The Best Question My Ex Could Have Asked Me

My hands shook as I picked at the food in front of me, grateful that the waitstaff wasn’t being attentive to us for once. My boyfriend, Brad, sat across from me with a grimace on his face. He’d spent the entire week telling me how ugly I was and how he could do so much better. He picked on me about everything, from my clothes to my hair. His favorite targets were my weight and makeup. He even went so far as to tell me he didn’t love me, and our entire relationship had been based on his loneliness and depression. I had known that he was mean-spirited, in fact, he regularly called his manager ‘ghetto bitch’, but I never thought he’d turn his hatred to me.

“What do you like about me?” he asked through a bite of his melted ice cream concoction. He’d ordered the concoction out of spite because he thought I was going to pay for his meal. I wasn’t. Just because I suggested that we go on a date to see if our spark was really gone didn’t mean that I was a push over. I wasn’t going to allow him to keep treating me poorly.

His question shouldn’t have caught me off guard, but it did. He’d been comparing me to other women every chance that he got, but I had never done the same to him. “I like watching movies with you,” I said. I struggled to think of anything else to add. We had a lot in common, like a love of video games and art. Despite that, I knew it would be a lie if I mentioned those things. I hated playing video games with him because of how competitive he was. I had also attempted to use his art to reach out to him, but he wasn’t receptive. I didn’t really care for his art anyway, since it consisted of what I would call ‘google art’. Nothing original, just pictures of celebrities he’d googled pictures of. The rest of our relationship consisted of him telling me what to do or telling me how much things about me bothered him.

“That’s something you can do with anyone. What do you like about me?” he asked the question again, this time with malice in his eyes. “There’s nothing special about our relationship. Nothing you couldn’t have with anyone else.”

I didn’t realize it then, but that was the most important conversation I’d ever had with him. I was so blinded by what I thought was love that I didn’t want to admit that he was right. There was nothing special about him, or our relationship. There was nothing I had with him that I couldn’t have with anyone else. There was nothing about him that made me want to brag about him to my friends. I didn’t look forward to coming home with him after working all day, and I didn’t like hearing about his workday. I may have loved him, but I wasn’t happy with him and I was settling.

When we broke up, I noticed all the things that other men did for their girlfriends. They were simple things, like bringing them their lunch, but they were things he never bothered to do for me. I started to look at men again, and I couldn’t help noticing how many men were more attractive than Brad. I didn’t rub that information in his face like he’d done to me. I never felt the need to hurt him, even though he’d have no problem doing the same thing to me.

Looking back, Brad had given me a gift that I would always be thankful for. No, it wasn’t him or our horrid relationship. As I’ve noted above, he wasn’t special, but he did teach me what I didn’t want in a relationship. Because of him, I won’t date a man if I can’t name at least one thing I like about him.