Let me tell you a story. It is not your story – or maybe it is. It could be. It is the story of many women. And it is my story. You are me. This is what happens to you.

It begins with the sound of your skull cracking against bathroom tile. You are arguing — or rather, he is arguing. You are fawning, placating, clinging with desperate arms. He pushes you away and the force of it sends you tumbling backwards into the bath. When you bang your head, the hurt, scared tears come — your voice peeling in the bathroom echo, like a little girl who fell in the playground. This angers him, as your tears always do. He accuses you of melodrama. He tells you to get up and stop acting like a child. You get up, your butt wet from residue in the tub, and walk to bed on unsteady feet.

When you wake up in the morning the room is spinning. When you stand you feel like you’re on a boat. He is all kisses and soft words and kindness. He takes you to the hospital. You have a concussion. Your mother works at the hospital and passing the ER she sees you. You tell her you fell.

You and he were friends before you were lovers. You met in high school. You told him about your awful boyfriend, who cheated on you with your best friend, and he indulged your fantasies of murder. You’d sit on the bus discussing how easy it’d be to sneak poisonous rhubarb leaves into their Big Macs.

He told you about being suspended from school and cautioned by the police for hacking the network and trying to bring it down with a virus. At lunchtime he’d disappear to smoke a bowl and come back mellow and silly. To you, a lonely working class girl with no friends, this all seemed impressive.

You didn’t see the red flags. You must have been colorblind.

It took years for your friendship to turn romantic, but in your early twenties it did. You knew he was a loser — a dropout working for peanuts in his parents’ grocery store, a serious drinker and stoner with a DUI under his belt. But he was fun and wild and seemed to really get you. He made you feel special, like a femme fatale, like you were in a movie.

You had a lovely honeymoon period — all intense connection and creative collaboration. You felt seen and understood for the first time. His empathy made you feel so much less broken and alone. He made you feel safe and special. An intoxicating combination.

Then things began to turn — earlier than you like to admit. On a weekend away he stormed off and left you alone in an unfamiliar town. When you argued, he regularly called you a cunt.

After he concussed you, a year in, you should have been angry. Instead, you forgave him. More than that — you told myself there wasn’t anything to forgive. It was an accident. He didn’t mean to. You provoked him.

Yes, all the clichés.

You have been dating for almost a year. He is living with you at university. You have been having a tough couple of months — your degree is almost over and the pressure is crushing you. You’ve been referred to a shrink.

You come home from the psych eval in a subdued, drained daze. You have so much work to do, but all you want to do is curl up and be quiet for a while. You peel off your clothes and climb into bed. He keeps talking to you, about his own little bubble, he wants attention, but you are not really responding. You can’t. You need to disappear. You close your eyes and curl up in the fetal position.

You feel him climb into bed behind you. He starts to touch you. You don’t want this. You don’t want anything. You wriggle away. He perseveres. You are not reacting. He persists.

“Look, if you don’t say anything, I’ll take it as a yes.”

And he penetrates you anally, without lube, or consent. He mumbles dirty talk in your ear. You are stiff and silent. Your face is wet. You guess you are crying.

When it is over and he sees your tears, he is annoyed.

“Go clean yourself up.”

You go to the bathroom to clean his unwanted semen — and the blood — out of your ass. You are sobbing. He yells after you,

“Oh shut up!”

Later it is his turn to cry. He says it’s every man’s worst nightmare, to be accused of this. You keep trying to tell him it was just a misunderstanding and no big deal, because that has already become your dynamic. He hurts you and you tell him it doesn’t matter. And in doing this, you tell yourself that YOU don’t matter — your fear, your pain, your outrage, your right to safety in your own bed — none of it matters. You know that he just raped you but you tell him it is okay. You push the truth of this violation to the bottom of your gut and do not speak it again for years.

Over the months that followed, his drinking and weed smoking reached new heights. He was stoned before he drove you to work each morning — and he was drunk all day most days, while you wasted your hard-won English Literature degree in a miserable office job. Still he managed to resent you. Apparently it was a lot to expect — drive you to and from work, twenty minutes, in return for buying all the food, his weed, keeping a roof over your heads.

One winter’s night you had a blazing row — over his drinking — and as you tried again to put your arms around him, to calm him, he kept pushing you away, his huge hands leaving your chest raw and bruised. You are small and he is a large, heavyset man. It was never a fair fight.

He drove off in the snow, drunk, and you stayed up until he came home hours later. In the morning you talked. These post-violence talks only ever went one way — you had to admit you were wrong in the first place, concede that he was right to be angry, and only then would he apologize for his cruel words and violent actions.

You did this because the alternative was to acknowledge that he was abusing you. They were not normal couples’ tiffs. You were living with an angry, volatile alcoholic addict and if that was true, the logical thing was to leave. But you were too afraid of the void you’d fall into without him, the empty space that would be left by his absence. You were dependent on his adoration. Without his flattering mirror to be reflected in, you thought you were nothing. You needed that pedestal. So you stayed.

It is still light out, even though it’s 8.30pm. It’s early summer, warm and quiet. You are standing outside work waiting for him to pick you up. You have been working for twelve hours. He is late.

Eventually his battered dirty Honda careens into the car park. You know before you get into the car that he is drunk. When you open the door, the stink of beer wafts into your face. You pretend you don’t notice. This is one of your skills, as the world’s most tolerant girlfriend. See no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil. You try to make breezy conversation about your day at work. It soon becomes evident, however, that he drank the entire case of beer you gave him money to buy — for a weekend celebration— in an afternoon. You go to the supermarket (it’s payday, you need groceries) and before you can even step out of the car an argument begins.

“We should get some beers.”

You can’t help it, you let the tolerant mask slip, your disappointment and anger showing through.

“Like you need more beer.”

You are already regretting the words as his fist makes contact with the side of your head. This is new. He has slapped you, grabbed you, pushed you before, but never a punch. Your first reaction is rage. You grab his long hair and pull it hard, as he starts the engine and accelerates out of the car park. You let go when he threatens to slit your throat.

“Get out of my car.”

You don’t get out. He gets out instead. He takes off his shirt and stands shirtless and fuming in the road. You get out, try to go to him, try to calm him, apologize for the hair-pulling. He keeps pushing you away, hard.

“Fuck off, you sanctimonious bitch.” He says, spitting in your face.

As you wipe away the spit and stand dumbfounded, he pisses against the wall of a nearby house. In broad daylight.

He gets back in the car and drives off, leaving you. This is the moment when you should call a friend, get help, make some tough decisions. But you’ve built your entire self esteem around this love and you don’t know who you’ll be without him. You see yourself as part of a whole — you and him. A unit, united against the world. No one understands you like he does. Your confidence in yourself was always low and he has spent the past two years chipping away at it with his constant criticism and his outbursts. Even though he treats you like shit, you are completely emotionally dependent on him. You wouldn’t know what to do without him.

So when he comes back for you, you get in the car.

He is sympathetic for a few moments but your despair, your inability to stop crying, sets him off again. He turns down a deserted side street in the sketchy part of town. He gets out. You lock yourself in. He comes to your door, knocking, taunting. You sit there, angry fingers clutching your phone, willing yourself to dial the cops. The keypad dial blurs through your tears. You don’t call.

You open the door. What else can you do? You don’t know how to drive.

He slaps you. Little stinging, mocking slaps. He grabs a fist full of your hair, trying to pull you from the car. You resist as hard as you can.

He keeps threatening to kill you. He unscrews the locking mechanism on your door and presses it into your forehead, laughing. He tears his shirt in half and wraps it around your throat.

“Do you want to die?”

For a long moment you think you are about to be murdered.

The tension is broken by a passing police car. You both notice it. It does not stop. He finds this hilarious.

You both sit in the car while he suddenly breaks down — screams and cries and laughs. You are silent.

Soon he calms and you tell him you will never leave him. You are not thinking about escape, you are thinking about return. You want things to go back to how they are when he’s nice to you, when he makes you feel good and safe and seen and loved. You think if you just show him how small you are, totally submit, completely give yourself to him, he’ll understand you’re not a threat. He won’t hurt you any more.

You are wrong.

That night, frustrated by your traumatised silence, he goes to bed early and you follow. Your emotional well-being is hinged upon his love. If he is angry with you, you are alone, and the warm glow of his intense adoration is gone. You want it back, want him to kiss it all better. You try to kiss him.

He slaps you full in the face, pushes you out of bed and gets up. He keeps hitting you and headbutts you, knocking you to the floor. He kicks you.

He locks himself in the bathroom. You come and sit outside the door, weeping.

“What?!” He snaps.

You crouch by the bathroom door and sing to him.

“And you can use my skin, to bury secrets in, and I will settle you down…”

You go to work the next morning, full of aches and still reeling. You tell your best friend, because you need her comfort. Later, he chastises you for this. How dare you besmirch his good name? He could tell people about all the shameful things you’ve done but he would never do that to you. It’s not like he behaves that way all the time. You were making him out to be an abusive monster. How could you be so selfish?

That awful night may have been the only one of its kind, but make no mistake, his abuse was an almost daily fixture of the relationship. There were other moments of violence — brief, unexpected. There was the constant threat of his anger. There was his drunken unpredictability. He sought to control your every move, through cleverly deployed compliments and criticisms. He continued to call you by that lovely pet name — cunt — each time you stepped out of the ever-shrinking box he’d made for you. His life was increasingly chaotic and toxic. He was arrested for shoplifting. He developed a secret opiate addiction. He stole money from his parents. You expanded your deep capacity for empathy — or for turning a blind eye to bad behaviour in order to survive, a coping mechanism learned early in life — to its limits for him.

You stayed with him for almost five years.

When you did finally end the relationship, it was not about the abuse at all. You didn’t come to your senses, realize you were worth more. You had other reasons, and you felt bad about them.

The breakup was long and messy and complex. As with quitting any bad habit, there were relapses. You stepped off the nauseating merry-go-round of romantic entanglement, but remained close.

And you still didn’t step down from that fucking pedestal.

Now you’ve met someone new. Where your ex was harsh, he is gentle. Where your ex was controlling, he is accepting. Where your ex was toxic, he is a lungful of fresh, healing oxygen.

Your friendship with your ex is still a thing — somehow — but it’s on rocky ground. For months now, before you even met the new guy, you have been feeling that this is not right. You have been slowly seeing the toxicity of the situation, and of your co-dependent tendencies. You have begun to speak up for yourself when he calls you a cunt or hangs up on you. You are getting there, but you still don’t consider escape. You are still that united unit, relying on each other to fill the huge chasm where self-esteem, resilience, responsibility and self-respect should be.

You tell your new man about the latest row with your “friend”, your abusive ex.

“Apparently I’m a sociopath. Oh, and I’ve ‘always been a bitch’.”

“What’s his problem?”

“He says we haven’t dealt with any of the crap that went on while we were together. He’s not referring to the things he did — he means like how I was so selfish and expected so much.”

“Yeah and he’s a saint.”

“He keeps saying we should go to therapy together.”

“You know, this friendship between you and him makes me really uncomfortable. Apart from the fact you are ‘best friends’ with someone who headbutted and raped you — which makes me really worried for your safety around him — it’s almost as if you never broke up. You don’t seem like friends, you’re like a couple, and that’s not something I’m okay with. It’s not healthy for anyone involved.”

His tone is calm. His body language is non-threatening. He is telling you, in a compassionate and loving way, that your continued relationship with this man, your continued emotional entanglement, is an ongoing and negative thing which impacts on you, him and the new relationship you are trying to build. He is raising legitimate concerns in a respectful manner.

This is what a relationship looks like.

You ended your friendship with your ex.You did not make this choice because a man told you to, but because someone helped you finally see the truth of your enmeshment with this dangerous man. You had remained his friend after everything he’d done, still lapping up the attention and letting him treat you like a possession, because that dynamic was familiar and being someone’s prize possession made you feel special. A favourite beautiful item, displayed on its pedestal. He broke you so many times — oops! — but you glued yourself back so expertly, no one ever saw the cracks. Not even you.

Forgiving him was a survival strategy. Thinking yourself too weak to survive in the wild, you accepted his treatment. You thought you were safer with him than alone. Up there on his toxic pedestal, you were safe. Only when you found someone to help you down, by respecting you enough to show you that you don’t need to hide away on some asshole’s pedestal, did you free yourself. When he treated you as an equal, you found the courage to break out of the safety of old patterns. You do not need to live up to anyone’s idealized vision of you. You are enough.

There is a difference between forgiving and letting go. You let him go the day you told him you could no longer be friends. You let go of the fear of your fragility, the belief that you couldn’t survive alone. You will be working on letting go of the post-trauma feelings and nightmares that you live with for a long time. You can do this. You are a survivor. You know now, you don’t have to forgive him to survive. For speaking to you like trash, for making you fear for your life, for the injuries and the pain – you don’t have to forgive any of that. It’s easy to forgive someone when you don’t value what they broke.

You value her now.