Thursday, Mar. 05, 2009 - 7:57 a.m.

Facebook comes through again. Yesterday, I was friended by yet another old friend, someone who I had fallen out of touch with. One of my old crew. It makes me especially happy because this friendship was one of the first to go when I got with The Asshole. I've always felt kind of guilty about it, because it was one of the first times I didn't stand up for myself, a pattern which continued for waaaayyyy too long, as we know.

I had a lot of guy friends back then. But when I got with The Asshole, his worldview did not include women being friends with guys, so he was always intensely suspicious of interactions of any sort with my male friends (or even with some of my girlfriends too, which shows the extent of his insecurity in the clearest possible light), and inevitably flew into some sort of accusatory rage when I tried to maintain the friendship in even a rudimentary way. So this old friend, let's call him R, R and I had a brief snail-mail correspondence when I moved away to college. One day The Asshole had intercepted one letter and opened and read it and apparently threw it away before I ever saw it, then when I came home from class started in on me trying to get me to tell the 'truth' about my relationship with R. I did. The truth was, he was a buddy of mine from high school. We hung out. Went to shows. We saw Cannibal Corpse. And there was this time we went to Cassadega and ate Hostess fruit pies and left a traffic cone in their intersection. This is a representative sampling. The Asshole tried to say that in this letter, R had professed his love for me. Of course, he couldn't produce said letter, nor any evidence at all. I didn't believe it for a moment, even then, since I already knew The Asshole tended to invent facts to support his arguments, but after fighting to the point of exhaustion with a verbally abusive, irrational maniac, I let it go. I never got to read the letter, and never heard from R again. I didn't want to drag him into the drama any more than had already happened. I don't know if The Asshole had ever actually had any contact with him, but I certainly didn't want him to. He was an abusive loudmouth to pretty much everyone.

First of many such events that slowly cut me off from all friendships and social support. Another male friend (N)was the second to go; he dropped by to visit on his way home from hiking the Appalachian Trail. I hadb't seen him for months, since before I had gotten together with The Asshole. We were hanging out talking when The Asshole came in. Later The Asshole swore that he had "smelled cum" on my breath when he came in. Swore to it over and over, as though it were an undisputable fact. Well, I had been there the whole time, so he wasn't going to be able to convince ME that I had done anything wrong. Besides, I explained, N and I had played strip checkers once and discovered that we just weren't attracted to each other. We were just lifelong friends. Anyway, needless to say, The Asshole was not moved by this explanation. I never heard from N again, either (though that friendship was doubledamned, since his girlfriend at the time was sort of the female equivalent of The Asshole). For years he continued to accuse me of having fellated N, whenever he wanted to try to remind me of what a terrible person I was, usually in the midst of some argument over some other completely unrelated thing.

So anyway, I'm now friends with R on Facebook. Another thing put right in a small way. I don't like going on about the Bad Old Days, but I had to get this one off my chest.

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