“Staying in a bad relationship is not poetic or beautiful. Staying with someone who hurts you or does not appreciate you is not romantic or beautiful. What’s beautiful is moving on. What’s beautiful is focusing on yourself. Loving who you are.There’s no flower more beautiful than the first to bloom after a harsh winter.” -unknown
I was loyal, that’s what I thought. His “ride or die”. Through thick and thin, nothing could tear us apart. That way of thinking could have and almost did cost me my life.
It started innocently enough, the occasional name-calling. Who doesn’t get angry and spew a name or two in anger at the person they “love”? He didn’t mean it, he only said it because he was mad, plus I was being overly sensitive. It was then that I started making excuses for him. I’m too sensitive, I have actually put on a few pounds so he has a right to call me fat, I shouldn’t have “made him angry”, I need to stop telling him what to do and nagging him.
There was also trust issues that started around this same time. I found women’s phone numbers in his pockets and had people tell me he was cheating. I always believed him when he told me he wasn’t. No matter how clear or convincing the evidence was that he was lying.
I didn’t realize that this was emotional abuse and for me it would later turn into physical abuse. I didn’t realize that I would eventually be making excuses for why he hit me, or why he tried to drown me in our bathroom sink. But that is exactly what happened. He also held a knife to my throat, choked me to the point of almost blacking out several times, bit me (yes he bit me, on my face), and threatened me with a handgun.
It wasn’t until the abuse became physical and I started “googling” things on my computer, that I realized it had actually started long before he ever laid a hand on me. It started with those “innocent remarks” about my appearance. You see he was wearing down my self-confidence, because I was pretty cocky back then, and he couldn’t handle that.
He also isolated me from friends and family. Trust me this was not done in a direct manner. Instead, he would make comments about how he didn’t like certain people, or he would start an argument with me every time I left to go out with someone I knew…..that argument was also not direct, he would say he was mad because I “never spent enough time with him”, instead of saying I don’t want you around so and so.
The problem is your sub-conscious makes note of these things. So eventually you start connecting leaving, with arguing and so you leave a little less….and a little less….until you barely leave at all.
I was so worn down mentally and emotionally that I am not even sure I cared if I lived or died sometimes. He kept me in a state of constant exhaustion and I couldn’t think clearly most of the time. He would wake me up in the middle of the night because something wasn’t “clean enough”, or to question me about anything he could think of. There was times I went several days on only a few hours of sleep.
It took me time to get things together financially so that I could leave him. I didn’t have a steady job because he made working nearly impossible for me, so it was two years in total from the time I decided to leave until I was able to walk out of his life. I fought like hell, went to sleep exhausted but I went no matter what. I wasn’t going to let him keep me from becoming independent of him. I don’t regret leaving. It wasn’t easy and my heart was broken, not for losing him, but for losing the person I thought he was, the relationship I thought we were going to have, and the years of my life I gave to him. It’s a very bittersweet feeling.
Do NOT take these signs lightly, I did, and I regret it every day. I live with the damage staying did to me daily. I developed PTSD, have severe anxiety and trouble sleeping due to vivid night terrors that haunt me regularly. Even with these struggles it is still worth every minute of my life I still have.