a mess to clean up again, and i was.

4 months later, the person i was dating told me he quoted the line “i am just putting up with him” to his BF when he was mad at me & his BF was saying nice things about me, but he wanted his BF to be mad at me too. He told me this expecting me to apologize to his BF. I was shocked. I apologized for things all the time, often guessing what might be bothering them. But with this, i set a boundary. i said, No, i am not okay with being expected to apologize for that. I said, i was treated badly by his BF for a long time, and i had to stand up for myself over and over, so while I am happy to be his BF’s friend now, what i said then was absolutely true at the time.

That night, he dumped me over text, furious that i would not apologize. He wrote that i treat him and his BF like idiot garbage and all i want is for them to grovel at me and inflate my massive ego.

Throughout our relationship i would ask often if anything was wrong, if he didn’t like anything i did, or if he had any boundaries to share with me, but it turned out that was my job to figure out and address on my own. I thought back so hard, went over every single interaction, every way i approached and treated both of them, and their reactions. and this is the pattern that emerged to me. - Every time i gently asked to be treated fairly, he would hear me and adjust his own behavior, but his BF would not. - Every time i dropped the gentle fluffy empathetic tone and instead spoke directly, he saw this as horrible and mean to his BF, but his BF would suddenly actually hear me and begin to understand me. So i was set up for failure from the start. - nearing end of the relationship, his BF did treat me like an equal & remembered what he needed to do on his own in every way, except sexually, because i cannot speak that way about sex. so i decided to stop having sex with his BF, rather than speak about my boundaries being ignored in plain terms as i do in this sentence. i posed it as me and his BF don’t have compatible preferences and desires, which was true enough. I thought we had finally reached a healthy place at this point. this is when i learned that you don’t have to be sore at all after sex even if it was rough if you are actually fully comfortable & present & listened to.

The only other times i spoke with that kind of direct tone/language is when i talked about sexism and unconscious gender biases. His BF insists to me there was nothing wrong with the way i talked about this subject. Rather it was the frequency of which that was so unusual and made his partner feel bad about being a man & unable to speak up about anything bothering him, plus what if he actually isn’t a man and that’s why this was so triggering. First of all we have to believe people when they tell us who they are, we cannot treat everyone as schrodingers eggs. Nothing can change the fact that I had never been treated with so many gender biases before in my life by any friend or partner, and i made the assumption that the two of them would want to know about things they were unconscious of, they presented to me as left leaning queer cis men who outwardly appeared to care about things like that. Like they would often tell me about witnessing other men being overtly or subtly sexist, but they never told me about speaking up at the time. I thought, if they understood more about the unconscious biases that exist in society, they would have more courage to speak up when they see it happening. Because i don’t have the authority to be heard by men who are being overtly misogynistic, they do have the authority and yet they don’t speak up. I have long worked to build the confidence to speak from a place of authority about anything. Like my work is in a particular field that is also my hobby and passion, and i still find myself having to correct myself and say with authority I KNOW XYZ instead of saying I think XYZ. it hurts so much to discover that I did not have the right to speak with authority about gender biases i experience in society and in this relationship.

i can’t comprehend how i took so much care to address everything with kindness, i held unending empathy for both of them not realizing what they were doing, but that was still not enough as if i wasn’t supposed to speak up at all? I was supposed to be his bf’s unpaid maid/therapist/escort and say nothing? i recently had this insane memory I repressed for decades: when I was a preteen maybe 10 or 11, i was thinking to myself, planning, if i had a boyfriend i would do anything to stay with him, let him treat me however he wished if it meant he would keep me. i thought, why are all these women being domestically abused, if they just did what their boyfriends wanted then it wouldn’t happen. First of all what the hell? i was growing up in a liberal bubble with no real world examples of abuse in front of me. I think i learned about domestic abuse in my sex ed textbook beginning around age 8 and apparently decided that was all worth it to get to have a boyfriend. at 15 i learned about feminism and promptly forgot about all of this. but now it’s come back to me, and 10 year old me is kicking me and screaming about being proven right, if i just had not spoken up at all, then he would still be my boyfriend today.

His BF said, if this were a story on AITAH, the verdict would be ESH. Reasoning being: While he admits he did take advantage of me while being in a position of power over me, i should have known that you can’t tell a person you are putting up with their significant other, it is obviously a shitty thing to say about their partner, puts them in an awkward position because of course they will be defensive of their partner.

i don’t know firsthand what it’s like to have a long term partner of well over a decade. I can only imagine that i would want to encourage my partner to keep learning and growing as a person and be the best they can be and not defend my partner for taking advantage of another person. if the other person were a stranger to me, i would be angry at my partner on behalf of that stranger. but if they were another person whomst i loved that would be so much worse??? Idk if it’s my silly neurodivergent brain & rigid thought patterns, but i cant comprehend how he told me he loved me, yet he was only ever angry at me, never angry on my behalf. He told me the worst experience of entire his life was witnessing me express hurt and frustration to his boyfriend for taking advantage of me. He was so upset with me for insulting him by saying I felt used. I was made to comfort him over the unthinkable suggestion that he was using me. But Manelich, I feel so used. So used & thrown away as if i was a malfunctioning machine harming his BF, and not a human person with feelings reacting to what they did to me. I don’t know what these men wanted me to do instead of what i did.