Dating : The abusive relationship I didn’t know I was in

“You’re mine” he said as he smirked to himself while looking through photos of us together on his phone. It was an unseasonably warm October day in Paris. He’d booked the trip as a birthday present to me and I should have been thrilled at that moment. I was in a city I loved with a man I was really falling for. But in the absence of elation, there was a sense of unease that I couldn’t fully explain.

We’d met on a dating app six months before. In the beginning, I hesitated. But I quickly mistook my intuition for insecurity, thinking maybe I didn’t deserve him.

I finally gave myself permission to fall and the relationship accelerated quickly. The red flags flew past too quickly for me to see them for what they truly were. Or at least that’s what I’d tell myself later. The faster things moved, the blurrier everything became — including my boundaries.

Within three months of casually dating he told me he loved me, just before our first holiday together. Conversations quickly became peppered with references to me being his ‘soulmate’ and ‘the one’. I was suddenly peering over the edge of a perilously high pedestal with no easy way down.

We’d had no conversations about exclusivity at that point. I didn’t meet up with any other men after my first date with him, but I had been speaking to a few. I gradually let each of the others know I was seeing someone if they contacted me. That was until he saw one of the messages. I soon found myself cutting out almost every man I had ever dated or befriended so I wouldn’t lose him. I began to feel sick every time I saw my phone light up in case someone from my past would flash up and he’d become enraged all over again. I later realised that he knew all of this by monitoring my devices, covering for it by leaving sweet videos and messages on my phone.

A few months later when things had settled down we moved in together. With a new job, flat and love all at once I felt like I was getting everything I’d ever wanted. But that joy was fleeting. No sooner had we finished unpacking the boxes it felt like his intense infatuation had shifted into complete disinterest. I began to feel little changes in our relationship, shifts so subtle that it felt too trivial to even raise them. From him no longer posting me on social media to barely contacting me when he was away for a few days — all the little things he did before. A few months later, I sat beside him in tears on a beach in Mexico because I wasn’t sure that he still wanted me. I couldn’t understand where the kind man I adored had gone. Rather than reassure me, he became irritated. I began to think about ending things, fighting with fear of throwing away everything we had together. But more than that, the pain of giving up on him as a person.

Then, everything changed. One morning I got a call from his family to tell me he’d been in an accident and he was over the blood alcohol limit. He had to be cut from the wreckage and needed surgery, but somehow miraculously survived. As his family and I parked up to collect his possessions we were confronted with the traumatic sight of his car, the heavy steel mangled as effortlessly as a crumpled piece of paper.

After he lost his licence we had to move cities so he could still get to work, equalling three hours of travelling a day for me to get to my full-time job as well as caring for him either side of it. Instead of a deepening sense of love and gratitude, he told me to ‘shut up and get on with’ looking after him when I stood up for myself as he criticised every little thing I was doing.

As he physically recovered, his self-destructive habits spiralled. From heavier drinking and substance use to disappearing all the time to see ‘friends’, often not coming home at all. He broke promises as quickly as he made them, telling me that being around me was boring after turning up hours later than he said he would.

He began to make cutting remarks about my weight, my appearance, my personality… even the way I walked. Over and over again until I felt too broken to fight back anymore. When we first met he’d tell me all the time that I was the most beautiful girl in the world. By this point, if I had a single blemish on my face, his own would light up with delight. “I like it when you get one, it reminds me that you’re actually human” he’d say.

I felt too confused and ashamed to let anyone close to me in on the truth. After another six months spent in the futile hope things would get better and multiple arguments about prolific liking of girls’ photos on Instagram he began dropping in comments like ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we broke up, you’d have nowhere to go would you?’

I was quietly saving money, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave. One day he came home weeping and told me he wanted to take a break so he could work on his mental health but asked me to wait for him. When I asked him what he wanted to do next, he told me he wanted to keep the relationship going while he worked on himself. I moved back to London, he stayed with his family. A few days before my 30th birthday he sent me a blunt message to tell me he didn’t love me anymore.

I was still bewildered a month later at what had happened. Was I not attractive enough? Or too dull? I looked down at my phone and saw a notification from a girl I didn’t know. It turned out it was his ‘girlfriend’ he’d been seeing for six months behind my back.

It also emerged he’d done this before to another woman, right down to telling her he wanted to split up for mental health reasons before suddenly popping up on Instagram with me.

As the truth was exposed, he pleaded with the new girlfriend to take him back… and she did. Leaving me to ruminate over why he chose her over me, what she had that I was somehow lacking.

“You know, what he did was domestic abuse” the therapist I started working with to try and untangle what had happened softly stated. “He may not have hit you, but it was abuse.”

In many ways he and I were the perfect fit in the worst possible way. Our codependent dynamic meant my nature to give slotted in seamlessly with his MO to take.

I had to ask myself how I fell for someone like this in the first place but also more worryingly why I stayed. I learned the hard way that when you grow up in an unhealthy environment, familiarity can masquerade as chemistry. How ‘I love you’ can be a truly dangerous weapon, capable of coercing you to stay in situations you never thought you would.

Past trauma isn’t permission to inflict pain on the people close to us, to leave a scar on their relationship history that could sabotage their future. It took being used as an emotional punching bag for years before being discarded as if I was never worth anything for me to truly wake up to what had happened and show me where my unhealed wounds were.

A year later amidst a global pandemic that forced me to stay in my home for months it dawned on me that instead of feeling trapped, by comparison, I felt far more liberated than I had back then. Because I know now just how psychological abuse at the hands of the person you trust the most can be isolating enough to make you a prisoner in your own mind.

The insecurity of being abandoned for another woman will live with me indefinitely. But, as I gradually welcome back the person I was before I met him, I can begin to question the validity of his constant critiques of my identity.

With each day comes a little more clarity that he left me because he found someone who would tolerate more and expect less. For a young girl who had so little love for themselves that any crumb of affection that came their way felt like a feast. And for some people, that’s enough to turn a blind eye to a lifetime of indiscretions.

Liberating myself from my romantic past comes with the promise that I will never again give so much for so little. The line between love and hate may be fine, but there’s a vast difference in what you’ll allow in a relationship when you work on the one with yourself.