I Didn’t Know I Was Being Abused By My Boyfriend

One of my biggest failures in my life is staying in a relationship with someone who was making me miserable. He made me feel like crap for a good part of our relationship. He would always be comparing me to other girls, calling me dumb and boring among other things. There was always something to complain about with him.

While he saw these insults as light banter, they hurt me.

We dated for 2 years.

At the time of the relationship, I didn’t know I was being abused. I was young and naive. Without the physical scars, it can be hard to see how bad we’re hurting inside.

Near the end of the relationship, I remember crying almost every night wondering what I did wrong.

But it wasn’t me. It was always him.

The irony was he always thought he was such a catch because, in his words, he didn’t smoke, drink or gamble. He made himself out to be a literal saint that all women should be fawning over because of his “virtuous” nature.

Of course he blamed me when we broke up. He even took to insulting my family at what would be our last conversation so that was a nice little cherry on top.

I came out of that relationship a different person, and not in a good way. It took me a long time to rebuild myself. But I still think about that relationship from time to time and blame my cowardice for letting it go on for so long.

There were many moments where I should’ve dumped his ass long before we actually ended it, but two stand out in my mind:

Our first date

He grabbed my hand as we were walking across the street to a little Thai restaurant and I had an immediate gut feeling that this wasn’t right. There wasn’t anything alarming about the gesture. It wasn’t a hard grab and the rest of the date wasn’t that memorable.

But I should’ve trusted that voice when he grabbed my hand. Instead I chose to ignore it and went on another date and another one for 730 days.

I could’ve avoided a lot of pain if I had listened to my gut that night.

My friend said I was lucky

My friend and my boyfriend were good friends. The three of us were hanging out at her place one night when the topic of relationships came up. She was single at the time and saying how hard it was to find someone and she casually mentioned how lucky I was. As I looked at my boyfriend, the first thought that popped into my head wasn’t “Yeah, I am pretty lucky” but instead, “Actually, not really.”

In any relationship, you should be grateful to have them in your life, and they feel the same about you. Fate, luck, and timing might have initially brought you together, but if you’re in a bad relationship, that feeling of gratitude and luck will run out, and you’re left with a person you wish weren’t there.

The abuse was subtle

He didn’t hit me or yell at me. His form of abuse was more subtle. He wore me down by criticizing and belittling me. Even the way I wore my hair warranted his opinion.

He called these subtle comments constructive criticism and said I was too sensitive when I spoke up. I now know it was verbal abuse and he was gaslighting me.

The abuse didn’t happen every day but looking back, I don’t remember even one nice comment from him. Most of the memories I have are negative.

Abuse doesn’t necessarily mean being physically harmed or screamed at. There is also the discreet and subtle kind. The kind that eats away at your self-esteem over time and makes you question yourself until you become a mere speck of your former self.

I came out of that relationship a different person, and it took me a long time to get over that part of my life. I felt so stupid after (and during) that relationship. I wondered how I could’ve let it continue for so long. My self-confidence was shot after that experience. When you love yourself less, all you want is for that person who’s causing your pain to love you more.

Sometimes I think back on that relationship and beat myself up all over again. I can’t believe I didn’t realize I was being abused for two years. When abuse is discreet and when you’re emotionally invested, abuse is hard to recognize and even harder to accept. I may sound ignorant but I didn’t know how abusive that relationship was until I finally got out of it.

I can’t pretend it never happened. The only thing I can do is to forgive myself and let the wounds scab over.

I read that to start the healing process, you need to see yourself as a survivor not a victim. This is very true and probably the reason I still have bad dreams about this relationship even though it was over 10 years ago. Victimizing myself was not the right path to start healing. It never is. Once we see ourselves as survivors rather than victims, we take our power back from our abuser. We become warriors instead and it makes us stronger than we believe ourselves to be.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” — Jean Paul Sartre

The first step to changing your life is always the hardest. We become attached to our current lives, regardless of how painful it is. The future is uncertain at best so it’s much easier to stay in a situation that’s predictable than change our lives only to step into the unknown.

If you’re being abused, I hope that you know you’re strong enough to walk away. Uncertainty is not that scary especially when compared to the everyday fear you live in. Your value and worth is so much more than the words of someone who only pretends to love you.

This story was originally published on Medium