When I look back through the pages of my notebook, I can see that I’ve started this story several times yet it still remains untold and unfinished. Until now. And that’s probably for a couple of reasons. One, it’s very personal and even though it happened decades ago, still embarrassing. And two, it’s just not a pretty subject.

What I’m eluding to is abuse in relationships, now sometimes referred to as intimate partner violence. For me, this took place inside a two year relationship that began when I was a very naive eighteen year old. He was twelve years my senior. Although I didn’t know this at the start….didn’t know til he had me “hooked”, as he lied about his age when we first met. 

I met him at a party two months after my eighteenth birthday. I’d had little experience with relationships throughout high school and in my head at least, was always wishing to be in one. So when this older guy (who was from out of town) noticed me at a party, I was elated. 

We began dating and things got serious quickly and soon I was moving to Winnipeg (about 500 km from home) and moving in with him. To say I didn’t notice signs right away would be a lie, not just signs but more like billboards. The mind games began probably less than a month after meeting but before the mind games there was all the love bombing, gift buying, flower buying etc that comes with grooming a victim. 

He would constantly ask me if I was happy and this was something new to me, nobody in my life before ever seemed to care if I was happy, or at least didn’t outright ask. I foolishly believed this was a sign that he really cared about me. And when I brought this up to him, he used it as a wedge to make me think that despite my happy childhood and upbringing, maybe it actually wasn’t as happy as I’d always believed it to be. 

I learned later that was just a tactic abusers use, they try and keep you separated from everyone in your life. The first time he played mind games with me was only about a month after we’d met. I was very smitten and probably already feeling like I was in love with him at that point, we hadn’t had any disagreements and all he’d shown me was love and attention. Then one night when we’d had plans to hangout, he didn’t show up. I waited and waited and called and called. And nothing. Hours went by. 

I even drove to the motel he was staying at and knocked on the door of his room. His roommate (and coworker) came to the door and looking back I can still remember the knowing look but also the look of pity he had for me, but he said he didn’t know where he was. I was devastated and couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want to see me. I ran through all kinds of ridiculous scenarios as to what I had done to make him so abruptly not want to see me anymore. And I went home to bed.

I woke up in the middle of the night to him knocking on my bedroom window and went upstairs to let him in. I was crying and upset and he had a black eye. He gave me some story about how he’d gotten the black eye and when I asked why he’d ignored me, he told me it was a “test”. A test to see if and how much I really did love him. 

From then on it was a series of “I love you, are you happy, I want you forever” and poems and bouquets of flowers and gifts but only as apologies for losing his temper, yelling, throwing things, punching walls. The jealousy, again, something I’d never actually seen in a person before, much less an intimate relationship, was scary. I knew better than to speak to other males or even speak of other males. I was in college at this point and beginning to sink into a depression.

He was always very secretive and though I wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment once I got home from college, I had no idea where he spent his evenings or with whom when he was working out of town. He made sure I never had the chance to look in his wallet or personal effects (kept them locked in the trunk of the car, he said they were more safe there). And there were times when he would have to leave and go out of town for the weekend on a moment’s notice to see an uncle who was sick (whom I’d never heard of before til that moment).

When he was working out of town and I was home alone, I’d get these strange, scary and accusatory phone calls from him in the middle of the night. He’d just call and say things like “I know you have other guys there, I know you’re cheating on me….” And keep me on the phone for what seemed like forever, I would be frantic to try and calm him down and prove to him that I was home alone and hadn’t and would never cheat on him. I was terrified and these behaviours would come from so out of the blue they really messed with my mind in regards to what was reality and what wasn’t. I was becoming more depressed and unhinged.  

It’s not that I wasn’t “allowed” to leave our apartment, it was just an unspoken thing where I knew that if I tried to have a social life outside him, there would be so many questions and accusations and most likely temper flare ups, that it just wasn’t worth it. I knew just exactly how to behave so that he wouldn’t become upset. So while he spent most of the time working out of town and only coming home every other weekend, I spent my days walking/bussing to college then coming home and doing schoolwork or cleaning.  

I remember just feeling so apathetic about everything, everything except him. My mind and body was a blank dark cave. I had no appetite and supper usually consisted of a baked potato cooked in the microwave, I wasn’t able to concentrate on school very well and was questioning what I was even doing there. The only bright light in my life was him and the weekends we would spend going out for supper and a movie Friday nights then grocery shopping on Saturdays. THE ONLY BRIGHT LIGHT IN MY LIFE WAS HIM. Exactly how he wanted it I’m sure now. Had me exactly where he wanted me. I was so foolish.

Probably the scariest incident I can recall with him was one Sunday morning we decided to drive to Selkirk to have breakfast. In the car on the way, I made the mistake of making fun of a song he liked. He flew into a rage. He yelled at me, berated me and pulled the car over on the side of the highway. He told me to get out of the car. Said he didn’t want to be with me anymore, wanted nothing to do with me and just to get out. I was so scared. How would I get back to the city? I was crying and apologizing and begging him not to do this. He did keep driving and we went to the restaurant. The whole meal he continued to call me down, belittle me and tell me how I was nothing but a spoiled brat who didn’t appreciate anything. I’ll never forget that meal and how he kept his voice low and said these things to me with a smile on his face so that the other restaurant patrons wouldn’t suspect a thing. But I couldn’t stop my tears through the whole entire meal and people were staring.  

I did eventually quit college at the end of my first semester for a most ridiculous reason. I was taking Hotel and Restaurant Management and one of our assignments was to partner up with someone and go to eat at a restaurant and critique the service. My partner was a guy named Sam who I got along with really well in class. I didn’t dare tell Gary about Sam. I think the only male I had talked about from school was the one who was gay. 

Anyway, the time was drawing near where I would have to go out and eat with Sam and I couldn’t see how to tell Gary about that. I just couldn’t envision the conversation. He would flip. Going out and eating with a male classmate as part of a class project was just not going to happen. I couldn’t risk it. This sounds insane now but at the time it was as real as the potato I’d had for supper. There was no way.

And so I quit college. I had just seen a doctor who had prescribed me an anti-anxiety medication and I had decided to move home, although Gary was coming with me because of course in my mind he wasn’t part of the problem, he was the one who loved me. Getting out of that apartment and being at home around my family did help with my mental wellbeing and I didn’t need to take any medication. I slowly started realizing that I needed to get away from him but I didn’t know how. I found myself just wishing he would die, a freak car accident or something. It sounds so morbid but I felt that the only way I could ever escape this relationship was if he was dead. 

We did eventually break up, thanks to him deciding to put the moves on my younger sister one day when they were home alone at my parents (I was at work). It was my breaking point. I’d put up with so much but this I couldn’t swallow. I called him on the phone and told him. He of course denied and said he hadn’t meant anything by what he’d done, etc etc. It was the end of our relationship but in the months that followed he stalked me. He followed me around, he placed 5×7 ads in our local paper proclaiming his love for me, he had his mom write to me and beg me to take him back. 

Probably the creepiest part of being stalked by him was the time my parents and I were at a very small and secluded lake fishing in the boat. As we were getting back to shore I spotted him there, also fishing in some shallow water with hip waiters on. While my parents loaded the boat, I went over and looked inside of his car. There clipped to the driver side visor was a photo of me. It sent chills down my spine. 

I soon after got a restraining order and from the day the police served him with it, I never saw him again. But he visited me in my nightmares for over ten years. And though he never actually laid a hand on me, the effects from his abuse infiltrated my brain and my thoughts and my feelings. It wasn’t physical but it was trauma just the same.

Some people might wonder how I could have been soooo foolish as to stay in this type of relationship. And it is embarrassing but looking back now it’s not so surprising. I was raised in a very solid, very loving and safe household. I knew nothing about emotional abuse or the cycle of abuse growing up. This was pre-internet as well. So information about this stuff was not a google away. All I knew was this guy was crazy about me and promised me the moon and I was in love. I thought maybe in relationships you take the bad with the good and I foolishly believed that couples ended relationships too easily and didn’t try hard enough. And I wasn’t going to be one of those people who just gave up. At least for the first two thirds of the relationship, at the end, like I said I just wished he’d die. 

I’m thankful for what I learned from it only because I’ve been able to arm my own daughters with the useful information from this cautionary tale. And now sharing my story today, maybe it will save someone from the hell I went through.