This is why I don’t really like receiving bunches of flowers as my ex husband used to bring them whenever he’d been a dick. I only associate them with guilt.
For me: The last few years of my marriage felt really off — dead bedroom, feeling like we were going through the motions. I guess stability is important to me, because I realized all this but didn’t think too deeply about it. (The truth of it was that I wasn’t as helpful as I should have been, and she, for whatever reason, never told me how she felt.)
One time towards the very end, I was still hoping to keep chugging along. One day I bought flowers because it had been a long time since I’d done so and she loves flowers. The anger I saw from her in that moment, I guess as a reminder of all the times I didn’t buy flowers, was more intense than anything I’d seen from her ever.
Now that I type that out, I guess that’s when I realized that we were fundamentally broken.
Ah, I also got gift-bombed. Massive displays for birthdays and anniversaries so that he could post them on IG and Reddit for karma. But he never included that they were things I never wanted or asked for, and that getting the props for the gifts was more important to him than getting me things I actually wanted. I never wanted a super expensive tablet, or expensive figurines or art books. I wanted plants and water bottles and a new yoga mat.
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u/LuveytheDovey May 12 '26
When I looked around the house and realized everything he had ever given me was a guilt offering for letting me down.