Yikes!
Is this really common?
But then, I liked high school after sophmore year...
I think people just have no idea how screwed up their fellow human beings are until they really get to know them intimately.
For me, the first real relationship was more emotionally new and traumatizing, but of the three people I've dated they've all had some level of panic disorder. Two even had pretty serious suicidal impulses. No regrets as they're all great and fascinating people, but there must be something peculiar to young love (and perhaps especially sex) that brings out the demons we all have.
That's a really good point. Maybe it's not a matter of picking crazy people, but that all people are more likely to be crazy then. Hmm.
Mine started my freshman year at UNC, then continued for four long, terrible years. Luckily, I spent six years getting that BA, so I had two good ones there at the end. I can pinpoint the main reason for the masochistic inertia, though I can't say whether it's universal or specific to me. Namely, sex with truly insane women tends to be really top notch.
I married my first boyfriend (and am married to him still.) But I was not only a late bloomer, I was a freaking poinsettia. We started going out my sophmore year of college.
Yeesh. I wish I could explain my stupid refusal to GET OUT of what was an intensely emotionally abusive first relationship by saying that the sex was good. Honestly, I think it was just that he was the first person I'd ever told the one deep, dark secret of my childhood to, and I just couldn't conceive of ever having to tell anyone else again. And as long as I was stuck in that relationship, I didn't.
What finally got me out? Well, there was the point when we were living together and he decided that we should break up so he could see other people and I somewhat brokenheartedly and somewhat relievedly agreed and he decided that I should stay in the apartment with him anyway because we had a lease and I entirely stupidly agreed and he starting seeing a woman I had introduced him to and I sortof got involved with a professor in my department and pretty much simultaneously the woman that my psycho ex-ish boyfriend was seeing came over and told me that she thought he was nuts and that I needed to get out of there and the psycho ex-ish found out about the professor and came *this* close to crossing the line from emotionally abusive into physically abusive and the two things together somehow woke me up and I got out.
So you see, I no longer have trouble with telling people the dark secrets of my childhood. :)
I didn't have any abusive long-term relationships in college. Ha!
Me neither. To quote Dick Cheney:
Life is a glorious cycle of song
A medly of extemporanea
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Roumania
Ha! Losers. Enjoy the re-education camps, suckers.
KF - I suspect sex with truly insane men doesn't pack nearly the incentive for staying. Just guessing.
I think you're right, apostropher. Arrogant, self-absorbed assholes, yes. Guys who are just crazy, no.
Arrogant, self-absorbed assholes, yes.
I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that.
Emotional outbursts can create bizzare scenarios; and I have seen a few. Sex with an insance woman is A , or may be even A . GETTING OUT is the hardest part.
A(plus), or may be even A(plus, plus). Not sure what happened to my plus signs!!.
In colleage, I was a newly minted lesbian, which is a really fun thing to be when you are 18 at a liberal arts colleage. Although more fun in Minneapolis or Pittsburgh than say Indiana, where I was. In retrospect, I can safely say that the first girl I fell in love with might well have been that destructive never-ending relationship for me except that she got gay-bashed and dropped me overnight in her trauma. That was pretty much the end of fun for sophomore year. Then I had a series of very short relationships with eminently sane and sweet young women that never went anywhere. And yes, the sex was not all that great.
I think it's possible that the problem is not that people tend to be naturally crazier in their mid-to-late teens, but that the reason people tend to be crazier in their first relationship is that intimate relationships tend to bring out repressed childhood feelings in people who already have problems. (Maybe people eventually acquire coping skills and are better able to deal with successive relationships, which is why the first one is the craziest.)
Example: My first girlfriend, who hadn't really been in a serious relationship until me, had been molested at a very young age. She also had a family history of alcoholism and depression. Gradually, she got more unstable until she attempted suicide 5 months into the relationship. About to head off to college, and unsure of what I should be doing, I consulted a therapist who advised me to break up with her. The rationale was basically what I mentioned above--that indirectly, it was I--as a first serious boyfriend--that was actually a cause of her problems, and that it would be easiest for both of us to end it and not attempt a long-distance relationship.
I couldn't do it. I thought it would break her, and I considered breaking up with a girl in that condition to be completely heartless. Well, you can guess how well it ended.