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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/Direct-Caterpillar77 on 2026-08-15 04:02:03+00:00.

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I am not The OOP, OOP is u/gottabreakup

Would it be messed up for me [22f] to break up with my boyfriend [24m] of about a year in public?

TRIGGER WARNING: Abuse, gaslighting

Original Post  June 8, 2016

My boyfriend Greg and I have been together for about a year. We don't live together, but spend most nights together and have a lot of stuff at each other's places.

I love him, but I can't be with him anymore. He talks about wanting to live together and get married, etc., but he flat out refuses to go to therapy to deal with anger issues that have come up in our relationship and resulted in him having violent tendencies. He has never hit me but our fights tend to get very "physical" - he throws stuff, pinches/squeezes my arms, holds me down, yells in my face, uses sex as a punishment, and so on.

I really don't see this getting any better. He says he'll stop and that we both need healthier ways to express our emotions, but he also hardly ever wants to talk about his anger issues when we're in a calm state, and he refuses to go to therapy or anything. He also gets pissed off again if I bring up him hurting me or cry about it.

So, I want to break up with him. Badly. But I don't know how to do it. Part of it is that he's REALLY convincing so I don't know if it will be easy for me to follow through once I bring it up. And part of it is that I'm scared he could become really violent.

That's why I'm thinking about breaking up with him in public...like maybe going to coffee or something. The thing is, I've been dumped while on a dinner date and it fucking sucked...I've always thought that's a really messed up thing to do to someone. I guess I'm just looking for someone to tell me if they think I'm going too far.

TL;DR - scared to break up with my boyfriend at home because he has anger issues, but don't know if it's ok for me to do it in public.

RELEVANT COMMENTS

[deleted]

No, it's not messed up. If you were my friend, I'd actively encourage you to be in public and even have a friend nearby when you break up with him. Have you considered breaking up with him over text? Or are you really dedicated to doing it face to face?

OOP

I hadn't really considered it because we're much more serious than that, I think he'd feel very disrespected if I did that. I might consider asking a friend to be nearby and come check in on me after half an hour or something...

Update! "Would it be messed up for me [22f] to break up with my boyfriend [24m] of about a year in public?" (answer: NOPE)  June 10, 2016 (2 days later)

Hey beautiful people!

I wanted to update you guys because I got SO much excellent advice from people here and I wasn't able to reply to a lot of it because I was a little in my head at the time, so I wanted to be able to say THANK YOU THANK YOU to all of you at once!

First of all, Greg and I are now officially broken up, and I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off me. I am a LITTLE anxious about the possibility of him trying to get me back, but some of the stuff he said made me feel this isn't likely. (And for those of you who said to change my locks, etc. - he doesn't have a key to my place! But I am asking a friend to spend the night with me the next few nights just in case!)

So, what I ended up doing: I asked Greg to meet me earlier this afternoon at a park near his place. I sat on the edge of a fountain because it was a spot that was surrounded by people/had a lot of people looking towards it, but there was enough room that we could talk. I also had a guy friend of mine (Sam) sit off at a distance and asked him to keep an eye and he said he'd come over if anything went wrong or it looked like Greg was trying to hurt me or start a confrontation.

I planned out a whole explanation for Greg, including telling him that I wasn't going to reconsider but that I really thought he should get help for unaddressed issues from his childhood. He immediately said, "I know. You're right. I'll get help. I've been wanting to get help for a while now." To which I was like uh, no, you haven't, you've actually told me you think therapy is bullshit and refused to even discuss it, but good, get help. And then he said "only if you stay with me," and I reiterated that wouldn't be happening.

He continued trying to talk me out of breaking up with him, like I knew he would, and made me sound really fucking crazy for thinking it was a good idea - he kept saying stuff like, "you think it's abuse for me to hold your arms down when you're being a cunt and I don't know what crazy shit you're going to pull?" (for the record, I have NEVER been violent to him, except in trying to get him away from me, and he has no reason to expect this from me)...and "you just don't know what abuse is because you were spoiled" and, when I would bring up specific instances, "that never happened," "you're making it sound so much worse than it was, I was just trying to de-escalate things," etc. - basically, giving up on telling me to stay and just trying to convince me I was making stuff up.

At some point, he got really tense and quiet and snide and he said "really? You think that's abuse? You think this is abuse?" and grabbed my arm really firmly and dug his nails in (I'm already getting bruises). I probably physically could have gotten away from him but I kind of felt like my brain shut down because it hurt more than what he's done in the past, and because it was kind of an unexpected perfect workaround for my plan...in that it probably didn't outwardly look like much (no one noticed) but still hurt.

He continued to basically go after everything he knows is a sore point for me..."you're just a spoiled bitch," "you don't get it because the worst thing that's ever happened to you is that you regretted fucking someone" (referring to a very traumatic forcible rape), "you're a fat cunt anyway"...essentially, targeting everything that was an insecurity for me. I now see he's been doing that in our relationship for a long time in more subtle ways. He's very good at reading people's weaknesses and using them against people.

After he let go of me, I stood up and said "NO" (I couldn't really think straight) and started running towards Sam. Greg got up and tried to grab my arm and pull me back, and I stopped so he wouldn't yank my arm off. Sam saw this and came over and physically pulled him off me and told him it's over and he needs to leave me alone and walk away. Sam is a big, pretty intimidating-looking guy - a lot bigger than Greg, which was helpful here. Greg said "fuck you both, she's got you believing her bullshit too," and then "fuck you, you cunt, you don't deserve me," and walked away.

About an hour after that, he started texting me saying he was sorry, that he really wanted my help addressing his issues, that he knew exactly what he's done wrong and he can really acknowledge it now and change, that this was a breaking point for him and he felt so guilty for "making me feel hurt," etc. (I should have blocked him earlier, but I was texting about where to meet up until he got there, and afterwards felt kind of shaken and forgot about it.) I blocked him on my phone and also on Facebook and Twitter. (You apparently can't really block people on gmail, only send their stuff to spam, but I did that too.)

I literally never want to see or hear from him again. I honestly thought I'd feel at least a little sad or guilty or "what if"-y, but I'm not. I'm so happy to be done with him. After the way he spoke to me today, I can honestly say that I was just wrong about him. I thought he was a good person who just had issues, but he's not - he's a person who's 100% willing to hurt me in ways that no one should, and only apologetic about it when HE faces consequences. I think he genuinely lacks a capacity for empathy - it doesn't hurt him to see me cry or hear that I feel scared! It only hurts him to know that might mean he doesn't get to be with me anymore. Everything he said and did was completely focused on how HE felt and how HE was reacting to things.

So, yeah, I feel a lot of relief now - not only because he's gone, but because this affirmed to me once and for all that EVERYTHING I thought was true and I 100% did the right thing by breaking up with him. He's just not a good guy, and I tend to have a really hard time judging people so I always chalked it up to his past and the fact that he was mistreated by others, but at a certain point, I also think it just doesn't matter why someone is the way they are, especially if they don't care about changing it until it affects THEM.

I also came across this quote while I was researching yesterday that was from a social worker, who said women would tell her their husbands break things when they're angry but it's just because they're out of control and don't know what they're doing, and she would always ask them if their husbands ever break their own things, and the answer was always no - they only break their wives' things. And the social worker said, basically, this proves that they aren't out of control - they know exactly what they're doing and do it anyway. The way Greg acted today rem...

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I also came across this quote while I was researching yesterday that was from a social worker, who said women would tell her their husbands break things when they're angry but it's just because they're out of control and don't know what they're doing, and she would always ask them if their husbands ever break their own things, and the answer was always no - they only break their wives' things. And the social worker said, basically, this proves that they aren't out of control - they know exactly what they're doing and do it anyway. The way Greg acted today reminded me of this - he figured out a perfect way to hurt me even though we were in public, and exactly what to say to me, and he wasn't yelling or getting in my face or being obviously aggressive because he KNEW he couldn't and was actually in control of his behavior. He just hurt me (physically and emotionally) because he wanted to. Not because he had to.

Ok, sorry this is so long winded. I just really wanted to share with you guys because I feel surprisingly great right now and I honestly have no idea how that would have gone if I hadn't gotten advice from you all first, but I suspect it could have gotten pretty ugly.

TL;DR - broke up with Greg (and learned exactly how nasty he is) and feel FREE! THANK YOU!

THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP

DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP's OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 7

I saw 1st post list of items and didn't need to read the read the rest to say get distance now.