It was a long time ago, well over ten years. Still it is hard to write about now.

I was in a relationship that was steadily becoming more and more abusive. There is a saying that relates to how to boil a frog. You don’t put it into boiling water or the frog will jump out, whereas if put into cold water and boiled slowly it will cook. The meaning being that it doesn’t notice the slow and steady nature of what is happening. I am not the first person to describe abusive relationships in this way but can testify to its truth.

I knew she had her demons from the very beginning. But I felt that I could offer her solace and give her the healing she needed. I felt I was doing good.

Over time she became vocally jealous of my friends. Always wanting to know where I was, very demanding of my time and wanting to keep tabs on me. She always imagined the worst regarding my friends, accusing me of cheating, so I ended up hanging out with her friends. Due to a disability it made sense that that I was around a lot for support.

The thing about her friends was they always backed her up. Every argument was my fault, every short coming in the relationship I was to blame and she was always the victim. She never wanted to break up the relationship though and always wanted more control.

In the bedroom, I didn’t want to carry on with what we were doing but she didn’t care about that. She used to shout at me all through the night, keeping me awake. She called my desire to sleep ‘getting beauty sleep’ (though the army know that sleep deprivation is an effective form of torture). The threat of violence did not come from her but from a relative that I saw regularly. He had been arrested for assault a number of times but had never been charged. She used this as a threat when I attempted to assert myself. So in the bedroom I gave her what she was after so that I could stop the shouting. And this carried on for a few months.
I was utterly miserable wanting somehow to both scream at the world and to be released from it.

We did not break up, I escaped. Secretly I had been visiting a website that gave accounts of abusive relationships. After reading the website content I knew my situation was not much different from the accounts given. Over the phone, I confronted her about her behaviour. I wrote down every word of abuse she had used on that call and it filled up two pages.

I then left my flat and hid where she and no one else could find me. She tried to reach me through my family but I had not told them where I was staying. When I returned to the flat it had been vandalised but I was so relieved that she had gone.

Even after this still she tried to reach me. I did see her one last time, to give some stuff back. To this day I remember her last word to me, yelling that I was an idiot in a very public place.

The sense of loneliness that followed is hard to describe. I was a stranger to my own body, nothing and no one could reach me emotionally. Caught between the desire to reach out to someone and knowing that they could not fully understand. What had happened to me just didn’t happen to men.

I did see a counsellor and she re-calibrated me. She told me that everyone has a right to refuse any sexual encounter and not be blackmailed or threatened into doing anything they didn’t want to do. It was so important for me to hear and from that session onward my healing began.

As I say it was a long time ago, well over ten years. I have not been in a serious relationship since.

I have also never been the source of anyone’s misery. I am not the world’s victim (despite her accusing me of being exactly that), but someone who is responsible for my actions despite the horrible things that have been done to me. I know now that I am forever different from her.