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My First Love

How It Nearly Destroyed Me

By Dee ZeePublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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When you think of love, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Happiness? Starting a family? Butterflies in your belly? I thought all of those too. Until it nearly destroyed me as a person.

I was 16 years old, and like any other 16-year-old, I thought I knew it all. I knew exactly who I was, what I wanted in life, and nothing and no one was going to stop that. That was, until I met her. Yes, her. I met this girl through some mutual friends, lets call her Leah. Well, Leah and I hit it off really fast. I thought she was super cute, and a great person. We began to talk almost none stop every day. She made me feel loved, beautiful, smart, sexy, etc. I finally caved and agreed to go out with her after she bugged me for months.

After dating for three months, I thought I was in love. She had convinced me to leave home, to move in with her. The way she spoke to me about it should of been my wake up call that it was the beginning of a awful relationship. I thought she was going to be the love of my life, and she told me if I didn't leave home and live with her, she would leave me. I should of let her leave me. But I was foolish enough to allow her to start brainwashing me. So, I left home, I moved in with her living with her great grandma.

Not even two weeks after moving in with her, she went out to spend some time with one of her friends, while she was out she texted me and told me that she had cheated on me with this friend. Little did I know, this would of been the first of many times this would happen. I should of then called my parents and asked to come home, but I left them so hurt and angry that there was no way I could go home now, at least, so I thought.

In my mind, she had been honest and came right out to tell me, so things were okay, and I forgave her. She went on to cheat on me a good dozen times with this same person. Also a good dozen times or more with multiple other people. She would make me feel crazy, worthless, ugly. Made me feel like I wasn't doing enough, and that was why she would constantly cheat, but because of how she made me feel, I felt like if I ever left her I wouldn't be able to find any better, so I stayed. Every. Single. Time.

Leah would constantly put me down, tell me that my feelings didn't matter. I could never tell her if something upset me, I couldn't tell her much of anything to be honest. She stopped caring about anything I felt unless it was to cater to her or her feelings. If I made her food wrong, or didn't get her a drink fast enough, I was a worthless piece of shit who couldn't do anything right. She told me all these things so often that I ended up believing them myself.

Also, Leah had a pretty bad green monster on her shoulder. "I wanted to sleep with everyone," is what she would say to me, I couldn't tell her I thought someone was pretty, or that I even like their shoes without wanting to sleep with them in her mind. In the end I realized it was just her guilty conscience. But her jealousy streak was so much worse than that. I couldn't even visit with my own mother without her being mad. In her eyes, I truly couldn't anything right. She would start telling me that I wasn't even good enough for her.

I ended up letting myself go pretty bad. Stopped caring how I looked, and on the days when I did try to make myself look pretty, she would say I was always doing it for other people, so someone else would notice me. Maybe in some weird way I was. Maybe in some weird way I thought that if someone else would notice me, and think I was pretty, that she would start thinking it again too. Boy was I ever wrong. It only made her even more mad. She would corner me and yell in my face about how I'm trying to find someone else to date.

But just like every abusive relationship, she would do the cute things too. Leaves cute little notes where she knows I'd find them, you know, to remind me how much she loved me, that she wouldn't know what to do without me in her life, etc. But of course it was all a lie. Maybe in some weird way she did love me, but you can't love someone else the way they deserve to be loved if you don't love yourself.

After a few months, maybe even a year of this you'd think that I would of gained the courage to leave, right? Wrong. Ask anyone who's been in an abusive relationship. It usually takes years, to make yourself let go of that thought that maybe, just maybe, one day you'll be good enough for this person, and that they'll love you the way they did at the start, the way you deserve to be loved. Multiple break ups, where either she, or I would go stay with another member of her family, so she could sleep with other women without it technically being cheating.

After four years of being "together," she finally made me hit my breaking point. We got into our typical huge fight that by this point in our relationship, would happen nearly every day. At what I thought was the end of the fight, I went to give her a hug and a kiss. That's when it happened. She grabbed me by my throat, pushed me up against the wall, and punched me in the face. I screamed so loud, not because it hurt, the emotional abuse she'd put me through for the previous four years hurt much more than the physical, but I screamed so her uncle who was downstairs would hear me and get her off of me. He got her off of me, which is when I made the call that I should of made a million times during those four years.

"Mom, it's me. Can you come pick me up? I want to come home."

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