How to Sacrifice Your Lover
A Tale of Gaslighting and the Cult of Borderline Personality
(True as Remembered) How to Sacrifice Your Lover is a psychological love story. It is an anecdotal examination of what happens when people with extreme opposing psychological conditions, meet, fall in love with, and become entangled in each other. Told in the form of a romance novel, it covertly explores psychological conditions and concepts of Gaslighting, Borderline Personality Disorder, Sociopathy, Narcissism, Dependence, and Avoidance. Trigger warnings: contains depictions of physical, psychological, and mental abuse.
Inari has beauty, radiance, kindness, and charisma unmatched, and upon meeting Yuki, is trapped in an addictive "feedback loop" of emotion that seemingly she nor Yuki can escape. Yuki, however, despite desperately fighting for Inari's love, honor, and safety, struggles to pull her away from, Jin, her sociopathic lover. Inari creates chaos to inspire emotion in Jin, her sociopathic lover, a "robot" with "dead eyes". As things become a tangled mess, Yuki struggles to define reality.
After all the groveling, I address the elephant in the room, and ask her, point blank, how she feels… most importantly… how she feels about me. She’s heard how I felt about her a zillion times and accepted it and smiled graciously every time I told her how beautiful she was and how in love with her I was, but I never really truly heard how she felt about me, romantically, out of her mouth.
She says a few beautiful things that I don’t remember at all, because… on cue… she pauses… and leads into “but…”
I am crushed.
At first, she writes it off as bad timing... that she wants to be faithful to Jin... etc., etc., etc. But I press her further and eventually determine that there’s no way she'd ever want me even if she were single and available... it is done.
READ MORELike with every breakup/rejection, I turn over every stone to try and find the missing puzzle piece that will get me to the center of this maze where her heart is... it is like a math equation that I try desperately to solve, a logical means to an emotional end, and it goes on for a couple of hours. It must have been painful for her. But she is not like nearly everyone else in this scene; she really has a big heart that is true and pure, and she listens intently while having so many wonderful things to say. It is apparent that she cares about me, still, deeply.
“Why would you stay with a man who doesn’t love you?” I ask bluntly.
“I see there being 3 pillars to a good relationship, the mental, the physical, and the emotional,” she says. “Very few relationships seem to encompass all 3 of those things, basically none of them really. There’s always one missing, and when that occurs you have to find support from somewhere else. Jin isn’t perfect. He’s far from perfect. But I love him.”
I try to make the case that she deserves better. I want to fill all the pillars of her relationship requirements! I attempt to portray myself as a man of confidence and honor. I portray myself as a misunderstood savant. I portray myself as the best for her. I dig through all the poetic concoctions that I had been dreaming of saying to her but, until now hadn’t the guts to say. I tell her I love her... and I tell her that I am in love with her. I replay all the events of the last couple of weeks... including all my interpretations of many of the events documented in this book and ask for her own interpretations, but she simply replies with phrases, like:
“Just because I did those things or said those things, doesn’t mean that I want you romantically.”
“You misinterpreted that, that’s not what that meant.”
“You didn’t see what you thought you saw. That never happened.”
“You’re too sensitive and derive too much meaning from nothing.”
“You can’t have those feelings just because I said or did those things.”
Everything I say is shot down with those phrases… until I just feel like God herself rejected me.
“I need to improve myself,” I say. “All of this mess was my fault, I’m so sorry I burdened you. I’m so embarrassed.”
Everything and anything I do and say, until finally... after 4AM... I am exhausted. Ultimately ... figuring it to be a lost cause ... figuring it all to be done and over... I conjure up the most grandiose thing I will ever say to a girl in my life.
“I want us to look at our lives 50 years from now, remember how you and I met, and remind ourselves that LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. If I were king, and you were queen, our lives would no longer be about ‘me and you’, but about everyone around us.... because I would be so happy and, life would be so complete... that I would want to share all this love I have with everyone else... because you make me feel so amazing.”
But even my best, most poetic words do not sway her. It is clear I cannot do anything to win her heart. She worries about me. She worries about my ability to cope with her rejection. She tells me that I should seek therapy. “There’s no shame in seeing a therapist, you know. My therapist helps me through a lot of things,” she says.
“Well maybe,” I reply, “but you don’t have to worry about me being suicidal or anything. I’m the kind of guy that would have to write a thesis before he killed himself. I wouldn’t leave some little note crying about my afternoon, then go hang myself. I’d have to write a long detailed, persuasive essay explaining everything that is wrong with the world before I permanently decided to end my connection to it. Worry about me after I’ve written a book,” I conclude.
COLLAPSEBefore I continue I would like to preface my review as biased because I am a friend of the author among other things. That being said it’s very strange to read this book even if by one passage at at time. The book explores some of the unusual circumstances are encountered by the author during a time I witnessed. when parties raged hard and people took serious the “all is fair” clause of love and war. Some experiences are unique to the author or unique to the goth scene, but often the experiences were things that even I could relate to. Relatable to me not because I felt the same way but because I saw many of the same patterns of behavior in people that were important to me and also in my own life. A big theme is the torment and total mind melt experienced by the protagonist. Strange to me because I had similar experiences but felt very different about the results. Either I’m a psychopath or it’s because of my pointy ears. In the end life is fleeting, so why not party your brains out like the author? Why not go for broke like the author? Some win, some lose, some cheat the game, and some go crazy like the author! But what makes life worth living is the crazy, spicy, raunchy, absolutely absurd insanity that separates truth from fiction. And more than anything this book beautifully illustrates how truth really is stranger than fiction!