Still not sure what I think or feel

Last night, I had a strange, almost compulsive urge to post on 7Cups asking people to inform me that what I'd said to Kyle* (fake name) was wrong. Why did I need to hear "you were wrong"? Because I was trying to forget something really problematic Kyle had said to me that I'd buried. I wanted confirmation that what we'd had was just normal relationship drama, and not evidence that I'd yet again compromised myself/my dignity in a romantic relationship. I don't want to think of what we had as degrading. I wanted to think of it as sweet, but tragically doomed due to Kyle's penchant for transference (his mother was a livewire) and our mutual guardedness.

Reader, he called me retarded. We were watching that episode of "It's Always Sunny" where Sweet Dee dates a rapper the others think might be intellectually disabled. They call him the R word. I think I said something to the effect of, "wow, this would never have aired today." Made some reference to the "Arrested Development" episode with a similar plot. In response, Kyle said something like, "yeah. I've always preferred to call the people I date 'special.' "

Maybe it was just a bad joke, but it veered too close to open misogyny (and it felt like a betrayal, considering we both place a lot of value on our intellectual accomplishments). At the time, I remember thinking, "I'm not going to get mad at him about this, because I got mad at him about something else yesterday, and getting mad again would just mean that I'm always mad at him, we can't just have a normal nice night. Also, this is how he pushes women away — it's not personal, it's not malicious. Also, this is how he grew up joking with his friends, and still jokes with them. It's just teasing. It reads as aggressive to you because you've lived something of a sheltered life, surrounded by people with aspirations of gentility, whereas he has built a life around a mildly adolescent punk aesthetic of astheticism and gritty discomfort; insensitive jibing is a part of that."

What do you think? The thing I wanted people to tell me I was wrong about is kind of hard to explain. Essentially, in the beginning of our relationship, I'd told him about a scary tech abuse experience I'd had with an ex (I left out the part about the sexual abuse, but there was that too). He said, oh, that happened to a friend of mine, her ex Davey* (name changed) was addicted to heroin, he used to hack her accounts and post nasty messages, steal from her bank account, steal and sell our things. I called Davey "the drug one," which he objected to with a sense of moral righteousness: "I don't see addiction as inherently immoral. He's a complicated person." I said, "okay, but so is his girlfriend. Everybody's complicated. The 'complicated man' trope is a tired one, and since women are socialized to be understanding to a fault, manipulators know they can take advantage of people's empathy." He said I was right, apologized for being dismissive, and conceded that Davey was a sociopath.

A few months later, he heard from his friend that Davey had died of an overdose. Because I associated Davey with my abuser, I found it difficult to pretend to be that torn up about it. But Kyle wanted to mourn him. "He was complicated," he explained, "but originally, I liked him more than Alicia* (his friend, name changed). He seemed stressed out to me, a hard working freelance writer... and Alisha was always hounding him." I tried to console him without saying anything I didn't mean. MONTHS later, the morning of our breakup, we were talking about Alicia's exes (sorry, Alicia). He made some remark like, "they were dumb, not evil." I said, "what about the sociopath?" Kyle shut down for the rest of the day. Eventually, over brunch, he said, "don't call Davey a sociopath." I said fine. By 6pm, we had broken up about something else, and only then did he admit that he'd been spiteful and immature.

I know what this sounds like. I hate having to think about it that way. Any perspective on all this would be appreciated. Literally any. I don't know what to think, or I don't want to know. Either way, I need to hear it.