What A Freaking Tool I Was!
Have you ever wondered about the disappearance of Justin, Andrew's once-upon-a-time boyfriend, from the DH storyline? This "goodbye and good luck" letter from Justin to Andrew attempts to answer that question.
Dear Andrew,
So you want to know why I don't want to be your boyfriend anymore? It just says so much about our misbegotten relationship that you need to ask. Where do I even begin?? The heart and soul of my reasons is that our relationship was unhealthy. What made it unhealthy is that you used me, didn't care about my feelings, and I just gave in to that behavior and let you have all the control. Not even the way my family treated me did as much ultimate damage to my self-respect as the way you treated me did.
Two very dark examples of how I let you walk all over me really stand out in my mind: 1) That time I had sex with you in your mother's house when your mother was there when I knew very well how she felt about guys hooking up with one another. Love-making is something that should be a sacred thing between two people who are in love. I've always felt that way, and that's why I don't plan on going to bars and screwing around like a little slut when I turn twenty-one. When I saw how casual you were deliberately acting when your mother freaked out at finding us naked in bed together, I knew then and there that you set the whole thing up as a way of hurting her. You used our making love as a club to emotionally smack your own mother over the head with! A lot of guys would have broken up with you on the spot, but I not only didn't break up with you, I didn't say anything at all despite the sick feeling that churned in my stomach for the rest of that day. I suspect you knew how much that hurt me, but you just didn't care about anything except your own stupid little schemes, as usual.
But 2) is really the darkest of the dark examples. That was when I let you talk me into beating you up so that you could accuse your mother of slapping you around in fits of drunken rage. "Do you love me? Then do what I tell you," you said. How manipulative. How horrible. Do have any idea what effect that had on me emotionally? I'm not the crying type (any son of my parents had better not be if he has any idea what's good for him), but it would have been better for me that night if I could have let loose some tears, because all I could do when I got home was lie in bed all night sleepless and hurting inside.
And you'd better believe it didn't help when you saw that the physical abuse angle might not work as well for your legal emancipation as you had planned and then you told your mother in public at the mall that you were going to accuse her in a court of law, of sexually abusing you. I can't really go into too much detail about how that disgusted me and how it continues to disgust me without launching into a stream of swear-words, and I promised myself I wouldn't lower myself to that level when I decided to write this. I actually made a decision at the moment to break up with you, but when the time came to say the words, I couldn't do it, and I realized I wasn't going to do it. How could I? Andrew Van De Kamp was my forever and ever one and only. Good God, what a freaking tool I was!
And then you ran away. Or that's what your mother told me at the time when I went to your house that day never suspecting that our relationship was already pretty much over. But I knew she wasn't telling the whole truth. I can tell when people are lying to me (like, for instance, the times you lied to me when I suspected you were cheating on me, and I said so out loud). Somehow I knew you had finally done something so terrible that she had kicked you out for good. It said a lot that as emotionally shattered as I felt, I wasn't surprised things ended up like that. Then one day my friend John sat me down with a very serious look on his face to tell me something important. That something was that he heard from reliable sources that you were turning tricks on the street as a common hustler in a nearby city.
Damn it to hell, Andrew, you knew you could have come to me for a place to stay and for someone to love you and care about you so that you wouldn't have to live such a degrading, disgusting life on the streets. That you didn't said in no uncertain terms that you didn't care about me and never really did. The clincher was that you had so little respect for yourself that getting back at your mother by living that way was the most important thing to you. How dark. How psychotic. That was one of the few times in my recent life that I cried real and serious tears despite not being the crying type. Shame on you, Andrew Van De Kamp. Shame. On. You.
And so now you're back and you want me to believe you've changed and we should be together again. But there's this thing in unhealthy relationships called "The Honeymoon Period". That's happens when the abusive partner does something so bad it either ends or threatens to end the relationship because the abused partner is just so fed up, they can't stand it anymore. The abuser is all "I'm so sorry, my dearest darling, I can change, I can change, give me one more chance because I love you so much." The abused one gives in and for a while after that, everything is sunshine and bliss. But the abusive behavior starts up again sooner or later, eventually leading to yet another blow-up when the abused one reaches the can't-stand-it-anymore point. And on and on and on the cycle goes.
I can't do that myself, Andrew, not for you, not for anyone. That would be throwing away what little self-respect I have left. What I need to do is the exact opposite: I have to get back the self-respect I lost in my dysfunctional relationship with you so that I can maybe someday look in the mirror without wanting to spit at the reflection I see. And after that I need to become somebody who cares about himself enough to stay away from relationships that suck the life and the humanity out of him. Yes, I still love you, Andrew, but being in love is not enough. You have to love yourself in a healthy way before you can love and be in a healthy relationship with another person, and nobody who loved and respected themselves could possibly stay in a relationship with someone like you. If you really have changed, I hope you continue to do that and I wish all the best in that effort. But that doesn't change the fact that I need to end things between us for myself and for my own good.
Goodbye, Andrew.
-- Justin