Dating : I Dated A Guy I Didn’t Like For More Than 5 Years

My mother raised me to be pro-life. She vehemently taught me that sex was dirty and reprehensible — unless it was sex within a Christian marriage, of course. My older sister already had four children “out of wedlock” and spent time in prison while she was pregnant with her first.

Our parents were divorced, our father wasn’t a Christian, and he was barely in my life, yet both parents left me feeling as if it was my duty to be the “good” daughter. My parents were so used to my sister rebelling that they treated the slightest problem with me as a huge shock and burden. It was especially stressful as a person with autism, who hadn’t yet been diagnosed. When I struggled in high school and college, I wound up having to hide it.

I was “too smart to struggle,” my parents said. And “too smart to make poor choices.”

They expected me to be the good younger sister and every time I even slightly missed the mark, they chastised me for “being lazy” or trying to embarrass them.

So, I knew I wasn’t safe to tell either one of my parents that I was pregnant. Still, I labored over the choice to terminate the pregnancy. There was so much guilt and shame from my upbringing. I knew the evangelical worldview said I was a monster to abort my child. I wondered if I would go to hell.

At one point, I thought about keeping “the baby,” and getting help from the church. Evangelicals, and even messianic members seemed to love stories where the woman keeps the child. I felt that they might be supportive even if my parents weren’t.

But then I brought it up to Daniel, and the first thing he said was how much my mom would kill me. How I’d said so myself. I could see that he was clearly terrified about the situation. He didn’t want to be a father, not then. At the same time, he wasn’t honest about that. I really resented how much he used my fears against me to convince me to have an abortion. I resented the fact that he never once considered the options with me or told me I had a choice.

Worse yet, he used that same shame and fear against me without acknowledging this was a legitimately difficult choice for me. I knew at that point that I never wanted to have a baby with him because I couldn’t count on him to be a supportive parent or partner.

I went ahead and had the abortion on December 21, 2007. I had to walk past screaming pro-life protestors tossing me pamphlets and telling me I “didn’t have to do this.” In the ultrasound room, the technician commented that there was just a sac and no heartbeat. When I finally had the procedure, the doctor told me that the pregnancy hadn’t appeared to be viable.

Despite those comments, I held onto an enormous amount of guilt over that D&C for years. My evangelical brain thought they must be lying.

Daniel drove me home, and on the way I stopped at a drugstore to buy Tylenol and a heating pad. Impulsively, I grabbed a handful of peanut butter Twix bars at the register.

When we got to my apartment, Daniel began talking about “the kids we were going to have.” Someday, when we could afford them. He talked about pregnancy being such a sexy thing, like it was hot that I had (supposedly) been carrying his child. It was all so tone deaf and off-putting — I told him to stop saying those things and to just leave me alone.

We were still so early into our relationship. It would have made all the sense in the world to just break up and be done with it.

Instead, I just… hated him.

And I stayed.