Page 180 of A Solid Guide to Surviving a Situationship

I stood there silently, tears still falling down my face.

“But every time I remembered you yelling at me…” He shook his head weakly. “My body just shut down.”

“You were cruel!”

“I did what I thought was best for me!”

He looked away, like even admitting that much exhausted him.

“I know maybe it doesn’t make sense to you,” he said, “but I came from relationships where anger always became something worse eventually. So when that happened, something in me just got triggered.”

The word hung heavily between us.

Triggered.

“I know you think I punished you,” he continued softly, “but I was trying to protect myself too.”

I swallowed hard.

Victor wiped roughly at his face, trying and failing to regain composure.

“I loved you the best way I knew how,” he whispered. “Maybe it wasn’t perfect. Maybe I failed you in ways I didn’t even realize at that time. But I wasn’t trying to destroy you.”

My chest tightened painfully.

Because for a second, I wanted to run to him again. I wanted to believe love could survive this confrontation.

But then Victor inhaled shakily and said one thing that finally broke whatever hope remained between us.

“But I can’t apologize for my trauma, James.”

Silence.

His eyes met mine again—red, exhausted, pleading to be understood.

“I can’t apologize for protecting myself,” he said.

And there it was.

Not cruelty.

Not hatred.

Just someone so consumed by surviving his own pain that he could no longer fully see mine.

Suddenly I realized something terrifying.

Victor wasn’t choosing cruelty. He wasn’t sitting awake at night thinking of ways to hurt me. He genuinely believed he had done the right thing…

And that was the problem.

Because if someone knows they’re hurting you, there’s always a chance they’ll stop.

But if they believe they’re protecting themselves while you’re drowning beside them… then they’ll never even see the water.

I looked at him through tears, my chest aching with the unbearable grief of finally understanding someone completely at the exact moment you realize you cannot stay.

And that was when I knew…