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  • TwoADay
    +12

    You can't fix people.

    I had this girlfriend, once, who was a really neat, smart woman. Unfortunately, she struggled a lot with depression and alcohol abuse. Her father died of alcoholism-related disease when she was very young, and her step-father was abusive (he was in jail for sexually abusing her step-sister at the time I met her). She had a string of predictably shitty exes when her and I started going out.

    Despite the fact that she said she wanted to keep things casual, I decided that I was going to be the guy to turn her around. I was going to show her how a girl should be treated. As you would expect, she responded to my kindness with vitriol. As I tried to get closer, she tried to push me away. She would say and do things just to try and make me angry, and then she would walk out when I wouldn't. When she finally got tired of it an dumped me, I was devastated.

    It was only afterwards that I realized how arrogant I was to think that I could fix her life. How was I to know what was wrong with her, or how to fix it? She never asked for my help, but I assumed that I knew better.

    • Shimmer
      +1

      That's a tough lesson to learn. What happened to her?