AITAH for losing my temper when a guy drove to my apartment at 3am to confront me about “us”?
I’m 21F and I live in NYC. This is about a guy 22M (he lives in New Haven) I had a very long, very complicated situationship with for about a year.
We met through mutual friends and were just friends at first. Then his mom passed away unexpectedly. They were extremely close. Around the same time, my aunt passed away. After that, we got a lot closer. It wasn’t like we immediately hooked up or anything — we just became very close, talking constantly, checking in on each other, etc. Eventually it turned very romantic and physical.
We never officially dated. A big reason was distance: different schools, study abroad, traveling, etc. But we were very involved. We texted all the time, called, FaceTimed, and whenever we were in the same city, we’d hang out (dinner, drinks, coffee, etc) and hook up. We were always friends, but clearly more than just friends.
Over the summer, my family was in France (we have a house there) and he came to visit me. He stayed nearby and we spent a lot of time together. It was very couple-y. We obviously cared about each other a lot, even if we weren’t officially together. Also over spring break I went to visit him in the city he was studying abroad at.
Some important context: he’s very attractive, very charismatic, and very rich. After his mom died, he inherited a lot of money and property, which gave him total freedom to travel and do whatever he wanted. He never went to therapy and kind of just avoided dealing with her death by always being around people and never being alone.
At some point later, I found out he had been seeing another girl at his school. We weren’t exclusive, so I wasn’t mad that he was seeing someone else — what bothered me was that he hid it from me and then acted like I was the problem.
We had a long phone call about it. During that call, he kept saying the girl “wasn’t important” and that it “didn’t mean anything,” and heavily implied that he wouldn’t have been seeing her at all if I hadn’t been so “confusing.” He kept saying I was confusing because I wasn’t upset or jealous enough. I kept saying I wasn’t mad and that he was allowed to see other people, but he kept pushing, like he wanted me to react more emotionally to prove I cared.
I genuinely don’t think I was confusing. I was just matching the energy of what we had always been close, but undefined. I do have strong feelings for him, but I didn’t think it was fair to act like I owned him when we’d never agreed to anything.
After that call, he broke things off with the other girl and asked me on a proper date. I said yes at first, then backed out because it suddenly felt like way too much pressure. When he came to NYC anyway, we still ended up seeing each other and hooking up.
About a week later, he started texting me saying I was being confusing again. This turned into another phone fight where he accused me of leading him on.
That same night, around 3am, he drove from his school to NYC without warning and showed up outside my apartment saying we had to talk. I didn’t let him inside, so we walked to a nearby park.
He kept asking if it would “really be so bad” to be together and wanted a clear answer right then. He was being very romantic, and confessing that he has strong feelings for me: I kept saying “I don’t know.” I told him I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and that it was literally the middle of the night and I couldn’t give him an answer right then. He wouldn’t drop it.
Eventually, I snapped. I said “yeah, it would be bad,” and then I went off. I said really mean things. I specifically said things I knew would hurt him based on what I know about him. I called him selfish, spoiled, emotionally immature, privileged, and said he doesn’t know how to deal with his emotions or his mom’s death. I swore a lot. I was intentionally mean.
I didn’t say I didn’t care about him, but I definitely attacked his character in a really harsh way.
After that, he told me we couldn’t be friends anymore and asked me not to contact him.
It’s been months, and I still feel really guilty about how I spoke to him, especially because we were genuinely very close and his mom’s death clearly messed him up a lot. At the same time, I also feel like I was pushed into an intense conversation I wasn’t ready for, at a horrible hour, and I reacted badly.
So… AITAH for blowing up and saying really hurtful things instead of handling it better?
