Had I known where to draw the line, I would have seen the warning signs and I would have done something about it. For me, the line was so fuzzy, I didn’t know what to put up with and what was actually abusive. I would see these warning signs and then make excuses for them. It isn’t nuanced, it isn’t confusing, and it isn’t unclear. I want to tell you that actually, it isn’t fuzzy.
I want to tell young girls loud and clear what is okay and what isn’t okay. ” Society doesn’t draw the line well enough, or soon enough, and it leaves the door open for abusers to do what they do. Millions, probably billions, of women have had relationships that fall in the smudge, and so many of them justify what happened by saying, “W ell, it wasn’t that bad, so I just let it go. The line is more like a smudge of ink, and actions that actually are abuse seem to get justified because they are stuck in the smudge-y parts, so no one can be sure that they actually are abuse. If it had never gotten so extreme, it would have still been abuse, but I don’t know if I would be able to be as sure about that as I am now. The reason for this is that our society draws a blurry, unclear, inconsistent line for what abuse really is. It’s pretty obvious, because it was so extreme.īut, I wonder, had it not been that extreme, would I still think it was clearly abuse? I know now that what my ex did to me, starting from just the first week of us dating, was abuse, but the reason I know that is because of how it all ended so horribly. All of that really helped me decide that I do identify with the word “survivor.” When people hear my story, they don’t question that I’m a survivor. It was also clearly illegal, and a judge knew that and put him in prison. What happened to me was clearly abuse, and clearly crossed a line. Ultimately, he found himself in the hands of very capable and motivated police officers and district attorneys, and was given a plea deal of 2 years in prison, just after he had turned 18.
He broke into my house twice and stalked me relentlessly. After 11 months I was finally able to break up with him, only to find that he wasn’t done with me just yet. By eight months in, he was raping me nightly.
He hit me, strangled me, slapped me and left bruises on my neck beginning around five months into our relationship. Much later, it even turned into him going to prison. All I saw then was mildly abusive and manipulative behavior, but what it turned into was months and months of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I didn’t know then that the relationship I was in would eventually come to define my entire existence. Now, as an adult, I look at those behavioral patterns and wonder how I could have been so grossly naïve and completely ignorant of the red flags when he would wave them in my face. Of course, I now have the benefit of hindsight, I now know what I didn’t know then – what he would ultimately do to me, to my body, to my family, to my life. He told me sex was the way for me to earn his trust. He relentlessly accused me of cheating on him. When we fought, he was never wrong, and I always ended up apologizing and begging for him to forgive me. He was a compulsive liar, and would lie his way out of anything.
He became jealous, manipulative, controlling. When I think back to this time, I get angry at myself for not “catching the warning signs fast enough,” and there were, indeed, plenty of warning signs.
#Young souls manipulators skin
As a young and impressionable soul, hungry for what my friends called “love,” the dreamy boy who was two years older than me – who had devastatingly creamy skin and a blinding white smile, who told me he “loved” me – was all I needed to consider myself the luckiest girl in the world. As a 22-year-old woman, I often look back to seven years ago, when a 15-year-old version of myself met a boy, and quickly became trapped in his manipulation.
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