Oh this is easy, older men preying on younger women who dont know any better but they tell you how smart and mature you are
They admit their mistakes from previous relationships but swear this time will be different …
Ignoring your own gut feelings. For me, I would see a behavior and “make a note” to watch it even though my gut was telling me to run.
Before we even started dating when we were still friends, I told him about my previous experience with sexual assault and he dismissed it and blamed what I had been wearing. Not sure why I ignored that red flag, but I guess hindsight is 20/20.
I never got physical abuse, and sometimes I consider that my relationship wasn’t abusive but then I think again about how depressed I was and think that maybe it was abusive.
First red flag is when he doesn’t let you dress, cut your hair or use the accessories that you want. My ex boyfriend used to tell me that if a cut my hair too short he wold break up me, that if I got piercings or tattoos he would break up with me, that I wore too much make up he would break up with me.
He never let me decide anything, we wold go and do everything that he wanted.
He manipulated me into thinking that my friends were bad just because he didn’t like them, he always thought that they were telling me to cheat on him. And also he never introduced me to his friends. This made me loose basically all of my friends.
He was obsessed with body image, we both used to be gimnasts, so he never let me eat anything that would make me fat and never let me skip the gym.