Some thoughts and meditations on being abused.

2026/08/07

Categories: Personal

Some thoughts and meditations on being abused.

So I guess this is sort of like a call-out post, but it’s a bit unclear whom I’m calling out. It’s sort of about a person who abused me, sure, but it’s also about me, and about some of her friends, and about social dynamics.

I’m writing this and publishing it because more than one person suggested that, instead of “making drama” by talking publicly about what happened in a community that she’s still active in, I should instead talk about it in other communities, and if I feel like her behavior is threatening, I should warn specific people if I think they’re at risk of getting into a potentially abusive situation. And I thought a lot about the missing stair concept, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought “hey, this is how you get missing stairs”.

That said, this sucks. I hate every part of it. I am writing a post calling out a person I love, and I hate that. But I promised once to tell her the truth, and I think people are not telling her the truth, and I can’t let that slide. I also think that her behavior is bad enough and persistent enough that I genuinely have an obligation to post a warning. I still hate it.

A Note For Ariadne

I figure there’s no chance you won’t read or hear about this. I’m so fucking sorry.

TL;DR

If you don’t feel like reading eighteen thousand words of weird relationship drama, just read this:

My ex-girlfriend Ariadne was sometimes emotionally abusive. Not questionably or sort of abusive, but some of the most intensive emotional abuse I’ve ever run into, and that’s with a life-long special interest in abuse and its aftermath. This is not unique to me; her ex-spouse was also clearly a victim of severe emotional abuse, and I’m not the only person I know to independently reach that conclusion. I also believe that she is deeply deceptive in describing her prior relationships and experiences. I am only sure of that in my case, but the other cases I’ve seen have similar traits and I suspect they follow the same pattern.

She is particularly dangerous to people in emotionally intense relationships, but has an identifiable history of dubious choices about consent, both sexual and otherwise, that is particularly notable in casual relationships. Additionally, some of her manipulative and hurtful behaviors might be directed at other people in her life when she wants something from them.

However, she also has a successful history of correcting and fixing problems like this in the past, corroborated by multiple witnesses. I’ve seen it. Moth-Vine (her former spouse) has seen it. Right now, no one is telling her honestly that she is doing abusive things, and as a result, she is not fixing them. Multiple people are telling other people, individually, that they think she’s lying or that they think she’s abusive; none of them seem to be telling her or stating it clearly and publicly to prevent her from dodging it. I believe this has created a “missing stair” situation and that the only way to fix it is to be clear and direct about it. If people weren’t “avoiding drama”, she could, and I believe would, fix these problems.

In short: This is not a suggestion that you should shun the unclean one, but advice that, if you want to be friends with this particular very interesting and cool person, you should be on guard for some specific possible harms you might encounter, and you should be honest with her, even if it’s uncomfortable. She’s a really cool person and deserves your honesty.

Intro

So, first, some preamble material, like “what am I doing” and “why”.

Dramatis Personae

Without some clue who the participants are, it’s pretty hard to follow along. There’s only a handful of people you need to know, though.

Very Brief Timeline

Quick summary of events:

This is just a very short timeline, the details I want to provide are scattered below.

The Missing Stair Problem

I was the third person from Ariadne’s social circles to contact Moth-Vine because we thought that he’d been emotionally abused, but so far as I can tell I’m the first one to say anything public. There’s a lot of cases where I found out that specific people knew something was wrong, but declined to say anything either publicly or to Ariadne. So if you know her, maybe you already know one of these. Maybe you knew an example I don’t, a while before any of this happened to me, and hadn’t said anything where I could see it. See the problem? My central thesis is really that those of us who have known there was a problem for a while, and not said anything, are actually making things worse for everyone including Ariadne. Bringing this all together, while long, provides the context for thinking about how we could all have handled a situation like this better.

Why Now?

I probably should have posted this sooner, but I didn’t. It’s been over six months, and to be honest, I’m still doing a lot of emotional processing and realizing things that probably should have been obvious. The main thing that pushed me over the line was talking to Moth-Vine a bit and realizing that I’d been making some stupid assumptions, and also picking up some corrections and some new information. I’ve also talked to a number of other people. Very concerningly, I’ve run into a number of accounts of people talking about specific abusive or dishonest behaviors individually, or warning or being warned by other people, without any public conversation about it. I can hardly throw much blame, I spent most of the first half of this year actively being deceptive about what happened to cover for her. (Stupid? Yes. I thought she would calm down enough to talk at all, and then I could tell her about the problems, and I thought she’d probably fix them, and then I wouldn’t have to do, say, this. I was wrong.)

When I talked to Moth-Vine, one of the things he mentioned was that I wasn’t the first person to contact him to tell him they thought Ariadne had emotionally abused him; I was the third person from Ariadne’s social circles to reach out to him. And that makes me think that people are probably sitting on a lot of information to “avoid drama”, and that this is exactly how a “missing stair” situation develops. So I’m going to do the thing which treats “missing stairs”: be direct, open, and public about it. I still hate it, though.

More importantly, when I talked to him, I was still in the grip of an egregious logical error. I had heard about her previous relationships, from her. I had heard a bit of what she was saying about me. I knew she was being deceptive about me, but it did not occur to me that she might have been deceptive about them. When I mentioned how she summarized the relationship to Moth-Vine, he pointed out things that caused me to realize that, now that I knew she “shaded the truth” so aggressively, I should be rethinking what I thought I knew about her other relationships.

I believe that the problems are worse than I previously realized. Things I thought were probably harmless might not be as harmless as I thought they were. Things I thought might be unique to me have apparently happened to other people. And, most concerning to me, I keep being told that multiple other people have at least some of these thoughts, and are sharing them individually with other people. This turns out to have a lot of implications that make me uncomfortable with leaving things as they are.

Honestly, part of this is just that the dishonesty was getting to me. I don’t really care whether people like me or hate me, but I care a lot whether they have false factual beliefs about me.

Scope And Confidences

I’m not covering everything I know or suspect. I’m trying to present a coherent picture of enough of what I know to make the convincing case that Ariadne is persistently and severely abusive and has serious problems in handling consent issues, both in sexual and non-sexual contexts. I am not trying to show every possible evidence I might have. Things might be omitted for a lot of reasons:

I absolutely do have more information which supports various points I’m making, but which I’m not using for a variety of reasons. I’m not going to explain further, because doing so would do a lot of harm and very little good. If you know about a thing that you think is relevant, and want to know why it’s not here, tough. I’m not going to answer any questions about why I didn’t include things, because if I did I might reveal things that I don’t want to reveal, and the only way to avoid that is to just fully decline. This is the information I’m choosing to provide. You can deal with it or not.

I am not including “screenshots” and I’m mostly avoiding direct quotes. I tried quoting something once and people yelled at me because of privacy, and I just don’t want to litigate that again if I don’t have to. I am not naming sources for several reasons; one is that Ariadne has repeatedly punted people she viewed as being disloyal.

It’s worth being clear that my cognitive function and memory got badly damaged during this (that is, in fact, a major part of the abuse), so I’ve been trying to check my memories against things before making claims, but I cannot guarantee 100% accuracy. Part of why this is so large is just so that it doesn’t change things much if a few specific things are slightly wrong; the overall conclusion would survive even if half of what I’m describing never happened. On the other hand, my biggest concerns all have to do with the actual things she told me in writing about her intentions and practices. I’ve checked things out and fixed the errors I could find.

If you’re looking for a short pithy version you can forward, there isn’t one. It would be too easy for it to circulate without nuance. I’ve even structured parts of this document to make it hard to get a short pithy quote that looks really bad for her without containing nuance and qualifiers. I can’t make this not hurt her, but I can make it way less devastating, and have done my best to do so.

There Is Hope

Ariadne can be better than this. That’s the real point of this document; I’m not just trying to establish that she is currently doing bad things. I’m trying to establish that she could be much better. To do that, I spend a lot of time talking about where she is now, but that’s just a lemma for the actual point.

I have certainly had some history of being overly optimistic about abusers changing. Ariadne stands out in that my belief isn’t that she “wants” to change or “tries” to change. It’s that, even just in the time I was involved with her, I repeatedly saw her successfully change. Not every time, obviously, but on multiple occasions, I pointed out that a thing she was doing was hurtful or harmful, and she stopped. Not “stopped for a week then resumed”, but just fully stopped. Moth-Vine also confirmed that he had the same experience with her fixing some things thoroughly, even on large and significant problems. As noted above, I’m omitting some things because she already fixed them; this makes my examples of things she’s fixed thinner than the reality.

My conclusion is that Ariadne is serious and motivated about not being abusive. Unfortunately, this only applies if she’s convinced that a given behavior is a problem – if she thinks it’s okay, she probably won’t change it. And here is where we have a problem, which is that so far as I can tell, her friends are by and large very enabling. That sounds harsh, and I will totally admit that I was also doing this while I was involved with her; I would take her stories about other people’s behavior at face value, and reassure her that she was fine and did nothing wrong. Now that I’ve seen how she spins events with me, though, I have realized that I should not have been doing that. Furthermore, she applies a lot of emotional pressure to just give her some validation and reassurance right now, and makes it hard to come back later and say “okay but while your emotions are valid, the way you’re handling them is not”, and I think the net result is that she has avoided confronting a lot of serious problems, and her friends have helped her doing this.

I’m also very concerned that a bunch of her friends are, in practice, gossiping about her behind her back. There’s certainly something to be said for not openly confronting someone every time you think they shade the truth a little, but if the net result is that some of her close friends just grimace and nod when you mention something abusive that she’s done, or go behind her back to warn other friends that they think she’s about to do something predatory to them, I think that’s actually a sort of awful thing to do to her.

My deceptions to try to make it look like she hadn’t been abusive were tied to this; for a long time, I thought that once she’d had some time to “cool off”, she’d be willing to talk to me again, and given her history, I figured she was likely to take these concerns seriously and address them, in which case, I wouldn’t feel like I owed people a warning about a problem which had been solved. I now recognize that this was sort of fucking insane on my part.

But ultimately, I am not holding out abstract hope that Ariadne could change. I’ve seen her do it, and I believe she can do it again. And as such, I’m not trying to persuade people to shun her or avoid her, just to be honest with her and maybe even a little blunt sometimes, to help her have the information she needs to make better choices.

The internet is full of pieces about how abusers don’t change, abusers can’t change, and abusers are horrible people. That’s bullshit. If you read some of this and think “that’s awful, I could never do that”, then that’s great and I’m happy for you, but maybe consider not being judgmental about it. I used to see all these straight people bragging about how bravely they were resisting the no temptation whatsoever they experienced towards having gay sex, which they found repulsive. If your nature does not admit being abusive, that’s great for you, but the people whose nature admits being abusive still have to try to exist somehow and do their best not to hurt people, and it’s hard, and they deserve a little respect and grace. Some day, you may find that you, too, could be abusive under the right circumstances, and I hope that if this happens, you find the grace you need.

Part of why I’m writing this piece, and not another, is that it took me a long time to learn to manage my own inner demons. I am built on a brain that has no empathy, guilt, shame, or remorse. I’ve been trying to learn to be kind to people longer than Ariadne has been alive. I know what it is like to have impulses and emotional needs that make it difficult to avoid harming people, and I’m sympathetic. But part of why I’ve succeeded is that I’ve surrounded myself with people who will tell me directly when they think I’m fucking up. Every. Time. And I think right now Ariadne doesn’t have any of those, and it’s crippling her attempts to be the person she wants to be.

Biases And Disclosures

I am definitely biased, but from what people I have talked to tell me, I’m mostly biased for Ariadne, rather than against her. Several people have told me they still think I’m in denial about her, or that I’m giving her too much credit. I don’t think so, but I have to acknowledge that it’s possible.

I can’t claim to be perfectly honest, because I spent the first six months or so of this year actively covering for Ariadne’s abusive behavior. For what it’s worth, I almost never say things that are not literally true, and I am very rarely deceptive. The only significant deceptions I can think of that I’ve done in the last thirty years have been on behalf of Jesse and Ariadne. Jesse and I spent a decade or so on tumblr during which we carefully concealed, through a lot of clever sleight of hand, that he was trans. We just didn’t want to deal with it. More recently, I spent a lot of time trying to give the impression that Ariadne was fine and my distress was just normal relationship distress and aftermath. This was an awful choice and sort of undermines this piece here. In practice, I pretty much lie exclusively to protect people I love, and even that only rarely.

This document is one I expect her to probably read, and since I don’t have a live back-channel to her and couldn’t tell her a more-true version, it’s relevant that it’s written under the rules I use with current or former romantic partners: No lies, no intentional material omissions without callouts, no misleading framings. If you’re wondering why I keep pointing out where I’m omitting things, that’s why.

I am not claiming that she was abusive and I wasn’t, I was unambiguously abusive to her at least once in the relationship (I go into more detail below).

The Initial Situation and Events

I’d known Ariadne for roughly four years when the relationship started. We weren’t super close, but had talked many times about a lot of issues in her personal life. I was one of the people commenting and being supportive about her divorce, and about her dad’s death, and so on.

We started a sexual (and later romantic) relationship shortly after my spouse died, and I think everything is somewhat shaped by that. It’s important to know that this wasn’t a coincidence; Ariadne reached out to me specifically because my spouse had just died. She framed this as desiring to offer comfort and consolation, which I think is at least part of the truth, but I also think it became quickly very clear that she had no real mental model of what was likely going on with me at this time. For instance, when we were first talking about things like our respective interests (by which I mean kinks), she said that she was considering telling me that she’d prefer slightly less reminiscing about past escapades. And I will honestly admit, I think I was probably talking about my recently-deceased spouse of thirty years more than most people would want to hear about someone’s previous relationships. But also, it hadn’t been a full month yet. I don’t know what she expected a recent widow to be talking about.

When we first discussed this, I attempted to warn her that I am pretty quirky, I make jokes a lot, and my sense of humor is pretty dark. She assured me she knew this and knew what she was getting into. This turned out not to be true at all, although I think she was merely mistaken, not lying.

As time went on and we became closer, she did come around to understanding how badly fucked up I’d been, and was a little more forgiving of early mishaps, and expressed that she was glad she’d been helpful to me, and I think this was genuine and sincere. However, while it was happening, I think she was entirely interested in pursuing her crush, and not really interested in or thinking about my thoughts or experiences. She certainly had almost no idea who or what I was, which was a huge surprise to me when I finally figured it out.

She got hurt a lot during this relationship. I think most of that was not really a result of any kind of intentional bad action, just poor timing or inevitable fallout from things she was doing to me. However, later in the relationship, I was actively trying to make her like me and stay with me, and I flooded her with exactly the kind of attention that she craves, to an extent that was wildly unsafe and unhealthy, and I think this is just straightforwardly abusive behavior. It created a near-addictive response in her, because I became her sole source for feeling good in a way she couldn’t feel otherwise, and that is a horrible thing to do to her, and probably contributed to her sticking with things and hurting both of us for much longer than she might have otherwise. I have pretty solid charisma and manipulation skills, and I spent a significant amount of time using them full-force to try to make her like me. Absolutely spectacular fuck-up. I sent her an apology about it. I have no idea how badly or permanently this hurt her, but I have a lot of regrets regardless. I could offer defenses about my intent or understanding at the time, but that sort of misses the point; abuse is not a crime of intent.

Okay, preamble over. Let’s get into the substantive claims. The goal of the main body of this piece is to establish that these are not individual one-off events that happened to go poorly, but examples of consistent patterns. I think a lot of the people in our mutual social circles are aware of one or two of these pieces, but since everyone’s “avoiding drama”, most of us never heard more than one or two of them.

Dishonest

Ariadne is consistently and pervasively dishonest. She does not think so, and in fact, wrote me an entire letter on the reasons for which her lies do not count as deception, but that’s the problem; she lies all the time, but doesn’t think it counts.

I wasn’t sure I needed this section, but one of the first things that happened when I mentioned having heard from Moth-Vine was that someone pointed out to me that she had divorced him because he was lying to her. That is indeed what she says. There might be some truth to it, even. However, in my experience, she is often pervasively dishonest with people she does not feel she has a specific duty of candor to, and even with them, she feels that she must lie to them to preserve “privacy”, so I am not sure it is rational to accept her claims uncritically. I’m giving some examples of this to help calibrate expectations. It’s also important to note that she did corroborate a lot of things he said, but some of those comments were things she wanted kept confidential. Thus, I’m not answering any questions or making any implications about which things, specifically, were corroborated.

The fundamental motivation here is, so far as I can tell, almost entirely reputation management. Ariadne has shockingly intense feelings about how people see her. Later on, fully aware of how completely devastated by loss I was, and that she was basically the thing holding me together, she was still hesitant about making the relationship official, and one of the reasons she gave for being concerned was being worried by what happens if she introduces me to people, because what will they think of her if they see her dating some weird old person? This was a recurring problem; she was uncomfortable with going out for dinner together because she was worried what people who saw us might think, even complete strangers she’d never see again.

I think a lot of the issues here come from the cognitive distortions introduced by being incredibly distressed by being seen negatively.

As a result, basically everything Ariadne says in public is carefully considered for how people will see it and how it will affect their perception of her. When we were on the rocks but not officially broken up, and she was actively hostile to any flirting behavior from me, she continued flirting with me in public so people wouldn’t think anything was wrong. I pointed out that this was fucking me up, and she did stop it immediately, which is a good example of the general pattern that she really does try not to do harm, most of the time. However, it’s still relevant that she was actively being deceptive in order to keep people from thinking anything about her that she thought looked negative. It’s also important to understand that she doesn’t feel like this is dishonest.

Case Study: “Melted Down and Disappeared”

Shortly after we broke up, Ariadne and I had some spectacular miscommunications, and long story short, when I found out, I sorta panicked. I didn’t know what was going wrong, but I knew something was going wrong, and that it was hurting Ariadne, and I needed it to stop. I decided to discontinue essentially all communications with everyone for a bit to let my brain recover some. I let her know this (“Dave” and “Chiomi” are two of my friends whom she knew and had contact information for):

So, I really want to not hurt you, but empirically when I try to communicate about these things in this state, I seem to hurt you. After I found out how badly that email hurt you, I turned off Discord and everything else for at least a week, and I am not going to try to explain anything until someone less broken tells me I’m making sense again.

Please communicate with Dave or Chiomi until then. I’m sorry. I was going to try to say more but then I remembered that I need to not do that.

In describing this to people elsewhere, she summarized it as “He melted down and disappeared for over a week”. I found out about this because someone who saw her description of it, and had also seen my statements to people that something was wrong with my communications and I was stopping, felt like it was not an accurate description. So far as I know, they didn’t say anything in response to her public communications, or say anything to her directly, about it.

Her summary makes it look like I “disappeared” without warning, and left her hanging with no idea what was happening. In fact, I had told her specifically that:

Her presentation of it, on the other hand, makes it look like I gave her no warning and just abandoned her to be sad. Which is the point, after all; she’s explaining to people why she will never talk to me again. There’s probably an actual reason, which she doesn’t want to talk about, so she needs to present them with an explanation of what happens which makes me look painful and horrible to interact with. So, she doesn’t exactly lie, she just doesn’t provide an important detail which turns out to radically change how everything is interpreted.

This is ultimately why this article is enormous – I want to provide full context and details on some things, because she’s very good at telling part of a story to put a spin on it. She doesn’t think of this behavior as deceptive; the parts she omits just don’t feel important to her.

Case Study: “I did not complain”

This one is complicated and messy. So, I make a lot of jokes on a lot of topics, and in particular, I tend strongly to a sort of aggressively antagonistic friendliness, or possibly aggressively friendly antagonism. So far as I knew, Ariadne was aware of this, and also personally liked it. She posted collections of hilariously insulting things her spouse had said to her, which she found delightful, and had examples of other friends saying “horrible” things to her, which she also found delightful. So I did this also, and she found it delightful. Or. So I thought.

In general, I’m aware that my sense of humor is too much for most people, and I am very active in testing the waters, gauging reactions, and adapting. I am quick to apologize if people take offense, and I do a pretty good job of remembering which people like which jokes, usually. But my primary strategy is to make jokes that are around the limits of what I think someone is comfortable with, so I can quickly find out whether that’s a little too far (in which case I apologize or back down) or clearly entirely acceptable (in which case I escalate).

Also, I make jokes with other people. Barb and I make horrible jokes together all the time. I refer to her as an “extremely precocious home-wrecker”, on the grounds that when she was four, she had sex with a married man and then his wife left him about it. She thinks this is hilarious. And we’re both very aware that not everyone likes this kind of joking around, and that we need to be careful, and we are careful.

Enter what Ariadne calls “cool girl” (after a monologue from Gone Girl), where she pretends to like things and leans into things she’s uncomfortable with. I made jokes with her, and since she loved them, and I was experiencing catastrophic existential loss, I sometimes told these jokes to Barb, who would also appreciate them. Barb then responded with similar jokes, and if I thought they were funny, I forwarded them to Ariadne, who reacted with laughing emoji and sparkle emoji and otherwise expressed enjoyment of them. Barb was horrified when I mentioned having told Ariadne about one of her jokes – she only makes jokes like that with me because she knows I won’t take offense or think badly of people about them – but I confidently told her that Ariadne had known me for four years and knew what she was getting into, and was enjoying this, and anyway, she reacted with laugh emojis. So Barb concluded that, in fact, this was acceptable.

And it was acceptable for quite a while, until one day Ariadne asked that Barb not make sexual jokes about her, so I told Barb, and that was it, there was never another such joke.

When I suggested we make the relationship a bit less casual, and a bit more emotional, Ariadne did something very surprising (which I didn’t find out about until much later), which is re-evaluate all her previous experiences in that light. So she was now interpreting all the things she’d been waving off because it was “just a casual thing” in terms of how she’d feel if someone in a serious relationship with her had done them, and found them deeply upsetting, and wanted apologies.

Now, we have enough information to contrast this with what she would typically say when describing this to other people. One person said that her description of this was just “I did not complain”. Several people who have heard this from her have said things that make it clear that their understanding is that I spontaneously started making intensely inappropriate jokes and continued doing so in the absence of any feedback until she actually complained. But that’s not what happened at all! I started with less aggressive things, and escalated because she kept reacting positively. When I tried the waters on sharing jokes with Barb, she reacted positively. I kept seeking feedback and confirmation that she was comfortable, and she kept enthusiastically confirming that she found what was happening delightful. And it’s worth noting, it’s not just that a couple of people have talked to me about this; it’s that one of them mentioned another person reaching out to them to be sure they knew. So at least some of the audience knew she was being deceptive. Does she?

It’s also worth noting that there’s a significant asymmetry here. When she re-evaluated the relationship, she re-evaluated my behavior by the standards of how she wanted to be treated in a serious relationship. However, she did not re-evaluate her behavior in terms of how she would expect to behave in a serious relationship. When she described these events to other people, she persistently interpreted my conduct under different standards than hers, and omitted the feedback loop entirely – even though (or perhaps because) the feedback loop hugely alters how people perceive the narrative.

Case Study: Genuinely Compulsive Lying

Ariadne constantly tells a sort of background level of what she calls “white lies”, which is to say, random lies on topics that don’t really matter to anyone, to maintain some kind of information security; she finds it upsetting when people know things about her. I’d told her that this was upsetting to me, and she was trying not to do it with me. At some point, she said something innocuous and vague, I guessed by blind luck (and incorrect reasoning) what she was talking about, and she found this upsetting. The details seem irrelevant to me, except that if she hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared; it was entirely her decision to say anything at all. She said she got “very panicked and claustrophobic” about me knowing that much about what she was doing. (Even though, in fact, it was merely a coincidental guess.) She said that promising not to lie was really unnatural for her. I think this is basically true, but it has a lot of implications for how I interpret everything else she says. At the time, I of course went along with it and was conciliatory; it was after I broke on October 10th.

There’s a lot of ways in which this is distinguishable from lies on more significant topics, but it gets to an important root issue, which is that Ariadne is genuinely compulsive about ensuring that she controls how people see her. It doesn’t have to be accomplishing a specific or focused goal; she just needs to have that control at all times to feel safe. Feeling like she’s not allowed to lie to keep people from knowing things makes her intensely uncomfortable.

It’s also interesting to note the terminology drift. Most people use “white lie” to refer to lies used to spare people’s feelings, but she used the term for lies that weren’t motivated at all by other people’s feelings, just her need for control over what they know about her. I also want to give her credit for making the effort to control this behavior when she found out it was upsetting to me. Ultimately, she couldn’t sustain that one, but the effort was made.

Considering Past Cases

Those aren’t all the examples I have of the pattern of deceptive behavior I’m talking about, but they’re enough to establish what kind of thing I’m talking about. This is pervasive. Everything I’ve seen people report her saying about our relationship has been misleading like this. She tells people all sorts of things about what she thinks Barb is like, or what I am like, and many of them are wildly misleading at best.

Recently, I realized that the way she described Moth-Vine acting during their divorce, while strange, wouldn’t have been strange if she’d treated him the way she’d treated me. Moth-Vine is not invulnerable the way I usually am, and many things I thought were amusing but harmless would have been devastatingly invalidating. So I reached out to him to let him know. When I reached out to him, my expectation was that her descriptions had been pretty truthful.

Instead, I mentioned a couple of the things she’d described, and he pointed out things which were plausibly true, consistent with what she’d said, and which would have radically altered how I understood things. And that is when I realized that I’d been making a horrible mistake; I hadn’t updated my beliefs about her honesty when I found out she was a habitual liar.

I don’t have access to her original descriptions of the divorce and events leading to it anymore, and I didn’t get full details from him, but it was immediately recognizable that the gap between his experiences and her descriptions was very, very, similar to the gap between my experiences and her descriptions. I can’t go check the exact details, so I don’t think I can present this as unambiguous evidence, but I’d spent a lot of the last six months thinking carefully about the ways she lied, both during and after the relationship, and this fits the patterns I’ve learned to look for.

This somehow surprised me, even though I knew she was like that.

There’s a phenomenon called Gell-Mann amnesia, where people who have expertise in a field will often note that newspaper reporting in their field is bad, but the moment they’re reading about something they’re less familiar with, they forget it. I found myself doing a similar thing; even once I had a number of examples of Ariadne being wildly deceptive in describing our relationship to other people, I didn’t question what she’d told me about her previous relationships.

I think that what might be happening here is that we all start with an impression that she’s scrupulously honest, as there are a lot of ways in which she is in fact carefully honest. Then, we maybe encounter one specific case where she’s shading the truth a lot, but we ascribe it to a particular circumstance, and don’t draw any conclusions, so we don’t say anything because we don’t want to start drama. And that’s how we end up with a long series of deceptions, none of which got questioned publicly, and a bunch of people each of whom know that one of the things is deceptive but think the others are not.

Interrogations and Struggle Sessions

Ariadne interrogated me in a way that, presumably unintentionally, reproduced precisely the mechanism by which brainwashing and torture break people. I’m going to go into the mechanics of this a bit, honestly partially just because human cognition is one of my special interests and it’s so cool.

So, the setup for this is pretty straightforward: I was recently-widowed, and Ariadne was providing me with emotional support that was basically holding me together. When I told her I thought I might like to pursue something more like a relationship than a fling, she reacted in a way that, at the time, made no sense to me – she took a break from talking to me for a week because she was unhappy with how I’d been treating her, then wrote me a wall of text about this. Unfortunately, she took a break from holding me together for a week, and by the time she came back, I was pretty fucked up.

She wanted to pursue a relationship, but first had to reassure herself that I could be “more respectful” of her. Which meant, in part, that she wanted apologies for all the things I’d done which had hurt her. Unfortunately, she did not actually communicate to me what these were. In particular, she did not tell me she’d been pretending to like things, only that she’d been letting things slide that she wasn’t okay with. So, the entire project was inherently, fundamentally, completely doomed from the start. But neither of us knew that, so we entered a period which started out as something reasonably sane-seeming; she wanted me to apologize, so I tried to. Unfortunately, no apology I made could ever quite be good enough, but they often felt close, but there was always some lingering doubt.

Unfortunately, the way she actually handled this was wildly destructive. She’d ask for an apology, I’d offer one, and she’d think about it a bit and then if she liked it so far be friendly, and otherwise she’d get hurt and pull away. If she pulled away, there’d be some interval during which she was touchy, and if I made bids, she’d react with outright hostility. But if I didn’t make bids, she’d get upset and hurt that I wasn’t paying attention and being supportive. In her defense, when I finally realized this pattern was happening and told her, she fixed it. Completely. It did not happen again; she reacted to all bids after that with at least general courtesy. Unfortunately, she stopped doing it in mid-October, several days too late to avoid disaster. Still, it was a very notable and sudden change. Most people doing something like that would keep backsliding and making excuses. She fixed it, and it stayed fixed.

A day or two after each round of interrogation, she’d try again. If she had liked the apology, it was almost-enough, but there was just one lingering doubt or uncertainty, so she’d ask for a new one that was better. If she didn’t, it was awful and she pushed me away for a day or two, then gave me some updated information about what she was upset about and tried again. The best explanation I’ve yet seen is to compare this with struggle sessions.

This, it turns out, is the exact pattern used for interrogation-by-torture and brainwashing, and it works. I have a not-clearly-diagnosed dissociative disorder, which for most of my life I’ve regarded as “minor”. If I am badly stressed enough, sometimes my sense of self sort of disintegrates and then a day or two later I have a working sense of self, but all my prior experiences feel sort of distant and all my new experiences feel like the first time I’ve had them. This used to happen every few years, maybe. After Jesse’s stroke it happened maybe once or twice a month. Once Ariadne started demanding apologies and explanations, I quickly lost count, but it was more than one a day.

For the first couple of weeks of this, I tried to avoid showing distress, because any time I mentioned that I was distressed, Ariadne got very upset because I was “pressuring” her and she didn’t trust herself to make authentic decisions when pressured. Given that she’d let on at least some about her “difficulty saying no”, I respected this and tried to accommodate it. After a while, though, I did let her know that this was actually damaging me pretty severely. Unfortunately, I had no idea how severely; I’d never been hurt enough before that it materially affected me for any length of time, and didn’t know it was possible.

I found out on October 10th, when I had an experience I described as “like being in a manual transmission car on the freeway and shifting into reverse”. Everything broke. I stopped having any emotional experiences at all for a while. I told Ariadne this, and that I was worried that there was some kind of serious damage, but she assured me that she was confident it would be fixable. Anyway, after this, I was just fully broken, in the sense of “everyone breaks under torture”. My brain had figured out that I wasn’t willing to lie, but that if I said certain things, Ariadne hurt me, and it decided to protect itself by simply not believing those things. For the next two months or so, my cognition got progressively more and more badly distorted. My memories and emotions got edited freely to ensure that, as much as possible, I would believe and experience only things that wouldn’t make her mad. It didn’t actually work, partially because there were limits.

I still don’t entirely understand how we managed to miss this. Starting in mid-October, we had to switch to writing letters for a lot of things, because if I tried to answer questions in real time, I would say things that made no sense at all. Neither of us picked up on this being a major change. Over the next two months, she continued with the struggle sessions, gradually expanding their scope. It wasn’t just about apologies for things I did; I was supposed to believe that Barb was a horrible person, who hated Ariadne and had been actively trying to push her out of my life. Unfortunately, no part of this was even a little bit true, and I’ve known Barb for ten years, so no amount of editing my experiences could get me to really believe it.

Around October 13th, I mentioned that I didn’t understand why she was so upset about one single comment, and Ariadne started showing me all the other comments she was mad about. I noticed that some of them had laugh emojis, and she explained that she’d been giving me laugh emojis so I wouldn’t suspect that she was mad. I was initially furious about the deception, and about the way in which it had made all communication impossible. After all, I’d just spent two months being hurt for not recognizing what she was mad about, and I just found out that the reason I didn’t understand what she was mad about was that she’d lied to me about it, pretended to like it, and then never corrected this. But I was broken and by the time she got off work a few hours later, I was entirely conciliatory about it.

Her explanation at the time was that she was lying because she knew I was having a rough time and just wanted me to be safe and happy and not feel threatened. I do not believe this at all. I think that is a motive that Ariadne, in mid-October, would have had, because she was starting to have strong feelings for me and care a lot about me. However, Ariadne in July was barely even aware that I was actually sad (I certainly showed no signs of it, because I’m badly broken). Her later explanations of her choices also omitted any suggestion of this. I think she was trying to spin it positively because she didn’t want me to be mad about it, maybe? Again, I don’t think she’s lying; I think she just characterizes her motives based on her current feelings when she’s doing the introspection, and sometimes forgets that her feelings during the event were different.

Unfortunately, one of the things that most reliably upset Ariadne was if my relationship goals weren’t the same as hers, so once I broke, they started changing rapidly to match whatever she wanted. If she wanted a closer relationship, within a few hours, I did too. She went from not wanting a partner at all to wanting to be extremely close and tightly bonded, so I did too. This made everything worse for both of us, because neither of us could possibly have sustained the relationship she ended up wanting.

I don’t think she intended this outcome, but I don’t think she tried very hard to prevent it, or paid much attention to the many obvious warning signs of things going horribly wrong, or my repeated requests that she stop doing the thing that was clearly fucking me up.

How bad was it? This happened in the same year that my spouse of thirty years died, and also overlapped with the year in which I originally lost him to a stroke. This is unambiguously, and by a large margin, the worst of those three experiences.

Case Study: Valence

I used to say that I appear to have a valence of two, which is to say, if I am emotionally involved with two people, I don’t seem to have any additional capacity for emotional involvement, but if I’m only involved with one person, people catch my eye. Ariadne at one point told me that she found this upsetting, because it put her in a category with other people and made her seem less special. By the next day, I no longer believed the valence thing; I had a complex explanation of how it was probably just speculative and come up with as an explanation for something in my relationship with Jesse (there was a window where we’d almost-but-not-quite added a third person to our relationship), and there was nothing to it.

I have no idea at all whether this is true. All the original memories got deleted or corrupted badly enough that I can’t understand them anymore. I don’t remember the process of reaching the conclusion, or when it was, or anything else. My brain knew that Ariadne was upset about a thing, and would hurt me if it was true, so it stopped being true to me. Even now that I’ve otherwise significantly recovered, there’s no way for me to go back and find out what things were like before that.

Requests to Stop

Yes, I asked her to stop. I told her specifically that the demands for ever better apologies were killing me and I couldn’t do more, and she’d say she understood and didn’t want to torture me, but also there was just one thing she really needed to know, or something like that. It all blurs together. We had these conversations several times.

A recurring theme in all of this was that she was protecting herself, and her stance was that she would do whatever it took to protect herself, and if I couldn’t handle it, I should leave. This is a sort of insane policy at the best of times, but for a recently-widowed person who’d been relying on her for emotional support, and broken by torture, it was completely impossible for anything to work that way. Note that it was fully asymmetric; she expected me to actively protect her, but explicitly would not protect me.

Ariadne Takes What She Wants

Ariadne’s behavior towards me, and other people, has been almost predatory. I missed a lot of this originally for various reasons. Most notably, quite a few people have told me that the relationship starting so soon after I was widowed was a giant red flag. I’ve consistently dismissed this on the grounds that it was actually probably fine for me, and I needed the support, and it helped a lot. And I still think that’s true, but she had no way of knowing that. She didn’t know what I was. She had no idea how unlike human norms my emotional responses were. So, she didn’t know it would be safe for me (albeit possibly not for her). She just didn’t think about it. Remember again her distress about discovering that I kept talking about the dead guy. She wasn’t expecting that, and felt like it was unfair to her.

I want to be clear, I do not think there is any malicious intent here. Ariadne was not trying to hurt me by starting a relationship with me when I was freshly-widowed. I think she at least sort of meant to be helpful, but she didn’t really think about what I might want or need, and when she started having goals to pursue (she was enjoying parts of the relationship), she focused on what she wanted and how to get it and simply did not consider how this would affect me.

Ariadne has a history of dubious-at-best consent in her interactions with other people. This isn’t limited to sexual behaviors, but it does show up there. At a high level, I think her model of how to interact with other people simply doesn’t include much consideration for their consent, just what she wants. I’ve got a few examples of this, and all of them are at least potentially defensible, but the pattern is very concerning.

Ariadne repeatedly lied to me in order to get me to “consent” to things that she thought I would not consent to if she didn’t lie to me. To be clear, I don’t think this behavior is entirely volitional. Compulsive lying to avoid being rejected is probably a behavior that’s very hard to control. But if you know you do that, you sort of have an obligation to warn people about it in advance so they can have informed consent; otherwise, you’re going to end up with a trail of people who feel betrayed and violated. Consent is ultimately an instrumental tool; we use consent to avoid making people feel betrayed and violated. Consent practices that predictably produce people who feel violated are bad practices.

I didn’t initially realize the reason behind the lies. I have been trying to avoid quotes, but I really think I just want to let her offer her own defense, here, because the fact that she considered this a defense of her behavior is mystifying to me.

Seebs: If you had not done this cool girl thing, we would either have been fine or figured out in the first couple of days that we were not gonna work it out.
Ariadne: [quoting that message] Well yes but I didn’t want that!
Ariadne: I wanted to keep doing what we were doing
Ariadne: And was willing to put up with some discomfort for that to happen
Ariadne: I didn’t think we were gonna have a serious relationship, so it didn’t matter
Ariadne: Being kinda uncomfortable a bunch was a price I was willing to pay to have a fling with you
Ariadne: And nothing you said or did signalled to me that you would change your behavior if I complained, or do anything but break up with me for being too much of a hassle

This is a fascinating analysis of her tradeoffs, but the only reference in it to my consent is that she didn’t think she’d get it unless she lied to me.

This is not the only time she lied to me because she was worried I’d dislike her (and thus, not provide sex). Early in the relationship, she asked for pictures so she’d know what I looked like. Later, analyzing another person’s posts about me, she commented they clearly did the same thing she did, and searched for pictures of me, which she said she’d done back when she had a crush on me. I was a bit surprised by this, and she explained that she pretended not to know what I’d look like so I wouldn’t think she was a stalker. Which is to say: She thought I might not consent if I knew the truth, so she actively lied to me to keep me from knowing the truth. She also offered the dodge that maybe it was kinda true because the pictures she’d found were old, so she didn’t know what I looked like now. Yeah, not buying that. And again, it’s frustrating because the actual claim was so trivial and uninteresting. I wouldn’t have blinked at her having found pictures of me, but the lie was upsetting.

I don’t think consent obtained through lies is ever valid. I don’t think it matters how I would have reacted if she’d told me the truth; what matters is that I never got the chance to decide for myself, because she didn’t think I deserved a chance to decide for myself. She knew what she wanted, and what tradeoffs she was comfortable with, and she made those decisions unilaterally, without consulting me. That is not how you get valid consent. It is, however, how I got, for the first time in my life, a referent for the concept of “feeling violated”, so I guess there’s that.

A fellow student at her college accused Ariadne of sexual harassment and possibly assault (I don’t have the full details available). Ariadne described this to me; in her description, the girl in question was just outright lying about her and the accusations were totally false and had no basis, and it was just jealousy because Ariadne was close to the girl’s boyfriend. When she initially told me this, I simply accepted this description at face value, but now that I know how she describes events I was present for, I am no longer confident that her description is accurate. I don’t know why Ariadne became so certain that she could not possibly have accidentally violated someone’s boundaries, or that her accuser was necessarily lying.

I’m not going to try to take a stance on what “really” happened. What I think is important is that Ariadne was outraged about this, and ascribed it to jealousy about her involvement with the accuser’s boyfriend. She felt it was clear that her accuser was lying, and this became a major sore point for her and sort of a template she applied to other situations. We’ll see it again later when she decides that my housemate is just like this accuser.

Ariadne gave me a detailed walkthrough of her thought process in what she called “difficulty saying no”, involving a person she knows who is sort of handsy but gives good massages. Her experience is that they’ll usually try to push a bit for more, and she doesn’t like that, but she likes massages, so if she anticipates being around them, she figures out in advance what her boundaries will be and how she’ll handle violations of them, because if she hasn’t made firm policies in advance, she’ll tend to go along with things at the time and be mad about them later.

In this case, I don’t think there’s any lying involved, but I still find myself wondering: If he knew she thought his behavior was repulsive, would he still be willing to engage on these terms? And from what she said, the answer is probably “no”. She thinks he wouldn’t, but feels that if he’s going to be pushy, then he’s going to sometimes make people uncomfortable and cross their boundaries.

And what’s fascinating about this is that she doesn’t seem to recognize that it applies also to her. She is willing to just say “well, if he’s going to be pushy, he’s going to cross boundaries sometimes and he can just deal”, but when she’s pushy or tells lies, she doesn’t feel the same way. Was she pushy in college? Yes, and this was clear from her descriptions of her own behavior. So contrast these two cases. In the college case, she is horrified that someone is obviously-falsely accusing her of crossing boundaries by being pushy. In this case, she thinks that someone pushy has no right to blame her if they’re bothered that she thinks they were crossing boundaries.

I think the term I want is “main character energy”, and that is a horrible thing to bring to how you approach consent.

Ariadne strictly prohibited me from talking about our relationship with other people without her express permission. You will probably have noticed that this is already actually flagrantly abusive and completely unacceptable behavior, but whatever. She made it clear that she considered the relationship “private” and that other people had no business knowing about it without our mutual consent.

And then she told me that she’d been discussing her feelings about Barb with a mutual friend, and hoped that was alright. And I said that I wasn’t super mad, but would prefer to be asked, so she agreed that in future she would ask. She did not ask. She continued doing this, usually accompanying it with a reason for which she thought I would obviously say yes so there was no need to ask, such as “because it’s someone seebs doesn’t know very well”.

The issue here isn’t whether or not consent is required to talk to people; it’s that she makes it clear that in principle she recognizes that my consent is relevant, but in practice I do not think she ever actually asked me before talking to people. Instead, there was always a reason she didn’t have to.

Her ultimate justification came down simply to needing validation, which of course she always got – because when she described things to people, her descriptions were subtly edited so that people would support her. But as long as she needed to do a thing, there would always be a reason she could and didn’t need to verify consent.

Ariadne does not really recognize or respect consent. Across every discussion we had (and there’s a lot more than these four), she generally did not talk about other people’s interests or consent. It’s just not a factor. She basically follows the superficial forms of social rules on this, but doesn’t actually engage, at all, with the question of whether consent is still valid if obtained under duress or deception. She’s letting people make choices. That she’s lying to them to prevent them from making choices she doesn’t like doesn’t seem to be a factor to her. This is a bit broader than just consent – for instance, hitting on the recent widow while not really taking into account the implications of them being a widow. But fundamentally, she’s getting what she wants and not worrying too much about other people. She is protecting herself, not anyone else.

She does have a strategy for keeping this from becoming a huge problem. She’s relying on her adherence to social rules and norms to keep this from being a problem, which is honestly a pretty viable strategy in general. Unfortunately, it’s hugely undermined by the fact that she’s very smart and can always find a perfectly good reason for which this particular violation doesn’t count. So she almost certainly understands that there are some genuine obligations to be truthful that she would respect if they came up; past that, it’s open season. She believes firmly that she is not deceptive and is not lying in substantive ways, but the fact that she twice told me specifically that the reason she had to lie to me is that she didn’t think I’d continue consenting otherwise makes me think that they’re actually sometimes pretty substantive.

This turns a fairly normal way for people to handle boundaries into a serious and recurring problem.

I think, like most people who compulsively conceal discomfort, her internal model is that she’s bravely sacrificing her comfort to accommodate someone else, and it’s simply never occurred to her that they might genuinely not want that strongly enough that it becomes a consent problem. I tried to explain this once in another context during the relationship, and I honestly don’t know whether it took, but she definitely didn’t generalize from it to the broader consent issues I’m describing here.

Controlling

Ariadne once mentioned, with some distress, that her former spouse had apparently been telling people she was controlling, and she was bothered by this. On the other hand, she also told me, at some length, how he had a friend she disapproved of and she was extremely distressed that he would not cut off all contact with that friend. I have heard both her side and his side of this, and they match up surprisingly well; he even agrees that, in fact, on the whole she was right about that friend. So, he’s not just being uniformly negative or saying she’s wrong about everything. On the other hand, yes, that is still an example of being controlling.

It is not the only one.

Self-soothing and Dwelling

Ariadne does not self-soothe, as a matter of policy. I was, to put it mildly, surprised by this. I’d complained about something distressing me, and she mentioned that it seemed like a good opportunity for self-soothing. I later suggested she self-soothe about something, and she declined to. I asked about the apparent conflict, and she sent me an entire letter explaining this.

Her explanation is that, if she self-soothes, she will “gaslight” herself into believing that things don’t bother her when actually they do, and put up with them. Also, if she self-soothes and isn’t distressed enough, people won’t address her problems. In fact, she actively dwells on things that bother her; if a thing is upsetting to her, she’ll make a point of actively thinking about how upsetting it is, to make sure she doesn’t forget that it’s upsetting.

In my experience, this consistently produces the exact same result in her that it does in everyone else who does it, which is that the more you dwell on how upsetting a thing is, the more upsetting it is. On multiple occasions, things that were originally merely slightly annoying to her got worse every time she came back around to them, until eventually they were totally unbearable. On the other hand, once or twice I managed to distract her from a thing, and it simply never came up again.

There’s a real underlying problem here, with the risk of her dismissing her own concerns, and her experience of people not taking her problems seriously unless she’s distressed. On the other hand, throughout our relationship, my problems almost never got addressed, because I was always waiting for her apparently-more-urgent problems to get resolved, and they never did. This is because I didn’t know she was artificially inflating the severity of her problems. She denies that dwelling on things makes them more upsetting. I’m going to stick with the mainstream theory. It’s understandable for her to be concerned that she has trouble bringing things up unless they feel severe and urgent. However, the net result of this is that any time I tried to weigh how upset she was, I was assuming she had a problem which was that severe after any kind of attempt at emotional regulation.

I think this is one of the things which is most likely to affect people even if they’re not in especially close relationships to her; she’s told me at length about times she’s broken down crying when talking to people and they’ve offered her validation and support. But if she’s declining to manage her emotions at all, and making other people do things for her to soothe her since she won’t soothe herself, that’s a lot of emotional pressure to put on people.

Regardless, one of the major outcomes here is that, at the end of the relationship, I had a backlog of months’ worth of complaints about her behavior striking me as fairly horrible (I wasn’t yet able to use the word “abusive”), which I wanted to talk to her about after the relationship, because I felt like she’d want to know. I’ll come back to that later.

Pushing Barb Away

Barb is the person who held me together for most of the last decade, got me and Jesse through several surgeries and other disasters, and kept the household together while I was dysfunctional due to Jesse’s stroke. Obviously, she’s important to me. I had told Ariadne this up front, and later when she started wanting to be important to me, she was very distressed about Barb being more important. And, for a while, I was inclined to agree that obviously Ariadne could be more important, but this was never enough. She devoted significant time and effort to convincing me to somehow get rid of Barb. Even months later, when one of our mutual friends reached out to her to see whether she’d be willing to talk to me (without my approval/permission, but it was an honest misunderstanding), she immediately came back with how she would never want to hear anything I had to say unless I completely conceded all her points about Barb and was no longer in contact with Barb in any way.

Ariadne had a lot of complaints about my interactions with Barb, and a few of them sounded sort of reasonable at first. Barb tended to interrupt me, and Ariadne didn’t like that, and wanted it stopped. Okay, that seems sort of reasonable. It stopped quickly. Barb and I are both disabled, and we tend to take care of each other; for instance, sometimes I make her dinner. Sometimes, executive function being what it is, all she needs is help getting started, so all I have to do is go down and be in the kitchen for a bit so she’ll wander there and start cooking. Ariadne hated this. But more generally, she hated any way in which Barb was in my life at all.

This wasn’t an entirely consistent or endorsed position. When she was calm, she’d talk about how she was glad I had someone to support me. She recognized that Barb had been immensely valuable to me in taking care of Jesse, and also in taking care of Kas. Even during some of the times when she was trying to pressure me to get rid of Barb as soon as possible, she generally insisted that she wanted Barb to be safe and not be, say, suddenly homeless in winter.

In July, I apparently made claims about Barb seeming “threatened” by Ariadne. I have no idea why. I don’t have any working memories from July, but I do know that nearly all of my social skills were completely dysfunctional and offline due to grief, so I don’t really place any weight on it. I don’t think it was unreasonable for Ariadne to initially believe these claims, but her insistence that they’re true despite all the evidence to the contrary is less reasonable.

Throughout all of this, Ariadne insisted that I absolutely must not tell Barb (or anyone else!) anything. This was shitty and abusive. As a result, Ariadne spent months asking me to explain and justify Barb’s behavior, without ever once allowing for even the possibility that Barb might be truthful if asked. Her basis for this was comparing Barb to her accuser in college, and concluding that Barb would obviously lie about her intent if confronted. So instead of communicating with Barb directly, or even letting me communicate with Barb, Ariadne spent months demanding that I try to explain Barb’s behavior and telling her friends that Barb was a monster.

There’s an interesting parallel between Ariadne’s treatment of Barb and her statements about her accuser in college. In both cases, she sets herself up as the sole arbiter of whether someone else is lying, when she can’t possibly actually know. The entire time we’ve been friends, Barb has been completely direct with me about the fact that she thought Jesse was, in her words, “an abusive asshole”. Yes, even when he was alive and I was married to him and in love with him. There is no plausible reason to believe that Barb would have pretended to like Ariadne if she didn’t.

Ariadne criticized my relationship with Barb in a lot of ways. She called it “codependent” for me to feed Barb. At one point she sent me a whole lecture about how when she was in another country for her studies, she went to school every day and made food and so on, even though her stomach hurt, and soldiered on, because she hated being dependent and wouldn’t do it under any circumstances, and talked about how much she hated it when anyone was dependent. This sounds pretty fucking ableist, but honestly, I think it’s actually just jealousy being filtered through her awareness that jealousy is a bad look, especially when you came into a relationship knowing there was another relationship there already. For instance, she never had complaints about times when taking care of Kas affected my schedule. When the dependency argument didn’t work, she also tried various other approaches to forcibly distance me from Barb. I’m Barb’s employer, housemate, and friend, and this was fine until Ariadne decided she really needed me not to live with Barb, and then immediately brought up how it was clearly an unhealthy relationship.

During October and November-December, Ariadne demanded many attempts to explain my relationship with Barb, because she decided that I needed to not be “close” to Barb, who had hurt her. I was spending probably an average of 2-4 hours a day just writing words about my relationship with Barb, trying to find something Ariadne would find acceptable. She often talked about how much time she thought I was spending with Barb, and her beliefs were wildly unrealistic. I actually tracked this for a couple of days. During a day when Ariadne was traveling and only occasionally had access to her phone, I spent more time talking to Ariadne about my relationship with Barb than I spent interacting with Barb. This was fairly typical.

What is the relationship? I don’t know, but I do know that Jesse was historically a pretty jealous guy, and we were monogamously married, and I was in this relationship with Barb for the last five or six years of his life, and he never found it objectionable in the slightest, and actually thought it was adorable. I think that a relationship which is compatible with an entire fucking monogamous marriage would normally be reasonably considered Not A Threat.

Ariadne needed me to cease all visible interactions with Barb. I wasn’t to talk about Barb, to reblog things from Barb’s tumblr, or in any other way remind her that Barb existed if I could possibly avoid it. This wasn’t exactly a demand, but any time she saw Barb, she got upset. On the other hand, if I said things that didn’t refer to Barb, but she thought Barb might be involved or present, she’d demand to know. This was wildly inconsistent, and I never really made sense of it. I also don’t entirely understand why I put up with it at all, but I think my belief at the time was that she’d gotten triggered, and if she got away from the aversive stimulus for a while, she’d be fine. That might even have been correct if she had not been so inclined to dwell on things that upset her.

Pointing Fingers

It took a while for me to spot it, but in fact, most of Ariadne’s accusations about what Barb was like were simply descriptions of her own behavior towards Barb. Ariadne insisted that Barb was trying to make her look bad and make me think less of her, and push me to keep Ariadne out of my life. In fact, neither of those ever happened. However, Ariadne spent several months constantly trying to tell me that Barb was just like the characters from Mean Girls, and that if I didn’t realize she was being insulting on purpose, it was because I didn’t have the social skills to spot subtle insults of the kinds mean girls do. She also pressured me, at length, to move Barb out, stop living with Barb, stop being close to Barb, and so on. When I discussed moving Barb out into a house, she told me not to hurry and do it too quickly, because if I bought a house that was too close, she might still find that unacceptable.

The only thing that really stood out in this, which didn’t fit that pattern, is her insistence that Barb hated her for “being a slut”. Barb is militantly ace, and sometimes talks sort of dismissively about allosexual people. On the other hand, I have never seen any actual hostility from her. So where did the idea that Barb was disrespecting her for being a “sex person” come from?

I think, listening to Ariadne talk about fuckboys, and casual partners, and looking at how she treated me and how she described her obligations to me during the more casual phase of the relationship, it was at least partially just an exaggeration and projection of how Ariadne herself treats people when she thinks of them as sex people rather than serious friends.

Bogus Accusations

I guess I want to drill into this a bit, because Ariadne spent months (by now about a year!) telling a lot of people all sorts of false things about Barb, and I hate untrue things, and I especially hate untrue things that are pointed at someone who’s actually been pretty nice to me, and who had no chance to hear the accusations against her or respond to them. Whatever the origins, none of it was true. Barb was never hostile to Ariadne. There’s no point in litigating all the details of the many specific complaints here, but everything I’ve seen Ariadne claim about Barb’s “hostility” was nonsense.

Barb is guilty of such offenses as “asking me to take five minutes to come help her get started on food when Ariadne wanted to watch TV with me”, but in every case, once she was told it was a problem, she stopped promptly. I don’t think she did anything even slightly rude to Ariadne after somewhere around August; after that, it was 100% Ariadne staying mad about things that had already stopped, and that she would have gotten an apology for if she’d asked for one.

I think the months of misleading and outright false claims about Barb delivered to anyone who would listen, and lack of any retractions or apologies that I ever heard of, is one of the more egregious harms Ariadne did to a person who was, in all meaningful ways, entirely an innocent bystander.

So let me just fully address the question of whether Barb was hostile or trying to push Ariadne out of my life:

Ariadne spent months torturing me and otherwise abusing me. Barb almost ended up suddenly homeless because of things Ariadne said to me. Barb got yelled at and insulted, and Ariadne spent months telling lots of people all sorts of bad things about her. She knows about basically everything in this document, plus a lot of other things I haven’t put in this document. She’s the one who had to put me back together after Ariadne broke me and left. Barb knows all of this and is fully aware of what Ariadne is like. So how do you think she feels now? Well, she’s not Ariadne’s biggest fan, but:

Barb is aware that I love Ariadne and still want to be friends with her. Barb is still not hostile to this. I think that tells you how seriously to take the claim that Barb was hostile and defensive and trying to push Ariadne out of my life.

No Agency for Other People

This is sort of a further expansion on the earlier consent topics, in a way.

A recurring theme in conversations with Ariadne was her desire to be the only person with any kind of agency in her life. At one point, when I was too interested-in-the-relationship for her tastes, she told me she was uncomfortable with that because she likes to be the one pursuing, and doesn’t really like to be the one pursued. When we broke up, she said it was extremely important to her that we both acknowledge that she was the one who initiated the breakup, because she is always the one who initiates breakups.

When she had things to say, it was important that I let her write long things without any interruptions or responses. When I had things to say, it was important that she be allowed to correct me immediately if she disagreed. When she formed an opinion about Barb, a person she’d interacted with almost entirely indirectly and only briefly, that opinion was the only valid one; my experiences as someone who’d known Barb for ten years weren’t relevant.

When we broke up, we made plans to talk again in six months, and I had mentioned wanting to hash some things out (the aforementioned many things I had problems with that I’d never gotten to talk about because she always took priority). A couple of weeks later, she sent me an email about how she’d decided that we were not doing that, she did not want to hash things out, and I must never contact her again. It also came with a twenty-six page letter of things that she needed me to hear, but with gracious permission to read some parts of it later if I didn’t want to read it all right away. I have not read the letter, and won’t. I do not in this case choose to further participate in her emotional abuse.

The 26-page letter is sort of insane. Attaching it to a “never contact me again” starts feeling emotionally abusive. But also, her email telling me never to contact her again explicitly referred to the things I wanted to hash out, and said we were not going to hash them out. Remember that backlog of complaints? She did, and called them out specifically as something she didn’t care about. She also said she was blocking me on various platforms to make sure I didn’t reply in any way to the letter.

The message here is that “being heard, ever” is a special privilege one earns by being Ariadne.

We’re not done.

A day or two later, because she was still watching my tumblr, she sent me an even angrier message, in which she yelled about how bad I must be if something I said on tumblr was what I got from her letter. (I had not read the letter.) So, even though she had told me she was blocking me and would not be communicating, she still watched what I was doing to yell at me if I said anything she didn’t like.

The message here isn’t just “seebs isn’t allowed to be heard by Ariadne”, it’s “seebs isn’t allowed to talk”. At all. Well, fuck that.

I did in fact contact her – I sent her letters with apologies, and also a detailed discussion of a lot of her abusive behavior, some time ago. She can read them or not, I don’t know, but I have never blocked her on any medium and don’t plan to. I’m unhappy about posting this in a format where she can’t easily respond, but if she wants to reply, she knows many ways to reach me.

Reputation Management

Throughout the relationship, Ariadne needed control over her reputation and any public opinion of her. She got mad if I posted anything that referred to her without letting her vet it first and possibly edit it. She insisted on knowing anything I heard anyone say about her. If I mentioned her, I was supposed to let her know how people responded. She demanded access to all the hidden channels on my Discord server, because she was jealous of Barb having access to any channels she didn’t have. Several people have suggested to me, though not exactly said it directly, that they’re pretty sure Ariadne had people, possibly multiple people, monitoring my channel on a Discord server we’re both on so she could find out if I said anything. Certainly, given how she behaved with me, that seems normal.

The amount of control here is absolutely unhinged, and she also expects other people to be the same way. For instance, she expressed worries about what would happen if Barb went through my phone and got things out of our chats. I cannot imagine why she would think that I would ever let someone go through my phone like that, or why she would think Barb would want to. Except, of course, I can imagine: Because she’s very controlling and assumes other people are too.

Ariadne’s beliefs about which things I needed to keep secret were confusing to me at the best of times. She appeared to be very concerned about what people thought of her, but didn’t really care about some things that I think look awful, and was wildly concerned about some things I think no one would even blink at. However, the degree of control she wanted was wild. At one point, she was telling me that she would never speak to me again if I ever told anyone about a thing. I asked, well, what about just putting it in as an anonymized thing that “happened to someone I knew once” and her answer was that, no, if she ever saw this pattern of events in anything I said, she would absolutely never speak to me again no matter what. I don’t actually think this one makes any sense at all; there’s nothing in the abstract pattern of events to tell you who it happened to or reflect on her in any way. If I tell you that I know someone who killed their little brother when they were three, you’re not going to immediately leap to accuse one specific person I know that you’ve never heard of, or anyone specific in my life, because there’s nothing to suggest which person I mean. I don’t even remember what the thing was she felt this way about! But in any event, it’s a wild example of a degree of controlling behavior far beyond any possibly reasonable boundary.

Higher Level Patterns

Okay, that’s lots of specific examples, now I want to talk a bit about the higher level unifying patterns.

I think the most fundamental thing would just be the phrase “I’m a bit of a hypocrite about that”, variants of which she said very often. There are so many things on which her policies are explicitly asymmetric. Sometimes the policy is formally asymmetric, as in her stance that she has no obligation to protect the other party in a relationship, but they have an obligation to protect her. Sometimes the policy is officially symmetric, but the actual practice is wildly asymmetric because there’s always a reason that this particular violation of her commitments or duties doesn’t count.

I think three things stand out as being particularly inherently abusive and explicitly endorsed policies. One is the lack of self-soothing described above. In practice, this becomes a powerful weapon for weaponizing other people’s empathy or concern for her. It’s also, frankly, very bad for her. The other two are her tendency to break deals (or only pretend to make them), and her refusal to protect people from harm.

Let’s Make A Deal

At one point, I thought we had a sort of mutual agreement, and Ariadne revealed that of course we didn’t, she’d never agree to that, and I pointed out that she’d asked me to do the thing in question. She explained that this is in fact a thing she sometimes does, which is that she’ll let people think they’re making deals, by making requests that would typically imply a mutual deal, and then simply not actually formally offer the deal, and thus, not be bound by it. She said she sometimes worries that this is “steamrolling” people. It’s not; a steamroller does not work by offering to become flat in the future, then not doing so. But it is, unambiguously, a deception or a betrayal. Or both! But it’s consistently one or the other, and it’s a thing that I ran into multiple times, and is simply part of how she approaches relationships. She expressed mild concern about it, but not to a degree that would indicate that she intended to change it.

I think this may technically be an improvement; Moth-Vine said she used to explicitly offer deals and not follow through. For instance, she’d offer to trade massages, get a massage, and then somehow never get around to providing one in return. By the time I was interacting with her, I think she had stopped explicitly offering the deals, but that could just be coincidence.

This behavior isn’t all that unusual in people; what’s striking to me is that she’ll describe it explicitly as a thing she knows she does, without any apparent idea that this is not an acceptable way to treat other people.

Not My Job To Protect You

This is another thing that I found really surprising that someone would openly admit to. Usually, in relationships, we accept some kind of obligation to care for the other party. Ariadne explicitly declines to accept such an obligation. She will sometimes decide to avoid hurting someone, fairly frequently even, but does not consider herself to have any duty of care to someone, even someone she’s describing as a romantic partner. Again, this is really weird, and if she had not stated it in writing to me, I would not believe it. I think it’s a coping mechanism for a history of not being able to protect herself enough and sacrificing too much for things, but the net result is just horrible.

It’s Not Just Me

For a long time, I thought that the problems we had were a result of the particularly ill-fated and inauspicious way we got started. And for a long time, Moth-Vine thought his problems with Ariadne were a result of the circumstances of their relationship. We talked a bit, and the fact is, we had very similar problems despite wildly different circumstances. I don’t think any of the explanations relying on the specific circumstances fit; I think she’s actually just like this.

Contrasting the situations:

Moth-Vine and Ariadne met in college, they had a number of interactions over years, they’d had some serious conflicts in the past, they worked things out and got together, and they were married.

Ariadne and I met on Discord, chatted occasionally for a few years, and then had a whirlwind fling immediately after I got widowed. Ariadne and Moth-Vine knew each other fairly well when their romance started, and had a long-lasting and tested friendship leading into the romance. Ariadne only knew me casually and the romance grew out of a casual fling. He lived with her for over a year, I met her in person roughly twice. I had an existing established person in my life (albeit non-romantically) that she knew about before we got involved, he was monogamous with her.

But we both experienced her being controlling and isolating us. We both had problems with her not keeping to deals (whether explicit or implicit). We both felt that her descriptions of the relationship to other people were significantly misleading or deceptive. We both experienced her decisions to “protect herself” and write us off as acceptable collateral damage.

And in fairness, we both think she is sincere and motivated about fixing her problems much of the time, and I think we both think better of her than most of our friends do. Moth-Vine wasn’t at all hesitant to say that Ariadne was right about the specific friend I mentioned that she’d wanted him to cut off. I still unambiguously love her.

The input circumstances differed wildly; the results were stunningly similar, including the part where both of us think she can be better than this.

Abusive Behavior I Don’t Care About

There’s honestly a large amount of this, but it’s just not that interesting to me and it’s hard for me to be sure I’m picking up on it.

Ariadne is wildly self-centered and very dismissive and invalidating of other people, especially by the standards I’d expect from even a casual relationship. This isn’t to say she doesn’t care; she does sometimes! She puts a lot of time and thought into it. Sometimes. But for instance, she was disappointed that I drank pop, because she thought tea was a more mature beverage. When she explained that, if we were to be close, I had to watch her favorite TV shows, I asked if she wanted to see mine; she dismissed this because she’s not really into other people’s media choices. She didn’t like video games and thus didn’t want to hear anything about them. She wasn’t interested in programming. Most people, when they’re in love, acquire some kind of indirect interest in the interests of the people they’re interested in. She didn’t.

She said once that she’s much better at “love-as-enthusiasm” than “love-as-care”, and I think this is pretty accurate. She just doesn’t have the experience most people have as “caring” a lot of the time, and it shows very strongly.

There’s a whole pile of things shaped like this which, I understand, are upsetting to most people. I don’t care, they don’t bother me at all. I don’t really care what or even very much whether people think of me most of the time. However, for most people, having someone talk over them and disregard them and talk very disparagingly about their interests, their tastes, and so on, would probably be pretty upsetting. I made a quip once about how the bright side is that I never had to wonder whether I was more important to her than how random strangers she’d never meet would perceive her. It’s not entirely a joke; I did in fact directly lose in head-to-head competition with “how random strangers would perceive her” at least once.

I am not really super qualified to explain how much of this there is, or how bad it is. My impression from showing examples to people is that it seems pretty bad to them. I’ve learned to recognize the particular way my therapist laughs when I’m accidentally describing something that would take significant time to process and heal from for other people but I just thought it was funny.

Anyway, I don’t really want to try to call all of this out because I don’t get it and it never bothered me much, but I feel like any warning should probably include a clear statement that other people, like Moth-Vine, were deeply hurt by some of the behaviors I don’t care about. This is one of the reasons I realized I needed to say something; I’d been evaluating the severity of the problem based on whether her behavior hurt me before, but of course, that’s not the right question.

I Think Her Friends Are Failing Her

One of the things I’ve been picking up over the last few months is that I keep meeting people who have heard one sketchy thing about Ariadne, because one of her friends warned them, or they were told by one of her friends that they had warned another friend about something. And I think this gets back to my earlier point about Gell-Mann amnesia. We have all these people individually trying to avoid drama by keeping things quiet and not saying anything, but as a result, we never get that overall view that shows all the problems at once, and lets us identify patterns. Missing stairs are, in some ways, a coordination problem.

Ariadne and I have a lot of friends in common. Quite a few of them have made it clear that they definitely consider her treatment of me abusive. As I commented previously, at least two of her other friends had already reached out to Moth-Vine to be sure he knew she was abusive, and in that case, it wasn’t even a warning, it was an acknowledgement of a harm that already happened. That doesn’t mean none of the others think her behavior was abusive; it just means they don’t have his contact info or figure he already knows.

Ariadne hated Barb, and kept telling me that her friends agreed with her and had agreed to tell me what was wrong with Barb. I think this happened four or five times, where she’d tell me that a specific person had agreed to explain to me what was so horrible about Barb. Of the people she told me were willing to explain to me how they knew Barb was a horrible person, none of them actually even made the assertion when talking to me. They simply declined to even assert that they thought Barb had acted badly. A couple of them acknowledged that they felt they’d been pressured to agree to a conversation they absolutely did not want to have. In one or two cases, she quoted actual words they said to me, and what I noticed is that they were typically saying something that was attempting to recognize and validate her emotions without necessarily agreeing on her underlying claims about Barb, but she was taking it as full endorsement.

One of my friends who is also friends with Ariadne mentioned to me that, on one of the occasions when Ariadne talked about the laugh emoji issue publicly, another of Ariadne’s friends messaged them to say “you know she was reacting with laugh emojis, right?” And yes, they were aware. But what stands out to me about this is that while both of these friends were aware that what Ariadne was saying was misleading, neither of them said anything in response to her misleading public statement. Worse, so far as I know, neither of them said anything to her about this. The information that multiple friends of hers think she’s being dishonest is information I think she probably ought to have!

And that last part, again, is why I think I need to say a thing clearly, publicly, and at length: Because this is resulting in deception, not just by Ariadne, but of Ariadne. If most people who know the story think her description is deceptive, then that’s important information for her to have!

If Ariadne were just a garden variety stereotypical abuser, this would be a bad thing, because it would mean that people were not picking up on the pattern of abuse, and people were not getting warned. And all of that is true, and it is bad, and that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this. But there’s another, and it’s more important (to me, anyway):

She’s not the stereotypical abuser. She’s a person who has, on multiple occasions, taken firm and decisive action to correct abusive or hurtful behaviors. She’s a person who stays up worrying about whether she’s hurting people. And she’s a person who frequently seeks reassurances or validation from her friends.

I asked her once whether she wanted me to support her even if she was wrong, and she said of course not, she wants to be told that she’s wrong. I was, at the time, way too broken to do it, but even so I was building a list of things to tell her about because I thought she wanted to know. She’s made it clear she doesn’t want to hear from me, but I don’t think that means she doesn’t want that feedback from anyone; I think she wants that feedback very much.

That doesn’t mean she’ll handle it gracefully. I know she’s punted at least one friend for not being sufficiently willing to agree that Barb is a horrible person. But I think it does mean that she’s made her preference very clear that she genuinely wants people to be truthful with her, and to stand up to her when she’s wrong, and I think we should do that. I was, admittedly, concealing things I knew about her abuse. In a way I still am – I assure you I’m not using all the examples I have! But a while back I sent her a twenty page letter detailing ways in which I thought she had behaved abusively. I don’t think she ever read it, but that’s on her end, and I get that she’s mad at me.

But I think that every time people go along with her behavior to avoid “making drama”, and every time people decide to just quietly tell one other person that they know she’s lying instead of confronting her, it makes things harder for her endorsed goal of being a good person. I’ve had a couple of people who have known her for longer say they think she might be getting worse rather than better now, and I think a likely explanation for that would be the degree to which people are willing to make supportive noises when they know she’s being unreasonable.

Ariadne is an incredible person who has a real, demonstrated, track record of fixing her shit when confronted by solid evidence that she fucked up, and also a very clear track record of being tricked into making excuses and shifting blame to other people when she can get away with it. I think that, if you care about her, you should keep in mind that her short-term moods are not always her endorsed philosophical goals. The temptation to say whatever will calm her down right now has demonstrably resulted in immense harm, to both her and other people.

I had a friend maybe 35 years ago who was a lot like that. She would burst into tears about anything, she needed constant validation, and so on, and I just did not fucking care. I would let her cry. I would tell her that her ideas were sorta boring and derivative, or that her jokes weren’t funny, and honestly, I think she just about hated me, but I was in her social circle so she had to put up with me. And then, one day, she said something really cool, and I commented on what a cool idea it was. And this absolutely knocked her for a loop, because in her entire life, she had never before actually believed a compliment. Long story short, she’s fine now. She’s a lot more self-confident and assured and she’s accomplished some incredible things.

The thing where many of the people I know to be friends with Ariadne are just not willing to push back on her at all, and more than one person has actively advised me to not say anything because it would make drama and we should avoid drama, strikes me as failing Ariadne the same way my friend’s other friends were failing her. It’s not just the possible victims I’m worried about; it’s Ariadne herself. I don’t think people understand how horrible and lonely it is to be abusive, and how hard it can be to pull yourself out of it without people willing to give you solid and honest feedback, and make sure you can’t get away with things that will make your problem worse.

I do want to recognize and respect the people I know who have pushed back at all, and acknowledge that at least two of them got punted for it. That is a risk you have to take when being honest with someone who has a serious problem. I don’t know what to suggest here, but I guess, everything I’ve said about how I feel about her lying to me because she was worried I’d dump her if she didn’t sort of applies. If you’re lying to her because you’re worried that she’ll friend-dump you if you don’t, think about consent a bit, and whether you think she actually wants that. Think about whether you actually want it. Please. She deserves better.

If you’re not sure what that looks like: Remember that you can validate emotions and still push back on fact claims. “I get why you feel that way, and that’s real, but …” can do a lot of good. It’s scary and a little risky, and I know she can react very poorly to pushback, but also she has repeatedly said she wants truthful feedback. No one said being friends would always be easy.

Ariadne has done some bad things. None of them are so bad that I think she deserves to have a life where many of her friends secretly think she’s abusive or lying and won’t tell her, only her other friends. That’s awful.

Conclusions

Ariadne is shockingly abusive, not just to me, but to other people as well. She is also extremely deceptive sometimes, so her accounts of her relationships with me and Moth-Vine are substantially misleading, and I would guess that all her other relationship stories are probably at least a little edited. I don’t know how much.

Her behavior is not caused by external circumstances, or by Barb being a bad person, or anything else like that. She is aggressive in pursuing things she wants, and will obtain “consent” by concealing things she thinks would cost her consent. This is not speculation based on guesses as to her motives, but based on her own direct words about what she is thinking and doing.

She is also an incredible person. Everyone always says an abuser is “trying” to be better; Ariadne has an actual track record of succeeding in being better on important issues, multiple times, and with little to no backsliding on the ones I was able to observe. While she does lie a lot in some circumstances, she will admit that she lies and talk about it fairly honestly in many cases. I’m not sure whether that honesty will withstand the kind of reputational hit this document might produce. I guess we’ll find out.

I do not want anyone coming after her about any part of this. If you try to hurt her “on my behalf”, I will be fucking pissed. She got hurt incredibly badly, and my belief that the pain results almost entirely from the consequences of her own abusive behavior doesn’t make that a good thing. I still both like her and love her and I am not trying to advocate for hostility to her, or shunning her, or anything like that. She’s repeatedly made it clear and explicit that she would like honest feedback, and I think she deserves it.

If her friends gave her the honesty and support she needs, she could fix her shit and be incredible.

FAQ

I know, no one’s asked anything yet. I’m thinking ahead.

Wow, she’s an awful person.

No. She’s great. She’s smart and funny. She cares intensely about doing the right thing, and she cares a lot about people. She doesn’t just abstractly “work hard” to be good, she takes concrete and decisive actions. She is nearly always considerate and kind. I think she quite possibly saved my life.

There is nothing wrong with her.

No. She’s incredibly abusive. She accepts no responsibility for a lot of the harms she does, makes excuses for unconscionable behavior, and lies egregiously about her role in conflicts she’s been in.

Those two answers were contradictory.

Hi! Welcome to Earth, I hope you’re enjoying your visit. I see you’ve met your first human.

But seriously?

I think she’s good at addressing problems when genuinely convinced of them, and hasn’t been convinced of some of these. It’s also possible that some of them will be simply a bridge too far for her, and she’ll be unwilling to change, but she might be willing to acknowledge that it’s a problem and adopt mitigating strategies. I don’t know.

What about [event]?

I am not answering questions about things I didn’t include. I do not think anyone has made it through this document and reached the conclusion “it’s impossible to say, but if I had one more piece of evidence that she was abusive, maybe I would believe it”.

My question isn’t in this list!

You can ask any questions you want. I may decline to answer some questions, but you’re allowed to ask.

Why a giant callout post?

The solution to a missing stair problem is a clear statement of the problem, with multiple examples, gathered in one place, and put somewhere public so people can read it without having to be manually invited to know the secret. I’ve thought about so many alternatives, and I can’t make any of them work, so here we are.

I’d have preferred to try to talk to her about things instead, but she told me not to contact her. I was willing to send her one letter outlining the abuse as I understood it at the time and giving her some of the apologies I owed her, but now I’m leaving her alone unless she changes her mind.

Can I show this to people?

Yes.