No, he wasn't rational. As evidenced by getting suicidal over a relatively short lived romance (a couple years?). It was years in the making though, becoming co-dependent on this girl, who really didn't give a shit about him at all.

When they first split, we could tell he was slipping into some type of psychosis. I immediately got his parents involved, along with the rest of his support network. We talked him into starting up therapy, let his direct boss know what was up, got some HR paperwork rolling so he wouldn't lose his job trying to get mental help (two 3-day suicide watches on a psych ward).

Before the night of her assaulting me, I was actually on talking terms with her, and even enlisted her in trying to get my buddy's head back on straight. He was calling her 5-10 times a day, leaving "take me back I'll do anything" type messages. We had asked her to please not answer or call back anymore, letting her know she hadn't done anything wrong, and it was him that was sick.

But she wouldn't let it go, she would periodically answer the phone, and talk to him hours on end. Giving him hope that they'd get back together. And then ignore him for several days. We even offered to pay her and for her to go see his therapist, so she could get professional advice on how to helpfully deal with such an obsessed and mentally unwell individual; she refused. But what she didn't refuse, was to keep answering that damn phone and edging him along. She seemed to like the control, and in a fucked up kind of way, the attention.

In court, when she was being held to account for her assault on me, she claimed that she had attacked me in order to get him to hate her. She said she figured I was the person he next loved the most, and she wanted him to gravitate back into my sphere, away from her. But that's not what she was screaming that night. She called the other girl a slut (the other girl locked inside the house), and how my friend was a piece of shit for having cheated(!), and that the other girl would leave his sorry ass too.

She lied right there in court, stared me straight in the eyes after too, brushing away her fake tears. She was convince that everybody had bought her story, and that she was the victim in it all.

And then the prosecutor called into evidence a recording I gave to him when he had first contacted me as the affected victim in the case. The recording? A voicemail that she had left me within the first several visceral days after my best friend's suicide. When the funeral was still being arranged -- and it was a big one, my buddy had so many loved ones in his life given his age -- my buddy's mom asked me to call the ex and let her know she didn't want anything to do with her, and that she wasn't welcome at the funeral.

Her response to all that in the voicemail, having been forbidden from the funeral, now being played in front of everyone in the courtroom?:

You fucking piece of shit, I don't want to be at that goddamned funeral anyway, no way I want to see his dead bloated body! He was a piece of shit just like you, good riddance and I hope he's in hell!

Those fake tears burned right off her ugly face real quick, you could see her grinding her teeth, turning beet red with seething anger. Finally, the bitch had to shut the fuck up.

So yes, you're right, he was not rational. But I respectfully disagree that there isn't at least some degree of blame that she deserves.

(And sorry if it sounds like I'm dumping on you, I'm not meaning to. It's been a while since I've been able to vent about it all. Such drama, it occasionally bubbles up, will always be a tattoo on my soul.)

Unless you have been with someone like that you don't get it. They break you down until you feel worthless so when they leave you have nothing.

I dated someone like that took me months to get to the point where I could even accept a pity date. Was so convinced that I was hideous.