30F, 34M — Our relationship has gotten better, but the same unhealthy patterns keep coming back. Did I make the right choice leaving?

I’m exhausted by the cycle in my relationship. Am I wrong for finally leaving?

I want to preface this by saying that these things have definitely become less frequent and more spread out over the last couple of years, and they generally don’t escalate to the point where I feel as scared as I used to. He has made improvements, and our relationship has gotten better in some ways. He is better at communication and has watched his temper a lot more in the last year. But the underlying behavior has never completely gone away, and I’m honestly exhausted by the cycle.

We’ve been together about 3½ years, and I have left during heated arguments multiple times because there were periods where I was genuinely scared of how mean and angry he could become. He’s yelled, gotten in my face, thrown things, and driven aggressively when angry.

He’s thrown his wallet at me and hit my arm with it. Another time, while I was showering during an argument, he came into the bathroom yelling and threw a brand new bottle of body wash toward me. It went through the shower curtain and hit me. That one really scared me because I was just standing there showering and didn’t expect it at all.

He’s thrown my clothes onto the floor during arguments. One time, our daughter was crawling on the floor next to him while he was trying to get into the closet to get to my clothes. I picked her up, and he got so far into my face while I was holding her that he stepped on my toe. She was less than a year old at the time. That night I made a pallet on our daughter’s bedroom floor for me and her because I wanted space. He eventually picked the lock to come in, and after everything had calmed down, he texted me asking if I wanted to have sex.

That has been a recurring pattern too: we could have a horrible argument where he was incredibly cruel to me, and shortly afterward he’d act like nothing happened and initiate sex or text and ask did I want to f*ck or suck his d*ck.

There have also been a lot of jealousy and accusation issues. Early in our relationship, I once tapped him on the shoulder at a bar and asked him for a drink because he was sitting separately from everyone we were with and talking to two women at the bar. He yelled at me for essentially the entire hour-long drive home about how he knew what I was doing and how I was being a problem and I’m crazy. Told me hurry up and get him to my house to his truck so he could leave because I’m crazy and then by the time we got to my house, he went inside and was going to go to sleep like nothing happened and told me not to speak because he was trying not to be angry.

Another time, I was at my grandmother’s house with his daughter and my brother. He was there earlier in the day and left because of some argument I can’t remember the details of. I sent him a picture of his daughter helping make dinner and offered to bring him a plate to bring to him as soon as we ate and headed home. His response was an extremely degrading comment implying I should perform sexual acts on my brother. On another occasion, he saw me and one of my brother’s longtime friends walk out of a detached garage together after we had gone in there to take a shot of alcohol away from the kids on a holiday. There was a house full of people out back right next to this garage and my brother was actually in there with us but he walked out the other side of the garage after, so all that he saw was me coming out with my brothers friend. He immediately assumed we had been cheating, left, made it a huge issue, and even contacted an ex trying to hang out afterward because he believed I had cheated.

More recently, we were getting ready for an event with my friends and I was trying to help him pick out an outfit. I wanted to FaceTime a family member to get their opinion, and he became extremely jealous and angry and ended up insulting me and saying another degrading sexual comment about that family member.

There have also been arguments where our daughter was right there. There have been times when we’ve been arguing back and forth in bed with her between us, usually because he wanted sex and I was asking him to stop because she was going to wake up. His response would be that he didn’t care. She is at the age now where she recognizes when things get heated and will cling to my leg or hide under the kitchen table. Or she will cry and that will make him mad.

About four months ago, I accidentally dropped a glass jar after we got things from the store for dinner. He yelled at me for several minutes about how it wasn’t an accident, that it was careless, that I was annoying, and questioned how I could have even let it happen. I was crying while trying to clean it up and wasn’t really responding because I didn’t know what to say. He kept repeating the question until I finally said I didn’t know and that I didn’t mean to. Our daughter was about two at the time and was crying behind a baby gate because she doesn’t like when he raises his voice. He even asked her why she was “fucking crying.”

I’ve been called a stupid bitch, a bitch, a pussy, told I’m too sensitive, told he’s sick of me, told he can’t stand me, and during arguments he’s said things like he doesn’t even know why we’re together.

There have been times when he told me to leave and then once I actually left, demanded that I come back or that our relationship was over. There were situations where it was late at night and I had our daughter with me and I was still expected to immediately turn around and come back. Other times he has later said he never actually told me to leave and that I left on my own.

And here’s where I’m struggling: he really has gotten better. These things aren’t happening constantly anymore. The really scary behavior isn’t what it used to be. There are good periods, good memories, and times when I genuinely feel like he’s the person I want to spend my life with. He is a lot more calm in day to day life and has gotten better at expressing feelings and concerns in a more healthy way.

But I feel like I’m stuck in this cycle where things improve, I start believing we’re finally okay, something happens, I get hurt and question everything, things calm down, he apologizes or things improve again, and eventually another version of the same dynamic happens.

I finally left recently, and strangely, underneath the heartbreak, I’ve felt some peace. He’s telling me he loves me, wants our family back, and believes our circumstances have contributed to our problems and that things could continue getting better. We moved away from my family for a job that he wanted and I became a sahm and it seems like I have been really depressed since then so he thinks those contribute to my leaving, which they have. But my main thing is the way conflict is dealt with in heated moments (mostly if he’s been drinking is when he acts this way or will talk to me the ways I have described- which again, is so much less than it used to be). I actually feel bad including some of the things he did in the beginning of our relationship because of how different he is now, but I feel like it’s important to give a fair picture of what all I have been through in these 3 1/2 years as a whole.

I’m questioning myself constantly.

Am I leaving something that could have continued improving, or is “better than it used to be” not enough when the underlying pattern is still there?

I genuinely want outside perspective from people who have been in long-term relationships where things improved but never completely changed.

Would you consider this a relationship worth continuing to try to repair, or would you be done?