It's probably worse than you're imagining!

[palominocorn]

Did I ever tell the story of how I got accused of being abusive for inviting someone to study with me?

Does anyone want to hear the story?

Comments

[zenolalia]

I need to hear it, what the fuck

[palominocorn]

[slides over a bowl of popcorn and a drink] I'm glad you asked! Get comfortable, there's a lot of backstory.

In college, my partner and I had this friend group that was honestly just full of assholes. Several of them really didn't like me. Part of it was that my personality was truly abysmal, part of it was that I had the gall to be "weird" (as in, queer and neurodivergent) in public, and a huuuuge part of it was that four of them had dropped giant "I would like to get to know you in the carnal sense" hints at me and I blithely ignored them in favor of dating my partner, whom they considered unattractive and stuff.

So, my partner has ADHD, meaning that self-motivation... is not their strong point, let's just say. This obviously causes problems when you're in college. After a particularly disastrous semester, they were told by several academic advisors "get your shit together or get out" (in nicer terms, obviously), so they asked me to help with that. We hammered out an agreement that we'd study together (we were in pretty different majors, so it was mostly sitting next to each other doing homework and sometimes helping with flash cards and stuff, but this was still external motivation for them so it worked, brains are weird).

Anyway, when the friend group hung out and there was nothing really going on, I'd say "let's do homework together" and I'd sit there doing writeups for labs while they would study for math tests. I just want to make it super clear: all I did was suggest studying/homeworking together. I wasn't locking them up until they finished their assignments or yelling or throwing massive shitfits. And then when my partner would finish their homework or reach the end of their attention span, they'd go right back to doing whatever.

That friend group, however, was... let's say not exactly academically inclined. "Fuck around all day and then scramble to finish an assignment at 3AM, don't study, complain that the professor gave bad grades because of bias" was par for the course for them. (One eventually got expelled outright, others lost scholarships and got kicked out of certain programs.) They were especially into a couple of co-op video games - Civilization V, Master and Commander, stuff like that. There were many times when my partner and I would be sitting there doing homework and these people would say "come game with us" and then get all pouty about it when my partner didn't.

Things deteriorated over the course of several months. They harassed me over all sorts of shit - for doing dishes instead of letting them stay in the sink for weeks, for throwing out food that was mostly mold, for taking out the trash, for being over "too often" (about as much as several other friends, but see, I was Bad and Awful and Evil), for asking people not to scream in the common area in the middle of the night during midterms, for quietly hanging out in the common area drawing dragons. What they did NOT ever bring up to me was my actual bad behavior - like that I'd thrown a plastic bottle of water at one of them for making a joke I didn't like, for example. (Like I said: abysmal personality.)

Eventually, they harassed me into a nervous breakdown and I decided that enough was enough and that I wasn't going to deal with these assholes anymore. This was made somewhat - you know, just slightly - difficult by the fact that a couple of them were my partner's roommates, and that the rest were this big friendship web. So if I was over, we'd spend time in my partner's room with the door closed, but mostly we hung out at libraries and lounges. (My room wasn't an option because my randomly assigned roommate was Really Fucking Religious in That Way and forbade me from being queer in front of them.)

One day my partner came home after a particularly difficult exam to find their roommates and most of their friends sitting there. "We need to talk" they said, and then started an intervention scene from a bad soap opera. They laid out their concerns: my partner wasn't spending enough time with them, was "too focused" on academics and on their relationship, that sort of stuff. Among other things they called me abusive. Did they say "he throws things and slaps people in the face" or maybe "he starts yelling and swearing when things don't go his way" or "he acts like a human steamroller", all legitimate things to say about me?

Nope! Their arguments were "he's not attractive enough" (remember that four of them had wanted to do the horizontal tango with me earlier) and "we always saw you with some more... you know... [gesturing at various body parts that are not entirely gender-conforming on me]" and, the critical one, "he makes you do homework when you could be gaming with us, that's abuse!"

My partner told them to go to hell and walked away, because WTF, really? But they tried the same thing at least two more times, and then they decided, brilliant people that they were, that the best way to break someone up with their "abuser" was to be even MORE rude to the abuser, and also to harass the "victim". If I had been abusive, this would have been the exact best thing for me they could have done. Eventually it got so bad that my partner had to move out in a hurry and leave no forwarding address. (They fortunately managed to find someone else to take over their lease so they didn't have to pay an early move-out fee. This other person was not friends with the roommates and just needed a place to live for the year, but supposedly they too avoided these people and eventually disappeared off the face of the planet.)

[zenolalia]

What. IN the fuck.

[palominocorn]

It was a very dysfunctional group of friends! That was the most egregious thing, but they did a lot. I learned after the fact that one of them guilted another into playing a game he hated by buying it for him as a gift on Steam.

Or, the pasta thing. They insisted that you CANNOT break linguini/spaghetti/etc when you cook it because the extra surface area makes it cook wrong. The person who insisted this was an ENGINEER who presumably had been taught that this added negligible area. But even "all my Italian relatives break it and it's always fine" didn't convince him.

Or the time one of them left a loaf of bread just OUT, completely uncovered, and insisted that it stayed fresher that way. A lot of homemade loaves of bread turned into croutons that year.

[zenolalia]

There's. There's so much happening here. I don't... pasta doesn't... work that way and neither does... bread...

Okay, I have a theory: they were all aliens who didn't understand the concept of wheat, or also human interaction.

[palominocorn]

Alternatively, they were time travelers from the distant future where wheat products are not longer a thing.

...it's better than believing that an actual person could be Like That, right?