I don’t know if this belongs here, I've never used reddit before. But I’m writing it anyway because I’m in shock, even now, two months later.
I was in a relationship with a guy for almost three years. He was the kindest, sweetest person I’d ever known. I’d never felt so loved in a relationship. He really put me before everything else (or so I thought, at least).
I don’t have much personal experience with drugs or addiction. The closest I’ve come to it before was being with someone who smoked weed a lot every day and occasionally took other things, like mushrooms and other psychedelics. But I’ve never had any close experience with opiates or cocaine like that. I’ve been in situations where people were doing it, but I’ve never done it myself. I dont like it at all.
I had moved to a city earlier to study and met him at our school. I stayed there because I loved him, and in total, I spent five years in that city. Our final period together now was tough. We worked together at his company and lived together. We argued every day, and I was longing to move back home. He worked a lot in the evenings, or so everyone thought.
This summer, after we’d been on a trip together, he sat down in front of me the day after we landed back in our city and told me he’d been abusing oxycodone for a year and a half. NOONE knew or had noticed, not even his mother, who works in an emergency department specializing in addiction. I was the last person in the family to find out. Everyone thought he was just overworked and that this was why he was acting the way he was (more emotional, thinner, hollow eyes.)
For a year and a half more than half of our relationship, he’d been taking this stuff behind my back. He told me he’d used it before we got together, although I suspect he wasn’t taking as high a dose back then. He said "he’d stopped for me" when we started dating. Then, a little over a year into our relationship, he started again.
By the end, he told me he was taking up to 280 mg a day. He’d also started treatment with a doctor on his own. He’d been in treatment for three weeks when I found out.
I was in shock and couldn’t process it at the time. I knew the word opiates wasn’t a good sign, and I knew heroin was an opiate. But I had no idea what oxycodone even was before this.
It sank in a few days later, when I searched for it and read about it.
He told me that was why he sometimes slept at work because he would lie there and take doses. He wasn’t working, as I’d thought. He was lying there getting high.
I’d also thought he was spending all his money on Uber Eats and shopping. His money disappeared so quickly after payday, while I, earning 1000 less than him, always had money left in my account. But no, he’d been spending 2000 a month on drugs. Maybe even more. That was why he was broke.
I sat quietly while he explained everything. Then he asked if I wanted him to leave. I said yes. I know that sounds really strange, but I didn’t fully understand what was happening in that moment, as I realize now in hindsight.
He went to his mother’s place and was gone for a while. Then I called him an hour later and asked if he could come back and have dinner (I know, really strange). He said we needed to talk.
That was when I understood what was happening.
He came back to our apartment, and I asked if he was going to break up with me. He just sat there in complete silence.
I screamed all kinds of desperate things at him, asking, “Why are you doing this?” He still said nothing.
He said he hadn’t been in love with me for a week.
Is it even possible to fall out of love during the third week of detoxing from oxy?
I didn’t understand anything. He didn’t cry or anything. Then he walked out the door and disappeared. I haven’t seen him since.
My world has been turned upside down.
I was kicked out of the job where we worked together. I wasn’t allowed to stay at the company, even though I wanted to finish my final month because I thought that would have been the more professional thing for me to do. I wasn’t allowed to. He wanted me gone.
Nobody at work knows about his addiction. If his colleague and business partner finds out, it could be “used against him,” he said. I assume there’s a risk he could lose his share of the company.
He got angry when I suggested I should be allowed to finish my month at work in person. He said he didn’t want to see me anymore because it was too painful for him to look at me.
I was forced to move out of the apartment, and now I’m back in my childhood bedroom in the city where I grew up. I haven’t lived here in ten years.
He’s been so different and cold since all of this happened. It was as though he changed toward me the very second he told me everything.
For example, he forgot to send the last things I’d left behind in the apartment. He would never have done that before. He never used to forget about me. I was the center of his world.
I don’t recognize him anymore.
This was the most empathetic and wonderful person I’d ever known. It really feels as though someone has taken over his body and the person I knew is dead.
He loved me almost more than I loved him, or at least that’s how it felt.
I tried talking to him on the phone after he dumped me because I needed to understand what had happened, since he says he can’t bear to see me in person.
He just gets angry and says I’m picking fights. He says all kinds of cruel things he would never have said before. He talks about the drug so casually, as if it were nothing.
I’m so hurt and angry now, in the third month since everything happened. At the same time, I think about what he’s been through.
I thought about him going through all of this alone, lying there vomiting and nearly dying without anyone’s support. Everyone around him thought he was working so much that his body was reacting that way.
But it was the drugs.
We haven’t been in contact for almost a month now. It’s been two and a half months since he left me.
I don’t know what I want to achieve by writing this post. Maybe I’m trying to find someone who can relate?
Has anyone else been dumped by a partner with an addiction? Has anyone else been cut off by someone with an addiction while they were going through detox?
Is this normal?
