My Artist Ex-Boyfriend Refused to Draw Me

I’ve always had a passion for art, so I was beyond thrilled when an artist took interest in me. No, he didn’t ask to draw me, he asked me to be his girlfriend. He never asked to draw me — period. I thought that him declining to draw me wouldn’t bother me, but it did.

When we first met, the tiny room he rented was plastered with his art. It was everywhere. Unfortunately, there were very few pieces of his artwork that I liked. Most of his artwork consisted of pictures of celebrities he’d googled and drawn, but a few pieces were original. There were also pictures he’d drawn of friends and family members, like one with his best friend pretending to slay a lion.

Then there was her…

Some of the pictures on his wall were of girls he’d either met online or in person. They were mostly just facial portraits, but there was one picture that I couldn’t help focusing on. It was a girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, and side-swept bangs. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she wasn’t ugly either. I asked him who she was, and he lied to me by telling me that she was the girl from the Big Bang Theory. He wasn’t the best artist, so I believed him at first. I thought maybe he could have been learning to draw and sketched it out, but upon further investigation, I found an exchange on his Instagram with the blonde in the picture.

The exchange confirmed what I had originally thought, he knew her and had drawn her. I don’t know if he’d ever met her in person or only online, but he’d drawn her from a pre-existing image. I was disgusted. I wanted to confront him about it, but I wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t something I’d ever had to worry about in any of my other relationships.

My mind began to roam to unpleasant places. Who was this girl to him? Had they dated? Did he have feelings for her? Why had he drawn her? Most importantly, why was the picture still hanging up if he was in a relationship with me, a relationship that he claimed made him happy?

I felt disgusted and disrespected…

I wanted to confront him about lying and demand that he take the picture down, but I couldn’t. I felt stupid for feeling so insecure, but he’d made me that way. Another unpleasant thought crept into my mind as I realized he’d never asked to draw me. Not only had he never asked to draw me, but he also regularly showed me the pictures he was working on and it was never a drawing of me. The last picture he’d shared with me was a picture of Amber Heard that I don’t remember him finishing. He’d even drawn one of my dogs, but not me.

This man had told me he loved me hundreds of times, but he’d never considered drawing me and that bothered me more than it should have. Maybe he didn’t find me attractive enough to draw. The point came where I grew too uncomfortable to keep quiet any longer. I had regularly been thinking about the fact that he didn’t want to draw me, and the fact that he surrounded himself with these drawings he found to be more attractive than me. I decided that I didn’t want him to draw me anymore, and I vocalized that.

“I don’t want you to draw me,” I told him one night as we were watching a movie.

He grabbed the remote and pressed the pause button, almost violently.

“Why can’t I draw you?” he snapped.

“Well, you’ve never asked to, but you’ve drawn all of those women,” I said, gesturing towards the walls.

“How do you know I wasn’t going to draw you after you lost weight?” he demanded.

As soon as the words left his mouth, I felt numb. I knew now why he hadn’t drawn me. He thought I was fat, and therefore not attractive enough to draw. I had never mentioned my weight to him, aside from making little remarks here and there about my gym goals. I knew that I was a little on the thicker side, but not by much. I also never looked down on my body, the way he was doing.

I remember getting into a fight and thinking that I should have never brought it up. From that point on, whenever his eyes lingered on me, I thought he was looking at me in disgust. I started skipping meals and forcing myself to go to the gym for an hour a day, even on the days when I’d been at work since 5 a.m. None of that mattered because I was with a man who insisted on me weighing a merger one hundred pounds.

It wasn’t long after that fight that we ended our relationship. When we were in the process of breaking up, he informed me that his friends said I was only average-looking and that he could do better. I had never cared what his friends thought of me, but his own words were the ones that hurt me.

Sometime after we ended things, he noticed that I had gotten a new job at Harley Davidson. He decided to call me that day and hurl insults at me. He claimed that working at Harley Davidson was on par with working at Hooters and called me a slew of terrible things. I never thought anything was wrong with working at either place, but when we were dating, he forbade me from applying at Hooters because he didn’t want men flirting with his ‘unattractive’ girlfriend.

His behavior only grew worse when he’d notice men flirting with me on Facebook. He began threatening to come over to my house at 3 a.m. because he needed to talk. He would leave me text messages demanding that I call him. He even had his father call me to leave a voicemail demanding that I call his son. I blocked them both, and only managed to gain peace when I sent his mother a message on Facebook explaining how her son was behaving.

You might have read those last few paragraphs and thought my ex was crazy and possessive. As I reread my own words, I’d have to agree with you. However, the me that was still reeling from our breakup allowed this onslaught of mental abuse to take its toll on her. I thought that I was fat and ugly. I thought that no man would ever want to treat me well because of the one I’d allowed to treat me like garbage.

Now that I look back on it, I realize that I deserved better and that he was the one with the problem, not me. My body was fine, but I was with a man who didn’t respect me and focused solely on my looks. I would have never been happy if I had ended up with someone as narrow-minded as he was. I can and will do better.