How The Men I Dated Helped Destroy My Self-Image.

Society has a real strong focus on self-love and how you only need yourself to be happy, and I get that, I really do. Society also acts like the relationships you have with others don’t have a toll on you. I started thinking about all the men I dated over the years and how badly they fucked me up. I decided to be so petty and call a couple out.

S: This was my first “real” boyfriend. I saw the world in him, that type of jazz. Turns out in the end he was a total piece of trash but any who. This was the man who simply couldn’t take no for an answer. This was the man who pushed me, and ripped my pants off of me after I said no a million times. This was the man who helped destroy my self-image by teaching me that the men who were supposed to love me couldn’t possibly respect me. This was the man who showed me how much I was really worth to him. How could I mean so little and how could someone have so little respect for me?
M: This one was probably the person who fucked me up the most in life. Well maybe even second. This was the man who promised me the world, promised me a future. This was the man who made me feel safe. This was also the man who left me by stating that he simply didn’t care about me anymore. This was the man who helped me destroy my self-image by proving to me that the worst thoughts I had about myself were real. Nobody hated me more than I hated myself. The thoughts inside my head kept me up at night, constantly thinking that I wasn’t enough, the love I had wasn’t desirable.
The men I dated have ruined my self-image in so many ways, whether it was calling someone fat who was a lot smaller than me, telling me how being assaulted made me broken, putting their hands on me with anything but love in mind.  The people I have met in life have really fucked me up along the way. I started to see myself the way these men treated me, I dated so many cowards that treated me like trash that I simply began to believe love wasn’t real, love was just something Hollywood made up to make a couple billion dollars.
I dated so many men who simply didn’t know how to love me, and it made me believe I wasn’t worth loving, my self-image was already fucked up from having anxiety and depression but the relationships I had with these men just put fuel to the fire.
I write a ton about self-love because I spent years not being able to love myself and with men who just couldn’t love me. I saw these broken men and tried to fix them, and that was such a mistake. I was trying to fix these boys who didn’t want to be fixed, who grew fond of making a joke out of me.
Self-love takes a very long time after dealing with abusive men and awful relationships, I have not mastered self-love yet and if you haven’t either that is okay, you’re not undesirable just because you haven’t mastered self-love yet. I promise someone is going to love the shit out of you. Keep going.

Scars heal.