I (F31) have been dating this man (M34) I met online for about three months.

In the first month or so he was extremely nice to me. He’s an overall generous person and everything seemed pretty seamless, so I was excited.

Then slowly, I started noticing that he has some anger issues. It was little things at first, such as being annoyed at waiters/cashiers which turned me off and kept it in the back of my mind. I had a conversation about that behaviour but nothing really came out of it.

Then in the third month or so, I noticed he has intense road rage… I witnessed it first hand (he was about to get out of the car to beat the other person up but I talked him down).

He proceeded to tell me that he once followed someone home after the person honked at him… This was an immediate red flag and I told myself I need to end this relationship soon. He also started acting passive-aggressively towards me for small things, many of which I did not entertain because I was already set on ending things with him when I felt the time was right.

At this point, he has never blown up at me, but I knew it was just a matter of time (at the time I thought i had a couple more weeks but boy was I wrong)

We had booked a non-refundable weekend trip a couple of months ago that was very pricey and due to other circumstances, I felt like I couldn’t back out. I had in my mind that I was going to end things right after the trip and 2.5 days would be manageable.

The trip started out really really well and we had a lot of fun until we came across issues with our car. Long story short, he began yelling at me and accusing me of misplacing an item when I know for a fact I did NOT touch it.

I tried to calmly tell him that I did not touch the item and he continuously tried to gaslight me into saying that it was my fault. At this point, I just shut up because I didn’t want to escalate the situation further.

He then yelled some instructions at me but I could not understand because he was yelling so I snapped and said “why the fuck are you yelling at me?”. At this point, he got really close to my face and I never seen such intense rage in someones eye and said “You dont know the F about anything”.

After that, I just completely shut down and my instincts kicked in to stay down and not escalate the situation. We drove back to our hotel and he did not speak a word to me AT ALL. We just sat in silence for 20 hours until we got back home. That night, I barely slept as I was not sure what he was capable of, I have never been that scared of someone in my entire life.

Once I felt I was safe since I was back in town, I told him that I never felt as disrespected as I did in my entire life and he had the audacity to tell me he never said that.

He tried to gaslight me into thinking that I made that shit up but I stood my ground and told him that nobody in my life has ever said those things to me, how could I have conjured it up in my head? He kept trying to deny my statement but at this point I told him I wanted to stop talking and that I’m done and just drove away.

Once I was alone in my room I began trembling.

Question:

So… has anybody ever experienced something similar? I feel OK now and glad I ended things quickly, but I am quite worried about any potential retaliation… I do not think he will do anything physically to me now that I am back home, but I am kind of a paranoid person. Anybody has any advice on what else I can do to keep myself safe or am I overthinking this situation?