Don't beat yourself up. You were trying to be a good partner, not a good therapist, and you took on many of the latter's duties even though you didn't have to.
Almost all of the behaviours you describe are familiar.
Usually when she hurt me, she'd get upset, and then suddenly I'd be one consoling her for upsetting me and completely miss that I just needed a bit of consolation and a loving arm to feel better.
This, every single time.
My ex also more or less told me he wasn't going to change -- by literally saying "I'm bad for your needs". At the time I couldn't make sense of it.
When I confided in him that I had been feeling down and was speculating whether it could be a depressive episode (it turned out to be a migraine), he suddenly retreated into himself with literally the same excuse, adding that his mother had recently told him he'd been in therapy as a child, but that he couldn't remember. (Who knows if that's true.) It was as if he wanted to one-up me.
I once made a careless joke about a medical way of committing suicide, and he asked me why I knew about this? I hesitantly told him I had considered it at one low point in my life. He just sat next to me, arms crossed, eyes closed, while a single tear trickled down his cheek. It looked and felt as if he was pitying himself.
Oh God, and the social situations...
- Him accosting an old man on a bike who had rung the bell for us to let him pass. The old man even cordially yelled "Thank you". My ex responded: "Shut up!" I was shocked and had to explain to my ex that that man had simply been friendly, not sarcastic or aggressive.
- Trying to buy shoes at the shop near closing time, and staying past it because he couldn't decide, while the poor assistant slowly ran out of complimentary ways of saying "get the
out". He ended up not buying anything.
- Sulking when we were out in public because he felt this wasn't "his crowd". NB. No crowd was his crowd. He was especially angry when people paid attention to me instead of to him.
The "no empathy" factor manifested in a bunch of other ways, too. He gave me the most horrible presents I've ever received, and given that I was orphaned at the age of six, my standards for presents really are very low -- to be honest, I'd rather not have received any than these. For my birthday, he gave me a used (!) CD with obscure, rather poor video game music he liked (and I didn't; + I don't even own a CD player, which he knew), and for Christmas, he gave me bags of loose tea. I really started questioning my sanity when considering that even some of my piano students had given me more thoughtful gifts than this person who I was supposed to be closest to.
Like your ex, my ex also couldn't stand the thought of people not liking him. Here's a hilarious one, when he learnt that my gay best friend didn't find him attractive, he sulked for days and complained for weeks after.
And shortly before he discarded me the first time, he told me he needed "time" to think about whether he wanted to be in a relationship with me... when I responded that I wasn't going to wait around whether he wanted me or not, and that if he wasn't going to be exclusive, I too wanted the freedom of seeing other people, he immediately dumped me.
So... threads like this one make me wonder how much there really is to a person with the disorder. The disordered aspects are all so frighteningly similar. Not even gender makes a difference; male, female, it's exactly the same patterns.
Speaking for myself, I don't care whether his selfishness was innocent (which I assume) or malignant. The effect it had was the same: I was constantly undermined, put down, taken for granted, mistreated, insulted and violated in my boundaries.
No more for me, thank you.
