TIFU: Paying $267 flight change fee on our second date so she'd stop screaming at United customer service instead of not seeing her again. Not today, three years ago—I just moved out.

tl;dr It was a mistake to give a girl cash to get her to stop abusing United Airlines customer service reps who couldn't just waive her flight change fee. Just moved out and rebuilding my life.

Our first date was in NY late Dec, we had matched on Hinge and she said she was always back in New York and would be moving back in Feb; both of these turned out to be a lie.

Our second date was her friend's wedding in Philly, I was in my last semester of business school and took the train down, she flew from Oklahoma. We overslept on the day of departure and she missed her flight.

She called United to get on a later flight and when the rep told her that she would have to pay a fee (COVID policies weren't a thing yet) she started screaming. At 30 years old she was terrified her dad would see the charge and that wasn't something she could deal with. She mentioned how often she took the airline, she'd never had a problem like this, in hindsight it was textbook bullshit. He's an abusive helicopter parent whose daughter (now) in biglaw feels powerless to stop from taking >$100k out of her bank account without her permission.

I had to catch my train back to NY and liked her, it didn't feel right to leave her screaming so I gave her the money. Fucking idiot I am didn't even realize that meant her dad would see the charge anyway.

Copying and pasting from a post on another subreddit where I discussed this for context. I asked the moderators to remove it because it blew up on that subreddit and I didn't want to risk her seeing it blow up.

Moving from the apt I share with my [33m] abusive ex [31f] tomorrow. Seeking advice on what to say to highlight how to escape her parents' abuse/be happy. What can I tell her on my way out?

edit3:

Thank you all for the great feedback, I truly appreciate it. Got the feedback I was hoping for so asking mods to remove this post.

edit2: People seem to think talking to her is a bad move. How about writing her a letter and leaving it with her? Is that still a terrible idea?

edit 1: Because everyone who has replied so far has said to just stonewall her: She's verbally and physically abused me, I took that and that's on me. Right now I'm trying to move forward with my life with the knowledge that I didn't let her being terrible to me make me be terrible to her. I don't want to become mean/uncaring like she has been and her parents are. I appreciate the feedback and it's making me rethink this but the idea of leaving with "goodbye, wish you the best," feels wrong.

I'm going no contact from the point I'm out the door but am going to have to live with the knowledge of how/whether I let her and her parents affect me and how I treat people. I'm trying not to let myself down. I care about people, that's part of who I am and I don't want to start the rest of my life not doing that.

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This is fucking terrible. The worst part might be that the past few days she's been so sweet, I know it won't last but I can't help being hopeful it would if I wasn't about to leave. I posted originally on another account, I've been advised that, like staying in this apartment as long as I have, doing that reflected poor judgement and so I'm posting on a throwaway. In that vein, I've adjusted inconsequential details.

tl;dr

We have been together in some form for 3 years, broken up since April 2022

I don't want to rehash things she's done to me or put her on the defensive, I want to highlight past events to the extent they are illustrative but I really just want her to recognize what she is doing wrong/how she can be better and be the wonderful person she is when not having an episode.

High level:

She jumps from happy and silly to verbally and physically abusive at the drop of a hat

Relationship ending because she wouldn't spend time with our families so I wouldn't propose. We live within blocks of my brothers and an hour of both of our families.

Her parents are somewhere between burying their head in their sand to the point of gross negligence and abusive

She gets mad at me for defending her to her parents; like she yells and screams at me whenever I bring up that her parents shouldn't be nasty to her

Things I want to communicate to her:

Be the partner you want

Let your partner talk to you, don't sit there screaming "I can't breathe" when you hear something you don't like to shut the conversation down

You can't live your life as a COVID hermit

When your parents are nasty to you, you shouldn't accept it and you deserve better

You need to acknowledge when you do things wrong

You can't nickel and dime someone and expect them to feel good about continuing to spend money on you without thinking about it

You can't hurt people

Ways to "win" a fight don't include: 1) biting yourself, 2) screaming, 3) calling your parents to bully your partner, 4) lying on your bed screaming "HELP CALL THE COPS STOP HURTING ME" to try and get the neighbors to notice

There are no winners in fights

Previous things I wrote on another account for context:

I feel like my ex's mother is gaslighting me

Context

We started dating in Dec 2019, Moved in together Nov 2021, and kept breaking up/making up until April 2022 when she started threatening my family's dogs. Since last November she has slept in the master and I have been sleeping on a pull out couch in the second bedroom. Somehow she's become most aggravated when I've stayed away from the apartment which I've tried to make a habit of, especially over the summer at my parents' house, at the beach, etc... Our lease is up this month so very soon there won't be a reason for her mother to contact me at all.

I'm an idiot

At a number of points since April we've discussed continuing to live together which makes me feel like an idiot given that the breakup was preceded by, let's just say really bad behavior. I think she has a good heart and when she's nice she's one of the sweetest people I've ever met, unfortunately her dad doesn't like not getting his way and becomes abusive/withholding when she doesn't toe the line. His actions cause her to have episodes and she takes it out on me. This is how I've come to understand and describe the situation through conversations with an amazing friend who is a Social Worker and told me I need to see a therapist specializing in PTSD-C and MDD. I don't have a fucking clue precisely what that means but I know what PTSD is and I can't say my impression of what she said feels wrong.

She yells and has episodes

My response to constant— we're talking daily to the point where I am afraid to come out of my bedroom and put up multiple security cameras in here because she's *less* violent in front of them — verbal abuse/violence has never been to do anything other than to try and calm her down. The yelling is terrible, like it hurts to hear. The doormen of our building came up to our unit at one point in response to neighbors' complaints about her screaming for help. I answered the door, they probably had expected I was beating her and seemed surprised that while I stood with them the screaming was continuing. I motioned for them to come in and look because, frankly, I wanted there to be witnesses that I wasn't hurting her. She was sitting at her desk screaming into her cell phone with her parents at the other end because of something they had said or did, I don't remember what it was in that instance.

Her dad is mean to the point that I just feel bad for him

I realized her dad might be a bad person/had been abusing me in an attempt to break me down to get me to propose to her when I went to Tiffany's on Wall Street (my first time going to look at a ring in any relationship), came back with brochures in English and Chinese excited to talk about it, and was told "if you were serious you would have come back with a ring."

He thinks I should have proposed to her a while ago despite her refusing to spend time with family; she has never met my youngest brother who lives five blocks away from where I am right now and hid in the bathroom the one time she allowed him to come over.

At that point we had known one another for about 2.25 years, been living in New York within an hours drive of both of our families, and had spent no more than 30-45 minutes with any members of our family present. Since COVID hit she has refused to go outside and to the best of my knowledge she hasn't had a meal with anyone in her family in over three years or left the apartment building I'm sitting more than three dozen times in the past two years; I do not remember the last time she left the floor our apartment is on but I would be surprised if it hasn't been months. I wanted to make things work with her but she'd skipped my brother's wedding saying she had COVID and believe she faked a positive COVID test in an attempt to get me not to go spend his birthday with my family. I have a great deal of love for her but it felt wrong to keep moving forward with someone who refused to spend time with our families.

Seriously though, her dad has episodes of his own and he motivates her to behave badly as well.

I realized her dad was definitely a bad person when she texted my mother at midnight saying she was going to abandon my family's dogs in the hallway because I wasn't in the apartment with her. My mother drove into Manhattan in a panic and arrived at the building as I was arriving home. She had not yet followed through and claimed at the time her dad had told her to do it, he's denied it but he's lied about a number of things that could make him look opportunistic and/or like a sociopath.

I'm fortunate to have had parents I never saw fight, raise a hand to me, or be nasty to me so I might have a skewed perspective but the things he has said to her are the WORST. I've heard him tell her that he would disown her if she didn't listen to him, he never wanted to speak to her again, he has cursed at her endlessly, and frequently after she hangs up on him while he is being nasty, he calls back to get one last gratuitously mean jab in before hanging up again after hearing her start to cry. It. Is. Fucking. Heartbreaking. I'm not angry at the man and I don't hate him, I just hope he can find it in himself to be kind to his daughter whose only offenses against him are acting towards him the way he acts towards other people; she clearly inherited his issues. Sidenote: he's an MD and if he treated other patients the way he treats her (there are a number of prescriptions he wrote for her around the apartment) I fully believe he would be stripped of his medical license in the fallout.

I didn't expect to write that much, I really haven't written any of this out before.

Anyway, this is what happened today and precipitated the attached texts

Ex is sitting in her bedroom talking to her father. I'd been sitting with her earlier in the day and it had just been nice/she was being kind so when I had a minute I came back to sit with her, I heard him say "this is why I don't want to talk to you" and he hung up. She seemed upset so I mentioned it wasn't okay for her to be treated like that, she shouldn't let it upset her because her dad is always being abusive.

She. Flipped. The. Fuck. Out.

She started screaming and crying that I was saying nasty things and for the first time I heard her say that she defends her family. It's relevant to note that my first encounter with her parents was to mediate a fight between them, they have had a hairtrigger love-hate relationship the entire time I have known them and two days ago she was crying because she was afraid of her father taking her money out of her bank account if she didn't do what he said.

Anyway, she calls her mother screaming that I'm saying "terrible nasty things about her father" and the two of them shit talk my family and I for about 20 minutes while I stand there silently wanting to correct her misrepresentations to her mother but not wanting to goad them. I learned a long time ago there is no point in arguing with them because they are incapable of being wrong and challenging that assumption led to the first (of what would be many instances) where I heard someone say without a trace of irony, "Do you know who I am? How dare you talk to me that way?"

I walked away and the texts with her mother that followed have me doubting my own sanity.

Ex is hiding from the world because she's embarrassed she's gained weight; her father and I both agree this is why she refused to spend time with our families/friends and things started going downhill

Friends told me she had started getting a bit chubby a month or two before I met her. I saw it continue with too much takeout/inactivity.

As she kept gaining weight she became depressed, embarrassed of her body, and cut herself off from the world. She stopped going into an office, refused to see her family, and wouldn't go outside her/later our apartment. At first this didn't raise concern because it was peak COVID but as the world started up again she refused to do the same. She started screaming at me when I would take pictures where she was even in the frame. We stopped having sex because she didn't want me to see her without baggy clothes on. She stopped showering consistently. I tried to get her to talk to someone or join my own therapy sessions and her parents to get her to talk to someone.

From March 2019-April 2022 I consistently tried to get her to go running with me, go to the gym, come out for dog walks and eat better. When she asked me if I wanted a second lunch if I pointed out that we had just had lunch or breakfast a few hours earlier she would get just... mean. Everything became my fault because there was so much rage and the situation got bad enough before she tried to solve it that by the time she was forced to admit there was a problem it was so bad that she couldn't face it without lashing out. She fractured her ankle standing up from her desk chair at 2 in the morning, started screaming at me when I wanted to take her to the Emergency Room, and only let me take her after multiple very very painful attempts at walking it off.

By September of last year she had gotten bad enough that, in hindsight, it was probably inevitable that she would end up with an injury because her body wasn't used to carrying so much weight around. Her parents were still kind to me at that point and I spoke with them often, typically to mediate fights between them. They told me that she was depressed because she didn't see a commitment from me and had been dating for a year and a half-ish at that point but that if I moved in with her she would stop being so depressed/upset and start getting better. I really fucking wanted her to get better and am, for lack of a technical term, negligently optimistic so I did. This was, in hindsight, a stupid fucking move.