Chapter 3, Control

So Gary & his misogynistic self start coming around more after his first deplorable showing.

Let me run you all through two situations quickly:

1) We're all at Polofest enjoying the melodic musings of KYGO - Gary is messed up and falls back into two of our guy friends. Our guy friends go to help him up by grabbing under his arms. Gary screams at them:

"GET OFF ME

F**GOTS."

Our friends back off and let Gary fumble to his feet on his own.

2) We're all at Revel (RIP Revel) for a night out. Our gay friend is with us. Gary starts fighting with one of our friend's husbands and starts calling him and our gay friend:

"F*GS".

Another hypermasculine trait misogynists tend to portray? Unhealthy lashings of homophobia.

I texted Lauren about the Revel situation the next morning because our gay friend had texted me, reasonably upset about the whole night (I have removed certain info and replaced names for anonymity within screenshots):

Notice how Lauren compares the Revel night to the night at Canopy which I told you all about in Chapter 2, Misogynist. Gary’s questionable behavior was already becoming a pattern & he had only been around for 2 months.

The easy and spiteful use of the "f" word by Gary is despicable; yet Lauren continued dating him.

Three months into their relationship, another sinister characteristic of Gary’s started bubbling to the service. Gary was incredibly controlling & was starting to get jealous when Lauren would hang out with her girlfriends without him.

Isolation is a powerful tactic used by controlling partners.

Let's take a look at a fight between Lauren and Gary where this started to become apparent:

& thus began Gary’s conditioning of Lauren - “going out with your friends is bad”, “being with me is good”.

Lauren continues to date Gary and we start to see and hear from her less and less. Lauren is definitely the type of girl who gets into a relationship and can't maintain her friendships (controlling partner or not), so we didn’t think much of her initial absence.

Our group of girlfriends decided to go on a weekend trip to Grand Junction over the summer. It was the first time all of us were seeing Lauren in a while.

So, we're in Grand Junction and we're all chilling and chatting on the couch following dinner and drinks. Out of nowhere, Lauren starts attacking us for how we still like to go out:

"I haven't seen you all because I don't want to party anymore. I'm over it. I'm turning 27 soon. I want to grow up. I'm not in college anymore. I’m going to be turning 27. I don't want to go to the bars. I want to be an adult. Gary is an adult. I don't like how you all party. I am not doing it anymore. I’m not going out with you all anymore."

Lauren repeats this mantra 782,374,938 times in different ways over the course of a half hour becoming increasingly self righteous & judgmental.

Lauren’s onslaught got so bad at one point that one of our friends left the room to cry and go to bed.

Lauren was being a pius, hypocritical little sh*t.

She had just slammed numerous shots of Tito's for God's sake!

Naturally, I ended up cutting Lauren off and going in on her. I'm not one to take unwarranted and unwelcomed criticism ESPECIALLY when it's targeted at not just me, but ALL of my friends.

I told Lauren that we didn't give a flying f*ck if she partied or not but her judging us was BS. She was being a bad person and a bad friend. The fight ended tensely & we all went to bed.

In the morning, I fell on the sword and smoothed things over with Lauren. Was it a genuine smoothing? Hell no lol, I was still livid as was the rest of the group - BUT - I will always mitigate drama on a vacay. Who wants to fight when you could be having fun?

Luckily we didn't really have to see Lauren and her manic self the rest of the day because she was in her room spiraling, trying to get a hold of Gary. Looking back on this now, we’re all fairly certain Gary was refusing to take Lauren’s calls or respond to her texts to punish her. He was mad at her for going to GJ with her girlfriends. The silent treatment was her punishment.

We all get home from GJ still reeling from Lauren's ambush - AND GET THIS - five days later, Lauren goes out partying with Gary & they both get

EXTRAORDINARLY

WASTED.

Ahhh yes, the smell of hypocrites in the morning.

I texted Lauren about her partying hypocrisy and her texts to me were contrived, holier-than-thou and super weird. They didn’t sound like her. I found out later that Gary had helped her write these texts to me.

Taking the weird texts, hypocrisy, the GJ blow up, and her misogynist homophobic boyfriend into account, our entire friend group wanted to start putting some distance between ourselves and Lauren.

Lauren started to notice none of us were really talking to her so she reached out to ask me about it:

So Lauren's freak out in GJ was brought about by Gary and his controlling conditioning - “going out with your friends is bad”, “being with me is good”.

Her accountability for her behavior was brought about solely by me calling her out when Gary was not present and looking over her shoulder, telling her what to think and ultimately what to say.

This will become a common theme in Lauren and I's relationship up to its demise -her God awful communication skills and her inability to apologize without being instructed to do so.

Lauren & Gary have this in common - they're both socially inept and unable to naturally take accountability for their bad behavior.

This is scary.

Why?

When someone doesn't have the mental wherewithal to account for their social wrongdoings, they're going to keep making the same mistakes. They're going to keep hurting the same people.

And Lauren and Gary were far from done hurting people.

To Be Continued.