“I didn’t know any of their names, and I doubt we’d ever meet in real life. Still, because of them, I wasn’t alone anymore”
Photo: J.V. Aranda I’m not sure what I was expecting from a group of strangers on the internet. But I needed advice about my relationship, and I wasn’t about to ask my friends. Sometimes I wondered if I was being foolish for overblowing our problems; other times I wondered if I was being foolish to tolerate them. Either way, I was too ashamed to talk to people who knew me, and so I tried people who didn’t.
We met at a party. I had been struggling with depression for about a year and had recently wrapped up an awful semester at a community college near my Midwestern hometown. I was 19, and it was the first time in my life I’d had no direction or plan, just a part-time job as a barista at a local coffee shop.
I buckled down and excelled in school, the depression lifting slowly but surely as I realized I had turned things around. He wasn’t impressed; when I started talking about possible opportunities — research overseas, a job in foreign policy — he was hostile. Instead, he’d talk about me moving with him across country, where he got a job shortly after graduating the year before I did.
Looking back, it seems odd to me now that I didn’t see the abuse from the very beginning. But that word felt so loaded; he had never hit me, so could I say I was in an abusive relationship? The yelling, the coercion, the manipulation, the dismissiveness of my ambitions — it clearly added up to something, but was it really abuse?
Things at home kept getting worse. At a party, he yelled at me because I didn’t intuit that he wanted to go home; in the car, he told me the only reason my friend had been talking politics with me all night was because he wanted to sleep with me. Soon after, when I refused to have sex with him, he punched a wall in fury. I ran to the spare room and locked myself in; I’d sleep there as long as I continued to live with him.
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