boyfriend puts me down

I met him on Tinder when I was twenty-one.

For two years, I tried to make it work with someone who seemed to resent the basic facts of my life.

My parents had money. They loved me. I'd grown up feeling secure on both counts, and I didn't know how to apologize for either one.

He made comments. Small ones at first, then a steady drumbeat. I liked nice things—good chocolate, travel, products that felt luxurious—and he'd call me shallow. He'd say I was going to end up someone's trophy wife.

It wasn't teasing. It was something else.

When he bought me chocolate, he'd buy individual pieces from the box instead of the whole box. Not because he couldn't afford it. Because the things I enjoyed deserved contempt, and generosity toward them was wasteful.

I started second-guessing everything I liked.

His mother invited me to dinner at her home.

She made comments about Asian people throughout the meal. When we sat down, she handed me chopsticks. No one else got them.

He and his mother talked mostly to each other. When I tried to speak, they talked over me.

I sat there feeling like an exhibit. Like I'd been invited specifically to be made uncomfortable.

I left that dinner knowing I'd been othered on purpose, but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't point to one thing and say, this is what made me unwelcome.

It was the accumulation.

I kept trying anyway.

I kept thinking maybe I was being oversensitive. Maybe I was shallow. Maybe the problem was that I cared too much about things that didn't matter.

The relationship ended later, painfully, when I found out he'd been cheating.

Afterward, I could finally see the pattern clearly.

He hadn't been teasing me. He'd been diminishing me.

Every time I liked something, I became smaller. Every time I mentioned my family, I became someone with an unfair advantage who didn't deserve what she had.

The dinner wasn't an accident. His mother had made sure I knew I didn't belong, and he'd let her.

I'd spent two years trying to fix things I hadn't chosen and couldn't change. My background. My parents' love. The fact that I liked nice things.

None of it was fixable because none of it was wrong.

What I couldn't see while I was in it was that he'd needed me to believe I was the problem. That I was shallow, oversensitive, too privileged to understand real life.

I wasn't oversensitive.

I was being treated with contempt for being myself, and I'd mistaken that contempt for a flaw in me.