She is 28, I just turned 30 yesterday. D-Day was 10 days ago.
She met this classmate when she began her master's degree a year and a half ago. For at least the past year, they've had an emotional and abusive relationship. He tells her how to feel and what to do, and she obliges. And she gives him hope that they might be together someday. But it gets a lot worse, and a lot weirder.
He's a high-functioning autist, and suggested she is an autist too. In fact, he informally diagnosed her, despite not being a doctor at all, and she apparently believed this quite quickly. They became closer and closer as they searched together for an official diagnosis of autism for her. He'd tell her which doctors to go to, and even went with her and kept constant contact with her psychiatrist throughout her tests. He and the psychiatrist would talk for hours about her case, and he constantly tried to push this diagnosis onto her and the psychiatrist.
He calls her "little rat". She says she didn't like this nickname at first, but she never stopped him. He kept using it and eventually she started calling him "little rat" too, and together they were "little rats" who do things like "have little rat coffee", which was meeting at a coffee shop to talk. There were some common phrases they used like "little rats help each other" to keep them together. He also called her a "silly little rat" when she did things he didn't like, or a "runaway little rat" if she distanced herself from him even a little bit. She never complained about this name calling. If she behaved how he wanted, she was a “smart little rat” or an “assertive little rat”. He would talk about Behaviorism sometimes. That's a psychological approach that started with experiments on rats.
I know all this because I have all their texts between March 2019 and now. She gave them to me (reluctantly) after I confronted her with a few questions. It began with me asking how she’d get to the psychiatrist for her final diagnosis, and she answered it was by boat (it's unusual to take boats here, but there's a town across the river). I asked her how she went there last time, and she said her autistic friend took her. I said I felt upset that she hadn’t asked me to go and support her instead. Later, I asked why the autistic friend hadn’t been at an important academic event for her that I had gone to. She confessed that it was because he liked her and didn’t want to be in the same place as her boyfriend. I asked her if she liked him, and she said no.
I asked a lot of questions. I got partial truths or outright lies at first, but as I kept asking, she revealed more and more. She thought of leaving me to be with him. She thought about what it’d be like to kiss him, and to have sex with him. She admitted that she emotionally cheated on me. After this admission, I asked her “did you cheat on me?” and she said no. I explained that she had just admitted emotionally cheating, and asked again. She said “I don’t know”. I explained more and tried once again, and she said yes. This is how a lot of the questioning would go. She says they never kissed or had sex, but this is irrelevant to me at this point.
She had her part in this too. She let herself into that relationship, and kept it going. She invited him to do a Psychology undergrad together for 5 years after they finish their master's, which hasn't happened yet. This was so they could follow their master plan of diagnosing her, working and researching together, creating apps and games for autistic children and having a successful company in the autism space, particularly in diagnosing. He promised her a job and a MacBook Air. She played him just as much as he played her, promising a future together. He'd tell her he liked her and they had to find a solution to their problem (me), but she led him on, always telling him they’d figure something out eventually.
This past year, she’s been depressed a lot of the time and suicidal for a few weeks. I was her suicide watcher for several days, as she had she had a fantasy of jumping out of my bedroom window. This was a terrible time for us. She was adjusting her medication, and, meanwhile and unknown to me, he was telling her how her depression wasn’t that bad, her suicidal thoughts were nothing, her suicide watch was unnecessary, and telling her which medications she could and couldn’t take.
Initially, I told her we’d work through this together. I asked her not to contact him ever again, and to be completely honest with me from now on, and hide nothing. The next day, she hid something else from me. She threw a little piece of paper he had given her in the toilet trash, along with a rat origami he had given her (called Sam). That day, I was reading their texts (over 20k messages total) and happened to stumble upon them talking about a “Certification” he had given her, and one she had given him. I asked her about this, and she told me she had trashed it earlier. I started going through the trash and she came over to help me. She found it – it was carefully wrapped in toilet paper so that I wouldn’t find it – and I read it. It said:
“The Federal Council of Little Rats confers this certification to [her name], in recognition of her constant effort, intervention and kindness throughout the year of 2019.”
She had given him one too. It was about how he was the first person to recognize her potential. This stung very deep, because I was always extremely supportive of her and worked so hard to help her reach her potential.
After a few days of asking questions and gathering material, I asked her to leave our apartment, which we just rented together. I asked her to give me time to think, but she’s been messaging me. I thought she was showing interest in keeping our relationship together, but now I fear that she’s just trying to manipulate me into staying. He has been messaging her too, and, while she hasn’t replied, his messages to her are very similar to her messages to me. They both apologize, show impatience, make subtle criticisms, offer distance but admit they weren’t able to give space, say they didn’t mean to do this, invoke good memories, mention their own suffering to appear as a victim, impose feelings onto the other person, and magnify their problems.
It’s hard to see all this from a person I’ve been with for 5 years, and whom I’ve loved so much. I knew she was talking to this guy, and that he had suggested she had autism, and that she was taking tests, but that’s all I knew. I had an intuition something was wrong, but I trusted her. I went back to therapy yesterday to figure out what to do.
I'd also like to say that I have nothing against autists, and what happened has little to do with autism in my opinion. It's actually about abusive and emotionally sick people. I think he might not be an autist at all, but a sociopath who found a convenient diagnosis to hide behind and gain power over people.
He'd tell her what to expect from the autism tests, and they'd discuss strategies on how to bypass the "bias detection" that might catch her in *wanting* to be diagnosed with autism. This is one of their conversation after she finished a test:
Him: Were you “good”?
Her: I think I was a little rat
Him: Then great 🐭
When I asked her about this, she admitted that "good" meant displaying autistic traits.
If this was "normal cheating" (if such a thing exists), I'd like to think that my decision would be easier. I despise cheating and she knew this. But sometimes I think that she might've been a victim in all this. Other times I think she was responsible for the affair too. Most of the time, I just don't know.
