Part of me wants to leave, and part thinks he just needs to get used to being in a relationship, because this is his first "serious" one.

You could listen to the second part, and it's possible he'll change and end up treating you much better. But I doubt it. If you choose to stay, you'll probably end up leaving.

The LW's description absolutely screams "Cluster B". Yeah LW, he can be sweet and kind when he wants something from you. A female fried of mine told her narcissist/antisocial personality-disordered husband last week that she was ready to leave him. And after a decade of rotten marriage, all of a sudden he's gone back into courtship mode with her. We're taking bets on how long it will last.

>but he can be so sweet and kind

Funny, that's what some of my friends used to say when their boyfriends or husbands weren't beating them up.

The dude's an emotional vampire in the making. If you really do know you don't deserve to be treated like this, why are you letting yourself be treated like this?

He's had three months to "get used to being in a relationship". One of you is a slow learner.

And after a decade of rotten marriage, all of a sudden he's gone back into courtship mode with her. We're taking bets on how long it will last.

A friend of mine was in a similar situation. They recently got divorced, but before they did, she tried to leave him several times. And, each time, it was back to courtship mode. The final time, he got her roses. And she told him, "This is the first time you've gotten me roses in seven years. What was stopping you from doing nice things for me before?"

LW, your guy sounds like a meanie, and I think Amy hit the nail on the head with her advice. You are only 22 now. Don't wake up with this guy at age 30!

LW, if you have to say he can be sweet and kind instead of he is sweet and kind, something ain't right. If he can be and isn't, he's choosing not to be. And you're choosing to show him you'll put up with it.

"Hoovering" is the term we use for when she tries to exit, but he sucks, er, sweet-talks her back into his grip.

I was reading LW's letter, and when I got to the part about not returning texts, I was thinking, "Eh, not that big of a deal. I personally don't like texting." Then we got to the rest.

LW, how about you just be "not there" one day, and don't come back? No need for a dramatic good-bye. And if you happen to run into him again one day, and he asks where you went, you can say, "What are you? My mom?" (By the way, that quote is two separate questions and are separated with a question mark, not a comma. Ask Grammar Girl.)

1) You have only been with this guy for 3 months, but he treats you like he's owned you for years.
2) You are hearing "I love you", while at the same time closing your eyes and singing "lalala" when he comes right out and tells you he just cheated on you, and dares you to do anything about it. (the "what are you, my mom" comment).
3) At 22, and only 3 months into the relationship, you should still be getting silly lovey poem texts and run by huggings, not emotional abuse.
The bottom line is, I wouldn't even consider keeping this guy as an aquaintance, let alone a boyfriend. Kick him to the curb, and find someone who will treat you right.

I found this comment from LW to be particularly interesting: "… because this is his first "serious" one." If this is her idea of a serious relationship, I'd hate to see the kind of stuff that goes on in her casual relationships.

By what stretch of the imagination is this relationship "serious"? Because she says so? Obviously, he doesn't agree.

Go! Get gone! Get away from this louse and let him find another doormat!

The nuns at Prince of Peace would have kicked the snot out of Grammar Girl. "My mom?" is not a sentence and LW has good punctuation to help offset her poor choice in men.

MarkD, then the nuns at Prince of Peace are wrong.

"Who are you?" is a complete question. When followed by "My mother?" the subject and verb are understood. "Are you my mother?"

The sentence is punctuated incorrectly. You are joining two independent clauses with a comma. Wrong answer.

Patrick and MarkD: I love that this thread has turned into a grammar debate. It makes my heart warm. Seriously.

LW, you don't have to let him "get used" to anything. If he isn't ready for relationship primetime, then you don't need to make yourself his trainer. I don't know whether he's a Cluster B, but he's certainly an asshole, and there are plenty of men who will treat you well at parties AND on the couch.

If you decide to leave, don't give him a chance to talk you out of it. Don't give reasons. You've been together 3 months, not 3 years, and you don't need to drag this out, nor do you owe him anything. Just tell him it isn't working. If you give reasons, he will try to convince you he can fix them, or worse, convince you you're nuts. If you're not happy at 3 months, you're going to be miserable in a few years, and then you're going to tell yourself, "But I can't leave him. We've been together for 3 years!"

There's this myth that abusive people are mustache-twirling villains, like in cartoons. They aren't. Even the worst of them are sweet and nice sometimes. Otherwise, no one would spend time with them.

Spot-on advice and comments as usual! Here's another angle LW might want to consider: At 22 years old, boyfriends and girlfriends aren't really all that necessary. No, really, they're not, but many people, both men and women, think they are. I think the delusion that people have to have a partner, any partner, versus the right partner, leads people to put up with shoddy treatment from people whose presence in their lives should be purely optional.

And LW should listen to MonicaP. This dude's not worth the increase in blood pressure.

Dear Amy,

My boyfriend is a fucking asshole. Should I stay with him?

Spot-on answer as usual, from Amy, and great comments.

Dear LW, I feel for you. You're young, you don't have a lot of experience yet, and like most other people, you want someone to love you. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But you need to recognize that what you actually HAVE is someone who TELLS you he loves you when he isn't too busy wiping his feet on you. Run, little girl, and let this creep become a bad memory - one you don't even think of often, because you're so busy being happy with a good man.

This douche sounds like a guy I dated when I was around 26...too old to sink so low, I know. But these are the dangers of low self esteem (I've since recovered). He would hit on my friends, make me upset, tell me I was 'too sensitive' and then send my girlfriends after me to make me feel better while he hit on other girls. He totally played the 'i love you' card, then just as quickly it went back up his sleeve when he felt like letting his true colors show (what color is douche, exactly?) It took me several months to loosen that grip he had on me, and that was several months TOO long.

LW, don't make the same mistakes I made - get out now while you're young and your self esteem is still intact, which I assume it is to some degree, since you wrote to Amy (good choice, BTW).

I've since crawled out of the snake hole, worked on myself and found an amazing guy to settle down with. As for Mr. Douche - after ruining some other young lass's life by suckering her into a 5 year engagement that ended in him dumping her (and calling her 'crazy' to anyone who would listen), he's now pushing 40 and can't even keep a girlfriend. Guess the pool of vulnerable women whose self esteem is still low enough to fall for that crap shrinks considerably the older we get...and thank goodness for that!

Also, great point by MonicaP...villians often help old ladies cross the street, after tying their girlfriends to the train tracks.

My ex actually studied to be a priest. He still likens himself to St. Francis - ha! St Francis didn't even own a mirror, much less spend half the day gazing in one.

Kat wrote: At 22, and only 3 months into the relationship, you should still be getting silly lovey poem texts and run by huggings, not emotional abuse.

That is such a good point. This LW is supposed to be in the fun schmoopy part of the relationship! If this is the "fun" part, I don't even want to know what's next.

They are both very young.

His behavior is actually quite common among guys his age. Who knows what he will be like in another ten years? All we know is that for now, he is very selfish and immature. He cares about getting what he wants and will probably have to experience being crapped all over himself before it dawns on him to care about being a decent person and doing the right thing.

She probably sees all the guys her age acting this way and just doesn't have enough experience to know better. I think she should date someone a few years older.

""Hoovering" is the term we use for when she tries to exit, but he sucks, er, sweet-talks her back into his grip."

I missed where it said anything about her ever trying to exit.

I see it more as : He does not consider this a serious relationship and is treating it as such, she does see it as one.
Lets be honest, she is putting up with his shitty behavior because " so sweet ... in bed snuggling" he's good in bed.

Pirate Jo, I dated guys that age back when I was, you know, that age, and I don't remember them treating me that way. No, this guy is just a douche.

Young people with low self-esteem radiate "abuse me" to predators. The LW breaks my heart.

Ha ... my emotionally abusive ex-husband also studied to be a priest. He's now heavily involved in a very conservative Catholic church (an interest that he discovered right after we got married). I think there is a very close connection between the impulse towards conservative (i.e. misogynistic) religion and the impulse to inflict emotional abuse.

Huh ... maybe it was just my experience, then. I found that a LOT of the guys I encountered in my 20s acted just like this. (At least, the ones who were hot enough to get away with it.) It's not that they intended to be abusive jerks, and I'm sure they would have been shocked to be told that's what they were. I also think a lot of them probably grew out of this kind of behavior as they gained maturity and learned to start thinking beyond their own immediate self-gratification.

Of course some people never do grow out of it. And honestly, aren't we supposed to learn about morality and how to be considerate of other people by, oh, age six or so?

One influencing factor for me was that I got better at spotting these types, so beyond a small handful of bad experiences in my early 20s, I didn't put up with this as I got older. Maybe that causes me to think younger men are worse, when really there are just as many of them out there but they became someone else's problem. Dunno.

First off, appologies for rambling, I'm sleep deprived and caffiene defficient :P
I'm going to step up and say that making generalizations about that age group is wrong, everyone deserves to be taken on their own merits and just because your personal asshole magnet was stronger than mine does not reflect the majority of that group.
I met my now-husband online when he was 19. He was a co-worker of a friend of mine, and we all played the same online game, so we became friends. In gaming, women are still outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1, so it's normal for a group to be mostly male, in their late teens, early 20's. My friend and I were the odd ones out, both in our late 30's.
My hubby and I lived half a state apart, we played games, we chatted, we became friends. I was living with someone,he had a girlfriend. It was cool, because we were both computer geeks, and we would work on nerdy code projects that our SO's thought were stupid, but we enjoyed. We became better friends. And not once did he ever treat me with disrespect, or or rudeness.
Fast forward, I am about to kick my SO to the curb for being a judgemental asshat. I'm venting to my BFF, now husband. He sits quiet for a little bit, and then he types back to me "You know, we make a really good team."

I had to pick my jaw up off of the floor. It took him months to convince me, but he's persistant, and awesome, and 8 years later still my best friend in the world.

I once said that after my second husband I would never marry again. I swore it on everything I could think of. I was going to be that crazy old woman with 80 cats. I had my palm read once, it was a charity thing and the woman wouldn't let me just make a donation, so I went along. She told me I was going to marry someone very special. I laughed, because at that time I was in the process of dumping the judgemental jerk, and had only just met my now-husband face to face once. He was 20, I was 40. We were married a year later.

Just goes to show, life is what happens while you are making other plans.

LW, keep looking, you should not settle for anything less than your best friend as a partner.

I want to meet a mustache-twirling villain...

There's a school of thought which says that abusive jerks attract more women than nice guys do. The LW would seem to be a data point supporting this view.

"I want to meet a mustache-twirling villain..."

A barber who robs banks on the side? Interesting combo!

There's a school of thought which says that abusive jerks attract more women than nice guys do.

Who, when, what age, what time of the month...many things matter here per the actual research. You really can't just generalize to "women.

Exactly, generalizations don't mean squat, generally speaking. The bad boys may just look more popular because the girls they attract with their fake nice guy act don't stick around long after the bad boy true colors show through, so they churn through a lot more women than the actual nice guys.

The really good guys tend to be taken off of the market fairly quickly, and if their woman is smart, made to feel like he's the center of the universe, or at least appreciated and loved so that he doesn't get distracted by all the jealous women who missed their chances and are now stuck with a market full of aging bad boys.

Even the best guy can be tempted to stray, which is why marriage is a work-in-progress, and we can't just sit back and eat bonbons and watch soap operas til we are 6 ax handles across the ass, but if you have the right guy, he's doing the same for you.

Pirate Jo: I found that a LOT of the guys I encountered in my 20s acted just like this. . . . I also think a lot of them probably grew out of this kind of behavior as they gained maturity and learned to start thinking beyond their own immediate self-gratification.

Of course some people never do grow out of it. And honestly, aren't we supposed to learn about morality and how to be considerate of other people by, oh, age six or so?

I think youth is an explanation, to some extent, for poor behavior. I know I did things when I was young that I didn't do once I got older. But I don't think it's the only explanation. I think how you're raised is another. My parents stressed consideration of others to me and my siblings and I've never been "horrible about returning calls and following through with dates" and I've never done something disrespectful like hit on a girlfriend's friend.

Rex: There's a school of thought which says that abusive jerks attract more women than nice guys do.

I'd say if a guy who's a jerk is also charming, attractive and sexy (being tall wouldn't hurt either) he's probably more likely to attract more women than a nice guy who's not.

But I don't think women are alone in this. I think guys fall for women who are jerks if the women are hot. I've done that a couple times in my life (for a while, the great sex let me ignore the other stuff but ultimately it wasn't worth it and I walked away.)

Aw, I think it's sweet that she believes the two of them are in a relationship.

And on a side note—both MarkD and Patrick are incorrect. "My mom?" IS a complete sentence, and could be stated as dialogue (which is what it is) in the following exchange, for example:

Patrick: "You'll never guess who called me at work."
MarkD: "My mom?"

The original statement could also be phrased several ways, such as "What are you, my mom?" or "What are you... my mom?" or "What are you?" (a long pause) "My mom?"

What I think LW should do is mindlessly date a whole series of assholes over the next decade or so, all the while putting all the decent men she meets in her 'friendzone' and being sure to dump on them about how her boyfriends are assholes while rejecting any of them who show interest. Then, when she hits her late 20's / early 30's, and age is starting to show its effects and her maternal instincts are starting to kick in, she should waffle on about how she has 'grown up', and pick a nice provider type and drop out a few kids. At least, I think it often goes something like that.