Inspired by #whyistayed
I’ve been trying to write this post for months now, and it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve tried being cryptic, I’ve tried being angry, I’ve tried every style that I know how to try, but it’s never worked, so this time, I’m going with bald facts.
I spent about 4 years or so in an emotionally abusive relationship.
I know that a fair number of people who read this also read her blog, and I’m not trying to poison you against her, or anything of that sort. I don’t think that she’s a bad person, and I’m not angry with her. For a long time, I thought that I’d just tuck my story away forever, because it’s easiest, and because my life was and is still tangled up in hers in many ways. But the #whyistayed tweets are really making me rethink that decision, so here’s my story.div>It didn’t start out that way. In fact, for quite some time, it was a great relationship. I was head-over-heels in love with her, and through getting to know her and exploring lesbian feminism and queer theory with her was truly an invaluable experience. I knew from the get-go that she had a somewhat difficult personality, and that there were many people on campus who disliked her, but we got along very well. The first things to go wrong hardly even counted. Our first big fight was over an occasion of underage drinking that had taken place months before we started dating. Soon after, she cheated on me, lied about it, and was unapologetic when she finally told me the truth. She left for study abroad right after that, and we kept our relationship going for a full eight months. When she came back, we started rooming together, and that was when things got really bad, really fast.
All of a sudden, it felt like we were a unit. She bought tons and tons of clothes for me, and picked my outfits out. I found it charming. We opened up our relationship, and she started seeing someone on the side, but constantly minimized my concerns and worries about it. At the same time, she began to get extremely jealous of my friends and the time I spent with them, so I eventually stopped hanging out with them. I spent a lot of time alone in my dorm room, listening to sad music and staring off into space, because I was so deeply unhappy.
I could never do anything right. I was always too messy, too disorganized, too loud. We would go into stores, and she would apologize to the store clerks for me, before I had even done anything to merit an apology. “Sorry,” she would say, “She isn’t from around here.” We would have huge arguments over the most trivial of things. Once, we got into a fight because I thought she had been cruel to a mutual friend. She responded by dumping me. Another time, she wouldn’t speak to me for a whole day because I didn’t want to have sex with her for religious reasons (it was Ramadan, and I was fasting.) We started a D/s relationship, which was fun to begin with, but which eventually became another way for her to control my body. She forbade me to masturbate. Over the years, when I expressed my discomfort at the continued confines of this dynamic, she said that the rules couldn’t be changed, except by dissolving the D/s relationship, and to do so would put our romantic relationship at risk.
She monitored my texts, and wanted to know where I was at all times. When I had to be at class or at modern dance club, she would invest that time in her secondary partner instead. I got so anxious that year that I stopped eating. Her text tone was enough to give me a panic attack, because texts usually led to encounters with her secondary partner that led to comparisons between the two of us. I gave up meat because she hated that I still ate it, and she leveraged her partner's vegetarianism against me.
One night, it got even uglier. She commanded me to strip and bend over the bed. I didn’t really want to have sex, but didn’t feel like I could say no, so I complied. She jammed her fingers into my vagina, and I don’t know if it was a lack of arousal or what, but it felt like I was being ripped apart. I screamed from the pain, she withdrew her fingers, threw me aside, and went to bed, leaving me on the floor, crying. After what felt like an eternity, she made a comment about how I was wasting our precious time together acting ridiculously. I meekly picked myself off and went to bed next to her. She made no attempt to comfort me.
Every now and again, I reread the chats I have saved from my year in Trinidad. They make me sick. They are about 50% cute, fluffy interactions, full of loving words and pet names, and 50% fights. This is an excerpt from a particularly stupid one:
Me: I need to go shopping for a hostess gift for your mom very soon.
S: Channa. Seriously. Or one of those prints you brought me a few summers ago.
Me: I was going to bring channa, anyway! But yeah, I was thinking about a print like that.
S: (Why did you bring me that print in the first place?)
me: (Because I wanted, in some way, to show you what my country was like. It was important at the time.)
S: (It made no sense.)
me: (It made sense to me.) (It was important to me, even!)
S: (But part of that importance was conveying a message to me. That didn't work out very well.)
me: (I know. But I couldn't think of what else I could give you to convey that message.)
S: (A picture.)
me: (It is a picture! I like that particular artist, because her paintings really evoke what Trinidad feels like when I'm not angry at it.)(I know you were confused by it, and I know you didn't particular like the print, and I'm sorry.)
S: (The inability to describe things must be a cultural trait.)
me: (Oh, I don't know. The artist is kind of scribbly, but there are houses and yards that look a lot like that.)(Anyway, I'm sorry. I really hoped that you'd like it.)
S: (You also hoped I'd understand your country.)(If I described what it feels like to drive down [specific road] at midnight in the summer with a friend and a bottle of coke to share, would you get a picture of [her home state])
me: (Not really. I'd get a picture of what [home state] meant to you at that certain time.)
S: (But if I described that to [friend 1]or [friend 2], they'd know exactly what I was talking about.)
me: (Okay, this conversation really hurts, because I did spend a great deal of time trying to find something that started to explain my country and who I was at the time. I'm sorry I got you a crappy gift, and I'm sorry you didn't like it.)
S: (No matter how many times we have this discussion, you will never understand.)
me: (Never understand what?)
S: (THAT YOU DIDN'T NEED TO GIVE ME A GIFT PERIOD. THAT YOU MADE OUR RELATIONSHIP AWKWARD.)
me: (See, I didn't think that it would make our relationship awkward. S, I am really sorry, okay. I shouldn't have got you anything.)
S: (You should probably just go nap.)
me: (Probably. But I don't get why this makes you angry.)
S: (Patterns of consumption.)
me: (It's moot at this point. I don't really plan on buying you gifts anymore.)I'll make them. It's much better that way.
S: (If you can manage to finish them and convince yourself to give them.)
me: (shrugs After Ice Queen, I think I'm able to give you anything. And I've already finished your Christmas gift for this year.)(I get that I fail at giving gifts. I'm trying to fix that.)
S: (What are you doing about Christmas for people this year, then?)me: (Socks for my mom, a nice shirt for my dad, charitable donations for Lawrence and Mary. I haven't yet figured out what for Karen's family, because I don't have money in my US account to buy things with. Cards and little Trini treats for Heather, Sarah and Ashley (plus Becca if I can get her address.))
S: (And Tammi?)
me: (Yarn and a pattern!)(Nice yarn. Non-wool, too, because she's allergic.)(We're doing gift exchange after Christmas, and you said that we could go yarn shopping for her while I was visiting.)
S: (Yep.)(If you have a pattern in mind, we could even mine my stash.)
me: (See. I'm not a complete gift fuckup this year.)(I was thinking maybe something with lace. There's not much else that would be of use in Trinidad.)
S: (You normally manage everyone else's gift while fucking up mine.)
Here’s another snippet:
S: I've started sleeping with [on-again-off-again partner] again.She tested clean, and I don't have a better outlet.
me: Oh. shrugs
S: It's not like you have any sex drive available for me.
me: When'd you start?
S:A week or so ago.
me: Ah.
Yes, that makes sense.
shrugs I guess that's my own damn fault.
S: I tried, Aliyah. I did. I tried so hard to create some sot of sexual anything with you.
me: Believe me, S. I know.
S: And you kept telling me that you just didn't have a sex drive at all.
me: S, I just want to be back together with you, living in the same place, so that things will be back to normal again. I hate this.
S: Doing nothing would make me resent you more than having a sexual outlet.
me: I know, and I'm not angry, because I know that it wouldn't have happened like this if I had a proper sex drive, and could give you what you needed.
S: If you hate this so much, why did you stay [in Trinidad]? Why did you go [to Trinidad] in the first place?
me: I don't know.
These two examples don’t seem particularly disturbing taken out of context, but imagine having stupid fights over nothing every day. They always ended in me apologizing profusely, and she berating me because I had thrown a fit and was acting like a martyr. Everything was grounds for a fight: we fought about my growing friendship with my brother’s then-girlfriend, about my use of time and money, about my various shortcomings. Once, we fought because she had found a draft of a thank-you note I had written to a friend that included the words “I love you,” and she thought I’d been cheating on her. We fought because I’d do sex talk wrong and break the mood. We fought because my lunch breaks were too long. We fought because I was boring and didn’t start interesting conversations with her.
There’s a lot of insulting my family that takes place in these chats. Every other one includes bits about how my father or brother are awful people. That was another hallmark of our relationship: she systematically tried to poison my relationship with my family. Every time someone objected to her behavior, she told me that they were trying to ruin my life because they didn’t like that I am gay. While it’s true that they still aren’t fond of my queerness, I’ve come to learn that a large part of their objections were to her specifically and not my gayness. But during my relationship, I felt so very alienated and lonely. There was nobody that I felt like I could confide in, because I knew on some level that they would think that there was something wrong with the relationship.
When I was in Trinidad, I tried to reach out to some of my friends from school. One of them, Vaneeta, is an air traffic controller, and she invited me to go spend a weekend with her while she was in Tobago. I made my plans, and everything was organized, but hours before I was supposed to leave, my ex decided that she was worried that I’d cheat on her. She gave me an ultimatum: either I cancelled my trip, or I would have to get retested for STDs after six weeks, and of course, we wouldn’t be able to have sex during a visit that I had just planned. I knew from experience that it would end badly, so I decided to make a sacrifice for the sake of my marriage, and I cancelled the trip.
In the years that we were together, I made every attempt to set boundaries, only to have them completely ignored. Every time I expressed my discomfort with her non-monogamy, my concerns were swept aside, or else made the grounds for a huge fight. I asked her to not live with other people while I was away, and she did. I asked her to keep her dalliances out of our household and bedroom, and then her partner started living with us. By the end of my marriage, I felt like I’d been backed into a corner; like I had nothing left to give up, because I had already given everything up.
And then it ended.
And aside from a suicide attempt that I couldn’t bring myself more than halfway through, I made it through.
And for the most part, I’m okay now. I’ve moved past that terrible part of my life. But I don’t ever want to forget what happened to me. Ever.
And I guess, now you know, too.
I spent about 4 years or so in an emotionally abusive relationship.
I know that a fair number of people who read this also read her blog, and I’m not trying to poison you against her, or anything of that sort. I don’t think that she’s a bad person, and I’m not angry with her. For a long time, I thought that I’d just tuck my story away forever, because it’s easiest, and because my life was and is still tangled up in hers in many ways. But the #whyistayed tweets are really making me rethink that decision, so here’s my story.div>It didn’t start out that way. In fact, for quite some time, it was a great relationship. I was head-over-heels in love with her, and through getting to know her and exploring lesbian feminism and queer theory with her was truly an invaluable experience. I knew from the get-go that she had a somewhat difficult personality, and that there were many people on campus who disliked her, but we got along very well. The first things to go wrong hardly even counted. Our first big fight was over an occasion of underage drinking that had taken place months before we started dating. Soon after, she cheated on me, lied about it, and was unapologetic when she finally told me the truth. She left for study abroad right after that, and we kept our relationship going for a full eight months. When she came back, we started rooming together, and that was when things got really bad, really fast.
All of a sudden, it felt like we were a unit. She bought tons and tons of clothes for me, and picked my outfits out. I found it charming. We opened up our relationship, and she started seeing someone on the side, but constantly minimized my concerns and worries about it. At the same time, she began to get extremely jealous of my friends and the time I spent with them, so I eventually stopped hanging out with them. I spent a lot of time alone in my dorm room, listening to sad music and staring off into space, because I was so deeply unhappy.
I could never do anything right. I was always too messy, too disorganized, too loud. We would go into stores, and she would apologize to the store clerks for me, before I had even done anything to merit an apology. “Sorry,” she would say, “She isn’t from around here.” We would have huge arguments over the most trivial of things. Once, we got into a fight because I thought she had been cruel to a mutual friend. She responded by dumping me. Another time, she wouldn’t speak to me for a whole day because I didn’t want to have sex with her for religious reasons (it was Ramadan, and I was fasting.) We started a D/s relationship, which was fun to begin with, but which eventually became another way for her to control my body. She forbade me to masturbate. Over the years, when I expressed my discomfort at the continued confines of this dynamic, she said that the rules couldn’t be changed, except by dissolving the D/s relationship, and to do so would put our romantic relationship at risk.
She monitored my texts, and wanted to know where I was at all times. When I had to be at class or at modern dance club, she would invest that time in her secondary partner instead. I got so anxious that year that I stopped eating. Her text tone was enough to give me a panic attack, because texts usually led to encounters with her secondary partner that led to comparisons between the two of us. I gave up meat because she hated that I still ate it, and she leveraged her partner's vegetarianism against me.
One night, it got even uglier. She commanded me to strip and bend over the bed. I didn’t really want to have sex, but didn’t feel like I could say no, so I complied. She jammed her fingers into my vagina, and I don’t know if it was a lack of arousal or what, but it felt like I was being ripped apart. I screamed from the pain, she withdrew her fingers, threw me aside, and went to bed, leaving me on the floor, crying. After what felt like an eternity, she made a comment about how I was wasting our precious time together acting ridiculously. I meekly picked myself off and went to bed next to her. She made no attempt to comfort me.
Every now and again, I reread the chats I have saved from my year in Trinidad. They make me sick. They are about 50% cute, fluffy interactions, full of loving words and pet names, and 50% fights. This is an excerpt from a particularly stupid one:
Me: I need to go shopping for a hostess gift for your mom very soon.
S: Channa. Seriously. Or one of those prints you brought me a few summers ago.
Me: I was going to bring channa, anyway! But yeah, I was thinking about a print like that.
S: (Why did you bring me that print in the first place?)
me: (Because I wanted, in some way, to show you what my country was like. It was important at the time.)
S: (It made no sense.)
me: (It made sense to me.) (It was important to me, even!)
S: (But part of that importance was conveying a message to me. That didn't work out very well.)
me: (I know. But I couldn't think of what else I could give you to convey that message.)
S: (A picture.)
me: (It is a picture! I like that particular artist, because her paintings really evoke what Trinidad feels like when I'm not angry at it.)(I know you were confused by it, and I know you didn't particular like the print, and I'm sorry.)
S: (The inability to describe things must be a cultural trait.)
me: (Oh, I don't know. The artist is kind of scribbly, but there are houses and yards that look a lot like that.)(Anyway, I'm sorry. I really hoped that you'd like it.)
S: (You also hoped I'd understand your country.)(If I described what it feels like to drive down [specific road] at midnight in the summer with a friend and a bottle of coke to share, would you get a picture of [her home state])
me: (Not really. I'd get a picture of what [home state] meant to you at that certain time.)
S: (But if I described that to [friend 1]or [friend 2], they'd know exactly what I was talking about.)
me: (Okay, this conversation really hurts, because I did spend a great deal of time trying to find something that started to explain my country and who I was at the time. I'm sorry I got you a crappy gift, and I'm sorry you didn't like it.)
S: (No matter how many times we have this discussion, you will never understand.)
me: (Never understand what?)
S: (THAT YOU DIDN'T NEED TO GIVE ME A GIFT PERIOD. THAT YOU MADE OUR RELATIONSHIP AWKWARD.)
me: (See, I didn't think that it would make our relationship awkward. S, I am really sorry, okay. I shouldn't have got you anything.)
S: (You should probably just go nap.)
me: (Probably. But I don't get why this makes you angry.)
S: (Patterns of consumption.)
me: (It's moot at this point. I don't really plan on buying you gifts anymore.)I'll make them. It's much better that way.
S: (If you can manage to finish them and convince yourself to give them.)
me: (shrugs After Ice Queen, I think I'm able to give you anything. And I've already finished your Christmas gift for this year.)(I get that I fail at giving gifts. I'm trying to fix that.)
S: (What are you doing about Christmas for people this year, then?)me: (Socks for my mom, a nice shirt for my dad, charitable donations for Lawrence and Mary. I haven't yet figured out what for Karen's family, because I don't have money in my US account to buy things with. Cards and little Trini treats for Heather, Sarah and Ashley (plus Becca if I can get her address.))
S: (And Tammi?)
me: (Yarn and a pattern!)(Nice yarn. Non-wool, too, because she's allergic.)(We're doing gift exchange after Christmas, and you said that we could go yarn shopping for her while I was visiting.)
S: (Yep.)(If you have a pattern in mind, we could even mine my stash.)
me: (See. I'm not a complete gift fuckup this year.)(I was thinking maybe something with lace. There's not much else that would be of use in Trinidad.)
S: (You normally manage everyone else's gift while fucking up mine.)
Here’s another snippet:
S: I've started sleeping with [on-again-off-again partner] again.She tested clean, and I don't have a better outlet.
me: Oh. shrugs
S: It's not like you have any sex drive available for me.
me: When'd you start?
S:A week or so ago.
me: Ah.
Yes, that makes sense.
shrugs I guess that's my own damn fault.
S: I tried, Aliyah. I did. I tried so hard to create some sot of sexual anything with you.
me: Believe me, S. I know.
S: And you kept telling me that you just didn't have a sex drive at all.
me: S, I just want to be back together with you, living in the same place, so that things will be back to normal again. I hate this.
S: Doing nothing would make me resent you more than having a sexual outlet.
me: I know, and I'm not angry, because I know that it wouldn't have happened like this if I had a proper sex drive, and could give you what you needed.
S: If you hate this so much, why did you stay [in Trinidad]? Why did you go [to Trinidad] in the first place?
me: I don't know.
These two examples don’t seem particularly disturbing taken out of context, but imagine having stupid fights over nothing every day. They always ended in me apologizing profusely, and she berating me because I had thrown a fit and was acting like a martyr. Everything was grounds for a fight: we fought about my growing friendship with my brother’s then-girlfriend, about my use of time and money, about my various shortcomings. Once, we fought because she had found a draft of a thank-you note I had written to a friend that included the words “I love you,” and she thought I’d been cheating on her. We fought because I’d do sex talk wrong and break the mood. We fought because my lunch breaks were too long. We fought because I was boring and didn’t start interesting conversations with her.
There’s a lot of insulting my family that takes place in these chats. Every other one includes bits about how my father or brother are awful people. That was another hallmark of our relationship: she systematically tried to poison my relationship with my family. Every time someone objected to her behavior, she told me that they were trying to ruin my life because they didn’t like that I am gay. While it’s true that they still aren’t fond of my queerness, I’ve come to learn that a large part of their objections were to her specifically and not my gayness. But during my relationship, I felt so very alienated and lonely. There was nobody that I felt like I could confide in, because I knew on some level that they would think that there was something wrong with the relationship.
When I was in Trinidad, I tried to reach out to some of my friends from school. One of them, Vaneeta, is an air traffic controller, and she invited me to go spend a weekend with her while she was in Tobago. I made my plans, and everything was organized, but hours before I was supposed to leave, my ex decided that she was worried that I’d cheat on her. She gave me an ultimatum: either I cancelled my trip, or I would have to get retested for STDs after six weeks, and of course, we wouldn’t be able to have sex during a visit that I had just planned. I knew from experience that it would end badly, so I decided to make a sacrifice for the sake of my marriage, and I cancelled the trip.
In the years that we were together, I made every attempt to set boundaries, only to have them completely ignored. Every time I expressed my discomfort with her non-monogamy, my concerns were swept aside, or else made the grounds for a huge fight. I asked her to not live with other people while I was away, and she did. I asked her to keep her dalliances out of our household and bedroom, and then her partner started living with us. By the end of my marriage, I felt like I’d been backed into a corner; like I had nothing left to give up, because I had already given everything up.
And then it ended.
And aside from a suicide attempt that I couldn’t bring myself more than halfway through, I made it through.
And for the most part, I’m okay now. I’ve moved past that terrible part of my life. But I don’t ever want to forget what happened to me. Ever.
And I guess, now you know, too.