There are likely things you have read in various forms of media about what this blog is. You will find those descriptions to be generally incorrect.

Additionally, as a heads up, it’s worth noting that in providing a concrete story and examples, this blog has apparently had the unintended side effect of helping a number of abuse survivors come to terms with their own relationships (and from what I understand, causing distress to some others who have not yet come to terms). I didn’t really know what emotional abuse was when I wrote this blog, and the comments from therapists and survivors who have since taken the time to inform me have been tremendously helpful to myself and a number of other commenters. I’m grateful to those of you who have reached out, and apologize to those who came expecting a light read and left feeling any significant measure of distress. If you’ve never dealt with emotional abuse before (as I hadn’t up until this point), it can be especially difficult to spot, as one of the most persistent patterns is being made to feel at fault for your partner’s behavior. Each situation is different, so I’m hesitant to offer general advice, but if things get bad enough that you fear for your wellbeing, and you feel safe enough to do so, please consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Edit: There is now an ongoing educational series exploring the forms of control and abuse apparently highlighted in this blog. In the hopes that it may educate people on what to look out for, here is a link to the first video in that series.

primer: I DO NOT STAND BY THE CURRENT ABUSE AND HARASSMENT OF ZOE QUINN OR FRIENDS. STOP DOING THAT. IT IS NOT IN ANYONE’S BEST INTEREST. 

addendum: Thanks for stopping!

Yes, this thing is huge. There was a lot of stuff so it needed a lot of words.
You can read the TL;DR if you’re in a rush, though I recommend going through the whole thing if you want an approximation of a full picture. I offered proof where I could, because she’s really good at taking advantage of a lack of it, and censored things that would likely lead to undue harm: here’s a link to the TL;DR post.

TL;DR

If you take my recommendation to opt against the TL;DR — yes, this is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark. It’s a post about an ex, and the tone reflects its intention as the starting post for forum threads entitled Cringe-Worthy Break Up Stories on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, because I figured it would be best to announce on friendly communities in innocuous ways. Penny Arcade and Something Awful deleted those threads, so now this blog stands alone. I will not take it down, because I know the information is important, even if what I have omitted means you never might.

And no, I never posted this to 4chan.

EDIT:

There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.

Also, to make it clear that the logs aren’t doctored:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ReC-GtLfc

Anyway, for lack of a better phrase; enjoy I guess.

A few minutes later I’m in the hotel room, sitting silently by the window as Zoe sobs. After a while she starts apologizing for how horrible she’s been.

She tells me how I’m the most important thing in her life.

How she’ll never ever lie to me again.

How she promises it’s all in the past.

How she’ll understand if I don’t trust her for a while.

How she’s willing to do anything to earn my trust.

Really earn it this time.

Not just demand it.

I melt, and we start talking things through.

We discuss a bunch of options, and I remember a time I searched my inbox for the word “love” in front of her and at her request, and I ask her to return the favor (by allowing me to search her inbox for other words that might imply infidelity). It seems to me a sufficiently difficult step that it would show me she’s serious, and it’d allow me to verify that the people she mentioned were the only people she had cheated on me with.

She tells me this is wrong. That it’s a violation of the privacy of the people she’s been messaging.

This is a sound ethical principle, but seems to be a somewhat manipulative strong principled stance given that the day before I’d been reconfiguring my wireless card, and remarked to Zoe that if I were to run a packet sniffer at that point, we’d be able to read in real time any unencrypted chat sessions from people connected to the same router. Zoe was really excited about this and encouraged me to do it (relax, I didn’t). So it was apparently okay to violate the privacy of the people in the hotel, but not that of the people in her inbox. And never mind, of course, that she had no issue reading through my own inbox a few months back.

I give her a “you’re joking.” look, and she asks me for some time to think on it. I tell her she can have some, but I need to go to a friend’s in an hour or so to do some work and make up for missed deadlines. By the time I need to leave she still hasn’t decided, and I tell her she can have more time to think, but she needs to promise me she won’t delete anything. I tell her I’m taking the first step in rebuilding trust here by giving her some. And I tell her that I really can’t keep doing this — if she violates it, it’s over.

With tears in her eyes she grabs me and hugs me and promises that all of the lying and dishonesty is over, she promises she won’t do anything to break this because it’s too important to her.

I make her give me one more promise — that she won’t hurt herself while I’m out, and that she’ll call someone to come watch her if she starts feeling like she wants to. She says she promises, and I leave.

It had, of course, occurred to me that I’d likely have no way of knowing if she deleted messages while I was out, but not knowing if she deleted anything wouldn’t put us in a worse situation. In the case that she fairly clearly didn’t (that is, the case where I find a bunch of flirting / solicitation), it would establish she’s serious, and we could try to find some way to make this work. And in the — at the time, unfathomable to me — case that she clearly did delete messages, it would blatantly show that this was the same sort of remorse she displayed when she claimed Nathan was the only transgression, in which case I could and should get away from all of this.

As far as I was concerned, one of the possibilities would leave things neutral, and two of the possibilities would make things better — albeit in different directions.

I manage to get very little work done at my friend’s house, and around 3am I head back to the hotel.

Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR: Act 2 TL;DR:

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I ask Zoe if she deleted anything while I was gone, and she promises she hasn’t and states again that that’s all behind her. I ask her if she’s ready, but she’s not yet, so we spend the next few hours trying to figure out how we’re going to make this work out. At one point she sobs desperately that she doesn’t know how long she can be in a relationship where her partner doesn’t trust her, and I tell her she’s demanding trust again. She sobs harder and tells me how terrible it feels that I don’t trust her anymore, that she really ISN’T that person she was before, that she really IS the person I fell in love with now. That she couldn’t even dream of acting like she had back then, and that she wishes I could just SEE that. She calms down and says she’s tired, and would like to wait until morning to do this.

For the next four hours I lie awake next to the woman I love – or someone who I thought was the woman I loved, but who has yet to provide a reasonable explanation for what she’s done to me. Who even after all of these revelations, I still can’t help but trust.

The dissonance gets to me, and I tell her it’s time. She stalls for a while, then begrudgingly grabs her laptop — and then stops. She starts to cry and tells me she doesn’t think she can be in this relationship at all if the trust has gotten so bad that we need to do this. I tell her if she really feels that way, then it’s her decision, and I get up to get my stuff. She backtracks quickly and logs into Facebook.

Before turning to the messages, I ask her to show me which of her friends she‘s given permission to view her relationship status (which she only just changed a few days ago). I’m disappointed to find she only set it to viewable for 50 people or so. Conspicuously missing from this list are any of the people she had cheated on me with. She gives a tame reason for the discrepancy, which is likely untrue, but even so, a minor enough lie that it isn’t worth losing her over. She hands me the laptop to look through her inbox.

I run a search for “love”, then a few other keyphrases. The results are all pretty innocuous. I open up the messages between her and Robin.

But the chat is empty.

“You deleted your message history with Robin.”

“Oh yeah, no I only ever talk to him through text too.”

I sit quietly for a moment, then get up and grab my bag “. . . I’m sorry. I can’t keep doing this.”

“What the hell? I told you I only talk to him over text, here, look!” She holds out her phone.

“Zoe, you promised you would take this seriously, and you promised you wouldn’t delete anything, but you’re not taking it seriously, because you did delete things, and you’re still lying.”

“What do you want from me? You’ve convinced yourself I’m lying and there’s no way to prove I’m not.”

I think for a bit. “Fine, put your phone on speaker, and call Robin and ask him to read out the last facebook messages he sent you.”

“Okay, let me just text him to see if he’s up.”

“No, if you text him first that will let you — what the hell am I doing, I already know you’re lying. I can’t do this, I need to go.” I head for the door.

“Oh wait no! I just remembered! I deleted his messages two weeks ago because he sent me something private!”

Oh god why won’t she stop? “No you didn’t. I can’t believe you’re still doing this.”

“What the hell! I’m not lying — how am I supposed to fix this if you won’t even believe me when I’m telling the truth?”

“We can worry about that when you start doing it.”

“Fine, whatever, if you don’t even believe me about this then it’s over anyway”

I leave the hotel, and ten minutes later, as I’m walking through the Tenderloin trying to find the library from the day before, Zoe messages me:

[836kb image]

Act 3 TL;DR:Act 3 TL;DR:Act 3 TL;DR:Act 3 TL;DR:Act 3 TL;DR:

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I spend my last night in SF with a friend and take a cab out to the airport the next morning. As I wait for my flight, I start going through my Facebook message history with Zoe, trying to make sense of the last 7 months. I try to see things from her point of view, to reconcile things that were said with things that were done. Eventually it becomes too much to scroll through, and I organize a bit and dedicate a new tab to each date range. I roll my eyes at my own bad pun — I am literally keeping tabs on our relationship. I spend some time writing down thoughts and timestamps, hoping to get things to make sense again. It becomes too much, and I set it aside and wait for boarding call.

I ask the flight attendant for a whiskey — he gives me two and says “I only charged you for one, you look like you need it.”

Shit. I got the same comment from a homeless person the night before — after he gave me a cigarette.

I try to spend the flight home thinking of other things — I go straight to a friend’s house after touching down in Boston. This friend had insisted I stay with him during the panic attack week and aftermath — making sure I ate and slept, quick to provide distraction if ever I seemed in need of it. Back then, he spent a lot of time reassuring me I was being stupid to worry — that no one could possibly be so shitty of a person as to purposefully set up these situations.

Now, three months later, I’m setting my duffel bag down outside his house again. He opens the door, gives me a hug and says only “sorry for doubting you.” As if having been there for me put him at fault.

We spend the next hour smoking cigarettes on his porch, and as I fill him in, we begin to laugh; harder and harder as the story gets worse. He asks me if he can write her a very sternly worded letter, and I tell him it wouldn’t make me feel any better.

He says it’s very much not on my behalf.

I ask him to at least wait until I figure out if she deserves one.

The next day I check Facebook and find that Zoe has unfriended me. Odd. I say something snarky about it on Tumblr. She sees it and facebook messages me with: “I unfriended you because I figured you’d never want to speak to me again, for what it’s worth (probably nothing). I won’t bother you again. Sorry.”

This doesn’t really make any sense, as it’s not like I have to message all of my Facebook friends, so, as has by now become habit when dealing with Zoe’s occasional incomprehensible answers, I don’t question it and (to stretch the jigsaw puzzle metaphor) just file it away as a puzzle piece.

I ask her if she was serious about getting back to being that person, and she says she was. And I tell her that the right thing to do, then, is to inform Josh’s wife. Zoe says she doesn’t have any info on her and freaks out about the possibility that she might go public. I’m disappointed that this is her primary concern. But she does at least recognize it as the right thing to do.

We spend the next four hours or so talking. Much of the conversation is open and calm — consisting largely of stories she’s already told about her past, but she gets mad and tells me she feels attacked whenever I ask about any of the inconsistencies in the claims she made about why or when she cheated on me. Asking about things that aren’t related to that seem fine though. This defensive behavior is new; she wasn’t responding like this when I first got her to admit to cheating, and I don’t really understand what’s changed. I throw it in the puzzle piece pile.

A few days later [July 19th] I check in on her, and ask when her therapy appointment is. She tells me the date, then gets mad and asks why I’m pressing her on this.

I tell her it’s because she’s in an environment that encourages and enables (and has potential to be harmed by) her behavior, and so she has something to gain by not taking therapy seriously. She takes a strong principled stance against letting me know if she’s going to her appointments.

Practically speaking this strikes me as a serious problem. Given that lying has been such a successful strategy for her so far (with recent exception — which still took me months to be sure I wasn’t just going crazy), there’s no reason to believe she would want to change, and no reason to believe she isn’t lying about trying to stop lying. We argue about it, and she says she’s not doing therapy for me, and I tell her I’m not worried about me because I already know not to trust her. I’m worried about everyone she’s misleading first, and — if she really does have a problem — her second. She gets angry again, and I decide to give her some space for a while.

It would at this point be impossibly dumb of me to just trust that she’ll take it seriously, but I can’t really do any more than hope.

I don’t message her for the next four days.

(In retrospect, if I were asked to evaluate from a distance how seriously she’s taking therapy — on a scale of “take therapy very seriously and go to appointments regularly” to “don’t give a fuck and take a trip to europe for three months.”

I would say that she isn’t giving a fuck

And taking a trip to europe for three months

But I’m sure she has some good explanation for it. She always does.)

Four days later I’m not doing a very good job concentrating at work, and go to check Facebook for the first time in a couple of hours.

Apparently, at some point in that two hour timespan, Zoe either blocked me or deleted her profile.

I post on Tumblr:  

“Oh cool yup. She definitely blocked me on facebook. I haven’t messaged her in 4 days, which probably makes that kind of a shitty thing to do to someone she’s already totally fucked over but whatever I guess. It’s pretty minor relative to everything else.”

Later that night she messages me on gchat.

[censored — not mine to reveal]

I am confused as to why she’s saying I’m not respecting her requests for space or time, since she hadn’t made any such requests (except for arguably the last conversation we had, after which I didn’t message her for four days). I toss it in the puzzle piece pile.

As for what she tells me, it convinces me to give the relationship another chance. At some point we start talking about this issue where she gets angry and defensive or says she’s panicking any time I try to understand more about her cheating on me, or why she kept telling me she wasn’t involved with anyone during the breakup, or why she tried to prevent me from sleeping with other people while she herself was doing it in secret, or any other of a host of unanswered questions. And I tell her that if we’re going to make this relationship work again, those things need to get talked about.

Dishonest? What the heck is dishonest about trying to figure out what was and wasn’t true for the last 7 months? I guess I’ll throw it in the puzzle piece pile for now. 

Anyway, as expected, so long as we don’t broach the subject of the past, she’s calm and pleasant and sweet, and we even manage to joke around a little. Eventually, the information she revealed becomes irrelevant, and she has a meeting to go to, but sends me this text a few minutes after logging off.

God damn it yes. Thank you for being decent finally you lovable jerk.

We talk on gchat again the next morning, and the conversation isn’t too tumultuous; though it doesn’t offer me anything in the way of new information or closure. Eventually she says she has to go to bed and we say our goodnights and both log off. 

I send her a message letting her know I have a question when I notice she’s online some 6 hours later, but she doesn’t respond. Four days go by and I don’t hear from her. Weird? 

It’s plausible that she just hasn’t been using gchat though.

I send her a text.

No response for the next day. I send her two more texts, and she’s almost certainly ignoring me now. Why? This is confusing.

Welp, I’m stumped. Maybe the puzzle pieces will help. Let’s see what we have.

1. Zoe unfriended me on Facebook.
2. Zoe’s behavior when talking about things she did in the relationship has changed — In the conversation when I was at the library she would just lie a lot until cornered; now she gets defensive / angry / tells me to back off way before there’s a chance to be cornered.
3. Zoe blocks me after I don’t message her for four days on the grounds that I am not giving her enough space to heal.
4. Zoe says she feels like it’s dishonest of me to be messaging her for closure??
5. Zoe says she wants to make things up to me, even if we don’t get back together. But, after a fairly tame conversation, she ignores me for five days and counting.

I’m not seeing anything. Maybe it was something I said in our very last gchat conversation that morning after she sent her text?

Oh.

Oh god damn it.

God fucking damn it.

“do you wanna maybe try in person?”

“do you believe I want to fix this or not?”

“I don’t want to do this online.”

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. SHE’S AVOIDED ME EVER SINCE THIS CONVERSATION BECAUSE SHE IS PARANOID I MIGHT GO PUBLIC AND DOESN’T WANT ME TO HAVE MORE LOGS.

Let’s look at the puzzle pieces again.

1. Zoe unfriended me on Facebook: She’s establishing distance so I can’t prove I know her or contact her facebook friends.
2. Zoe now gets defensive and angry when pressed for information: She does not want to leave more incriminating things in my logs.
3. Zoe deactivates her profile after 4 days of radio silence: She wants to decrease the plausibility of the logs I have by making them look like this:
4.  
5. She says it’s dishonest of me to message her for closure: She’s stopping just shy of flat out telling me she thinks I might go public.
6. Zoe ignores me after telling me she wants to make things up to me: Because making things up to me decreases the odds that I go public, but
7. She doesn’t want to do that online: Because that’s not worth the risk of my having more logs of more incriminating information.

JESUS CHRIST SHE IS FUCKING OSTRACIZING ME BECAUSE MAKING IT UP TO ME IS NOT WORTH THE RISK. Jesus F Christ what a selfish jerk.

I guess maybe I should at least make sure she isn’t also just failing to recieve my texts. I give her a call, but it goes to voicemail after two rings.

I’d like some response, so I guess I should give some innocuous pretense. She still has my fancy headphones, and she’d probably want to minimize the number of reasons I have to continue contacting her, so she’d probably respond to a message asking for them back. I send her one more text to make sure:

Motherfucker.

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End.

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