I fell in love with a master manipulator, and it nearly destroyed me.

Hi everyone, this is my 3rd time posting here.

I wanted to share my full story because writing helps me process and maybe it’ll help someone else see the red flags I missed.

Trigger warning: mentions of emotional abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, cheating, self-harm, suicide, trauma, animal death, and eating disorder (anorexia).

I fell in love with a master manipulator, and it nearly destroyed me.

It started like any other love story. My life was good, I (26F) was finally happy, and I was ready to give love one last chance.

And it was great, at first. I had never loved like that before, never felt so wanted or understood. That’s how it is with manipulators. They are experts at making you feel special without actually doing much of anything. Just words. Just love bombing.

An ex of an ex (24F) started messaging me. We chatted for a while, flirted, and eventually started dating seriously. She was married (30M). We were a polyamorous couple (sorry, I don’t know the right terms, but she and I were a couple, she and her husband were a couple, but he and I were just platonic. No attraction, just caring as you would for a family member, because in my eyes and from what they had expressed to me, we were exactly that, a family).

We had very clear boundaries that had been discussed at length. Her husband’s only rule was that he wasn’t comfortable with her pursuing anything with another cis man. We had all agreed that before any of us got involved with another person, whether seriously or not, we had to have a discussion, all three of us, before pursuing anything. We were a family, and any new person would affect all of us.

I had also expressed multiple times that cheating, especially when you have no reason to cheat other than wanting to, instead of having an honest open discussion, was a huge deal breaker for me. I had mentioned that a three-person relationship was already complicated enough, and four would only cause chaos. I wasn’t planning on pursuing anyone, at least not seriously, and neither was she, or so she said.

The thing you should know about my ex fiancée, let’s call her Celeste, is that life with her was no picnic. It was constant bad news, constant trauma dumping, and even when she was having a good day, she would find a way to make it a bad one. There was always something. Every day I had to keep her from falling apart. Some days we would all get stoned and make food together, and we would be having a good time, but I guess she wasn’t getting the attention she needed because she would randomly trauma dump the most unhinged lies ever and ruin the mood. It was like we were not allowed to have fun. I could go on for hours about all the issues she had, like her so called anorexia, her Munchausen's, her Bipolar (that I now suspect to be a misdiagnosis and to actually be something much darker, but that's not my call to make, I'm not a psychiatrist, But this text is already heavy enough and very long, so I'll skip some of the details for now.)

But I didn’t mind. My mental health was at its best, and I loved her. I thought we would get through it together. I thought I could fix her, that I could destroy all the demons from her past with patience and understanding.

I remember one night after a D&D session with friends, I felt more alive in those few hours than I had in weeks. It hit me how lonely I had been, because Celeste is not loving, she is not affectionate. It was like living with a roommate who doesn’t do any work and just drains everyone around them. She was unemployed, and her husband and I took care of everything. She never even did a load of laundry or cleaned a dish. On the days we cleaned, she would just sit on the couch and “draw” (she steals other people’s art and traces over it, then calls it her own).

It had become clear how much of myself I had lost. For a brief moment, I saw the truth, that she had been using me and slowly tearing me apart. That was the first time I thought about leaving her. But then she turned the charm back on, said all the right things like, “I’ve never loved anyone like this before, I hate saying I love you, but with you it actually means something.” And I was right back where she wanted me, wrapped around her little finger.

Weeks went by. She started to lie more and more. At first, it was small white lies, nothing major. She would embellish stories to make herself seem more like the victim. Then it got worse. She started lying about serious things, like saying she was getting anonymous phone calls telling her to end her life and blaming the ex we had in common. But there were no anonymous calls in her history.

And the biggest lies were the ones that broke me the most. She faked having multiple miscarriages. We had been talking about having a child together, all three of us, which was a huge deal for me. I had never wanted kids, much less to carry one myself, but I knew she had issues with fertility and told her I would gladly carry our child if that’s what it took to start a family. None of her miscarriage stories ever added up. After talking with people I know in healthcare, I learned what she said was very unlikely.

Her way of “announcing” it was also unbelievable. She would just walk out of the bathroom while we had guests over and say loudly, “Welp, I just had a miscarriage! It was hurting really bad, and I felt like I had to push, and yeah, it was a fetus.”

Then came the gaslighting.

One day, a guy named Alec, who worked at the weed shop we went to, got her number through her account and started texting her. We had all been a little flirty with people now and then, which was fine as long as no real feelings were involved. But they ended up going on a late-night trip together. Both her husband and I told her we were uncomfortable with that. She snapped at us, saying she was an adult and could hang out with whoever she wanted. Then she turned it around and gaslit me, saying nothing would ever happen because she was a lesbian, that she had no attraction to men other than her husband because of her past traumas, and that I was being unreasonably jealous and controlling.

So her husband and I decided to trust her. The next day I was upset when she came home at 3 a.m. They had left around 8:45 p.m., and the shop was only 20 minutes away. I confronted her, letting her know it was very triggering for me because my ex used to do the same thing. She said she understood but that nothing happened, that they bought what they needed, hung out with friends, smoked, and then she got upset because it was late and demanded he take her home.

After that, something in her changed. She showed zero empathy. Even less than usual.

Before, she was just not affectionate or romantic, at least not with me. (She and her husband were sexually active, but she and I were not. I’m demi-ace, so I don’t feel that need to be physically intimate, but I had told her many times that I wanted to be close to her, I was just too shy to initiate.)

But now she wasn’t just unaffectionate. She was cold and empty, especially toward me. She would spend the entire evening giving her husband “that look,” and wouldn’t even glance at me. It was like I didn’t exist anymore.

When our kitten died in my arms (I work at a vet clinic and had taken her home after someone found her on the side of the road), she didn’t react. Her husband and I were crying our eyes out, and she just stood there, empty. She started shopping for a new kitten the next day.

When my aunt passed away suddenly from complications and I broke down crying, she just patted my shoulder and said, “There, there.” Keep in mind, I had also just learned that my grandmother, who I’m very close to, had a heart attack and we weren’t sure she would make it. Thankfully, she did.

Celeste’s birthday was the day before my aunt’s funeral. I still threw her a party. I was emotionally destroyed, but I put on a mask and made her day special. The next morning, she sent me off to the funeral alone so she could go relax at a hotel. Her husband ended up coming with me. Then she disappeared up north for a whole week while I grieved alone, also worrying about my grandmother and feeling completely abandoned by the person who was supposed to love me.

When I confronted her about how distant she’d been, she told me she had tried to take her own life on that trip. Another manipulation. She used that to make me feel guilty for being “too emotional.” I still doubt that story to this day because the details didn’t add up.

By then, I started to strongly suspect she was cheating with Alec. She was gone for days, saying she was babysitting for her mother, which wasn’t unusual, but she normally didn’t sleep over. Lately, she was always there, sometimes for multiple nights, barely texting back. She always had her phone on Do Not Disturb, claiming notifications overwhelmed her.

Whenever she finally replied, strangely enough, Alec would also text me within minutes. I expressed my concerns, how she had been distant and never home. She made me believe I was crazy and told me I needed to go back on my medication, that my BPD and CPTSD were making me paranoid. Her husband backed her up, saying he trusted her fully and that I should too. So I trusted them both. I thought I was a terrible person for even doubting her.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was falling apart, barely eating or sleeping. I loved her, but she was destroying me. She told me she was manic because of her bipolar disorder, but she had never acted like that before. She was a different person. Cold, reckless, scary.

I started reaching out to family and friends, even ones I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, because she had isolated me. I had lost ten pounds in four days. I was relapsing into bad coping mechanisms. I was not okay. I needed to get out before I completely lost myself.

After finding a temporary place to stay, I ended it. The breakup was amicable. I still have the message I wrote to help me say what I needed to say. I still loved her, but I was saving myself.

She told me she was unlovable. She told me lies, like that the marks on her neck were strangulation marks because her husband had become violent since smoking weed. As if I couldn’t tell the difference between hickeys and strangulation marks. She said she was going to be monogamous now and not pursue anything with Alec. She even threatened our common ex, saying if I ever got back with her, she would “track her down no matter where she is.”

After I left, she started driving stoned, being reckless, saying things that scared me. I packed my essentials and left without telling her where I was going.

A few days later, things started coming to light. I called Alec because I suspected she was cheating, and he confirmed they had been in a serious monogamous relationship for about a month before I left, and that they had been intimate before that.

According to him, her husband knew, because she told Alec that she and her husband were basically over, only married for immigration reasons, and that he had stepped aside kindly. That was a lie. I later confirmed with her husband that he had no idea.

She also told Alec to hide their relationship from me because I was “too unstable” and would end my life if she left me. I never said that. I was scared of her, yes, but I wanted her to end things because I was too afraid to do it myself.

Alec told me he justified the cheating because he thought he was saving her from an abusive relationship. When I asked, “Wait, she told you her husband was abusive?” he said, “Not her husband.” My heart shattered.

I had given her everything. My home, my life, my independence. I was even willing to face my biggest fear and carry her and her husband’s child. She was the love of my life, and behind my back, she was painting me as an abusive partner.

That’s what she does. She did it to her ex before me. And now she’s doing it to Alec. Each time she plays the victim, preys on empathy, and spins the same lies. It’s even how she met her husband. He “saved” her from her abusive ex too. I don’t know how much of what she said about her exes is true, but I know what she said about me is not.

That’s how she got me. She told me all the horrible things our ex supposedly did to her, and I felt for her. She preyed on my empathy like a siren preys on sailors. It was all a lie. She only wanted me to piss off our ex, then I became a second income, then an incubator. It was never love for her, only convenience. It shattered me.

I tried to warn Alec, told him my side of the story, but he was already under her spell. He believes her lies completely. She’s good at her game. She’s been playing it for over a decade.

So at this point, I knew I had be played and I was hurt, but mostly, I was terrified of what she would do next. I had seen how she gets obsessed with her exe's she stalks them and cyber-bullies them, tries to either push them to suicide or send them to jail with fabricated evidence (both these things are things I either saw her do, or she admitted to me while in her 'manic' state)

She even lied to Alec and told him I left blades and pills in her room after moving out. He messaged me saying he would go to the cops the minute I “slipped up.” This is false. I have video footage and witnesses. She was just saying that to make him hate me, just like she made me hate our ex with lies.

I am finally free from her, but not from the trauma she left me with. I am treeified daily, scared of what she might decide to do to me, anonymous calls make my blood freeze, I find it very difficult to trust others now... I am healing slowly, writing, processing. I try to be patient with myself, but some days are harder than others.

I will never understand why she did what she did. Because unlike her, I am overflowing with empathy.

And that is what she used against me all along. My empathy.