An Affinity reader was inspired by the article on teenage dating violence, that she was courgeous enough to share her story of being abused. She was brave enough to share her experience, and I thank her.
I met Christie at orientation on my first day of university. I can’t say there was anything remarkable about our introduction, but when she added me on Facebook later that night I couldn’t help but notice that like myself, she was a girl who happened to be into girls. Having just moved to Vancouver, I was anxious to make new friends, so when she offered to show me around the city I didn’t think twice about accepting her invitation. We got along really well right off the bat and there was no denying our immediate chemistry. I was elated at what seemed to be a wonderful friendship that had space to move into a relationship potentially, it was a great start to my university experience. Pretty soon we were seeing each other casually, and looking back now this is where the red flags started popping up. She’d insist that we spend a lot of time together, even if I wasn’t always in the mood. She’d ask if I wanted to come over after class to study and have dinner and I’d tell her I was tired or had a project to work on and instead of accepting my “no” she would practically beg and guilt trip until eventually I would relent. At the time I figured she just really liked me and wanted to spend as much time as possible with me, what I didn’t know was that this was the beginning of her controlling my life. She would use these tactics in almost every aspect of our relationship, every “no” was the beginning of a negotiation. Our relationship progressed much faster than I had anticipated or was comfortable with and by the end of the month we were an item.
It seems ridiculous now, but at the time I truly felt like I was dating someone who honestly respected me and who would never hurt me. Things were pretty turbulence free in the first year, aside from two things that stand out to me in hindsight. The first was when I went home over the holidays to visit my family she texted me constantly and would get angry when I wouldn’t reply quickly enough. She’d mope around when I was gone and made me feel awful for wanting to spend time away from her. Looking back now, I know that this is because she was jealous that I had relationships that existed outside of her, and being able to spend time with other people who loved me freed me from the emotional codependence she had been fostering. She wanted to be the only person in my life who made me happy so that the impact of making her upset would have more power over me. The second abusive thing she would do was buy me really expensive gifts, seemingly out of nowhere. She loved to surprise me with clothes, flowers or food, which honestly made me feel very uncomfortable seeing as we were broke art students and she definitely couldn’t afford to shower me with these presents all the time. The guilt I felt over receiving these things was another tactic she had of controlling me, I felt like I had to repay her for these unwarranted presents with my body and my emotional availability. Every time she did something that upset me, she would buy me something nice to make up for it and then use that nice thing she had bought me to guilt me into not being mad at her anymore. The surprise presents existed as a way of ensuring that I always owed her something. There were never any genuine apologies from Christie, just ways to realign the guilt.
At the end of our first year of university I went home for the summer to visit my family once again. This really upset Christie, all summer long she would constantly be sending me guilt trip texts about how poorly she was doing without me. She felt abandoned by me, even though I was only spending a couple of months at home which is a healthy and normal thing for a 19 year old girl to want to do. The way she missed me wasn’t healthy, she wasn’t longing for her partner to be back by her side, she was demanding that I return to her and continue my duty as her emotional punching bag. I was never a person with my own needs to Christie, I was a thing that existed to make her feel loved and fulfilled, my absence to her was a betrayal. At the end of the summer I was emotionally exhausted from having to deal with the constant guilt trips and fights, but I thought that if I just returned to Vancouver everything would fall into place and we’d be back to normal in no time, or at least this is what I hoped for seeing as we had signed a lease and were moving in together in a week or two. That’s when I found out that Christie had been cheating on me all summer with multiple girls. I had two choices: leave and be homeless or stay and be miserable. I chose the latter, and thus began the worst eight months of my entire life. Christie’s infidelity wasn’t exactly a secret, she simply decided one day that we were in an open relationship and that if I wasn’t okay with it then I was being a bad partner.
I couldn’t leave, because I didn’t feel like I was able to. Emotional abuse is an ongoing erosion of your self esteem. Your abuser slowly and carefully finds ways to control every aspect of your life and will convince you that if you doubt them that you’re crazy. Christie ensured that she was my top priority and that everything came second to her, including my art, my friends, my happiness and my health. I honestly felt that without her in my life I would cease to be. I was miserable and heart broken, living with a person who claimed to love me but didn’t respect me enough to be loyal to me. The open relationship was of course a one way street, if I tried to go on a date with anyone it would cause her to have a jealous fit that I would then need to calm her down from. It was so unfair, she could act however she wanted towards me and I had to tolerate it but if I ever wanted anything I was left to deal with my emotions completely alone. She shut down on me emotionally, especially when I needed her more than ever. Two months into us living together, a friend of mine back home tragically committed suicide. This triggered my breakdown, I couldn’t get through a day without crying. Christie would find me huddled up in a closet sobbing my eyes out, pull me up by my arm and instead of comfort me like the loving girlfriend she supposedly was, would angrily tell me that I needed to get myself together and leave me alone sobbing. I was a mess and she did nothing to support me, in fact I think it must have really bothered her that suddenly my emotional needs were at the forefront of our relationship for once and that I required more attention than she was willing to give. A few weeks later she terminated our relationship in the midst of my emotional crisis. The night she broke up with my felt like the end of my life. I thought I was completely empty then, like someone had come and scoped up all my insides and sewn me back up again. I was hollow, but little did I know that I was free.
Somehow I moved on, I mourned my friend’s loss and dealt with the pain Christie had put me through with my art. I buried myself in my work as a means of survival. I became manic, unable to sit still for even a moment because a second of silence would mean I had to confront my situation. On my own, I found ways of becoming whole once again, but unfortunately my pain was far from over. Christie and I still had to live together, had to share a bed even. We were unable to get out of our lease early and had three other roommates that relied on us to pay rent. I was trapped, my life still tied to Christie’s but with none of the substance that held it together. That’s when she started being really nice to me again. Without the burden of our relationship, it was almost as if she was able to view me as an equal. My life no longer revolved around her and that’s when she decided she wanted me back. Right before I was to go home for the holidays she apologized and asked me to be her girlfriend again and for some reason I said yes. After the initial month of what you could call a honeymoon period, she was back to her old abusive self, except far worse than before. All of my hard work I did trying to prioritize myself over the winter months quickly crumbled, and once more she became the soul focus of my life. Living with her was like walking through a mine-field. Anything could set her off, and once she was upset her only goal was to make me feel worse about myself. She spent a lot of time going out with friends at this point, long nights at bars while I lay in bed unable to sleep knowing that she was no doubt in another girl’s arms. I tried to tell her how much this hurt me, how lonely she made me feel but once again my needs were always second to hers. Any emotional reassurance or validation I wanted from her was unreasonable, how dare I ask for my girlfriend to just act like a girlfriend?
I wish I could say that I finally got fed up and left her but that wouldn’t be true. There wasn’t a triumphant moment where I left my abuser, instead I felt more as though she had discarded me when I outlived my usefulness. She broke up with me again around the time my school year was ending. No reason given, just that she didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore. I cried again and I went home to see my family. Once I was with the people who loved and supported me though, I realized just what I had been through. I started to really rebuild this time, not just cope. I distanced myself from her completely and finally began taking hold of my life for the first time in two years. With distance and time I started to recognize her behaviour for what it really was: emotional abuse. There’s still the residual effects of her abuse that permeate my life, like being afraid of asking for emotional reassurance from people I love and feeling like any time a person is upset around me it is automatically my fault. I’m working on repairing the damage Christie did to my self esteem. I’ve started forming healthier relationships, both platonic and romantic. Emotional abuse is so dangerous because it’s almost invisible. To everyone on the outside, Christie and I were a happy couple. Even I had difficulty recognizing the abuse for what it was because the very nature of emotional abuse renders you incapable of trusting your instincts. It took me a long time to realize that love should never hurt. If you’re in a relationship and you feel like your partner might be emotionally abusive take a step back and ask yourself a few questions. Do they respect you and treat you as a person who is equal? When they do something that upsets you, can you talk about it with them without it turning into a fight? When they apologize, do they acknowledge what they did and try to make amends or do they shift the blame to you by saying things like “I’m sorry you got so mad”? Do they get upset when you spend time with other people, especially close friends and family? When you say no, do they listen or do they begin to negotiate? Someone who loves you won’t treat you like you’re lesser, in fact they’ll do everything they can to support you. It took me two years to realize that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way and my only regret is that I didn’t listen to my instincts which were telling me that this wasn’t right. My life has improved so much since Christie stopped being a part of it and now I find it hard to believe that I ever thought that she was making it better.
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