Here are the numbers on Marloes Coenen’s MMA career, now that it’s over: 31 professional fights, six title fights, one single-night tournament championship, slightly more than 16 years worth of continuous competition.

No two ways about it: That’s a lot of fighting. Too much, maybe. She started when she was 19 and now, with her 36th birthday looming at the end of the month, she has to admit that she can’t take any more of this. The muscle spasms that make her entire body seize up, the near constant fatigue, the aches and the pains – they just wouldn’t go away.

“I’ve hurt my body too much, for too long,” Coenen (23-8) told MMAjunkie.

And so, following a fourth-round TKO loss to Julia Budd in a Bellator women’s featherweight title fight earlier this month (watch it above), Coenen called it quits.

But what really matters when it comes to Coenen’s career is the stuff that the numbers can’t tell you. For instance, there are the things Coenen proved to herself while spending nearly half her life as a professional fighter. There are the things she learned about herself, which she doubts she could have learned any other way.

Then there are the things she taught others. As Invicta FC President Shannon Knapp put it, starting out in an era when many promoters only wanted female fights as an excuse to show off attractive women in sports bras, “Marloes was one of the ones who showed us that this could be done a different way.”

In some sense, she had the kind of career that probably can’t exist in today’s MMA. For a Dutch woman in MMA at the start of this century, there weren’t many opportunities at home or across the Atlantic. But there was Japan, which is where Coenen’s career kicked into high gear with the single night ReMix World Cup tournament in December of 2000.

She was a 19-year-old college student in Rotterdam, and then she won three fights in one night to take the ReMix World Cup title and a $100,000 grand prize. That payday, earned in her first year of competition, would prove to be the biggest of her career. But there was something else too.

“That first time I fought in Japan when I was 19, it was like I was dropped into this world,” Coenen said. “It was an amazing experience, and I didn’t have the words to explain why at the time. It was years later when I was more mature that I realized what it was: Fighting was the place where I felt free.”

Knapp got to know Coenen first in Strikeforce, where Coenen became the women’s bantamweight champion, and then later in Invicta FC, the all-female promotion headed by Knapp.

Ironically, Knapp had her doubts about women’s MMA early on. It wasn’t that she doubted women’s fighting ability, she said, but she got tired of always hearing the same thing from male promoters.

“Back then whenever anyone talked about putting female fighters on the card, it was never about the talent,” Knapp said. “It was always, ‘Shannon, find us some hot girls.’ That’s always what they said. So I didn’t have a great feeling about it, just because of the way it was billed, and I didn’t want to give up a spot for serious male athletes to a circus show of pretty girls. But Marloes, when I saw her, she changed my mind. Here was this woman who was attractive but never tried to exploit that. She worked just as hard as the men. She was smart. She was passionate. She changed my whole perspective on women in the sport.”

For Coenen, her time in Strikeforce was notable in part because of the title she won, but even more so for the one she didn’t. Her first meeting with Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino for the Strikeforce women’s featherweight title ended in a brutal third-round TKO loss for Coenen, but it remains one of her most cherished memories from her career.

“That was the fight where I proved to myself that I was a fighter,” Coenen said. “When I first became a champion at 19, I thought I was just lucky. I thought it was a coincidence that I somehow got this title. But the first time I was in the cage with ‘Cyborg,’ it felt like she was throwing bricks at my head. I’d never been hit that hard in my entire life. My face was like Jello everywhere. I was black and blue. But that was when I proved to myself – no one else, just myself – that I was a fighter. I didn’t give up or back down. That felt really good.”

It’s one of the things she’ll miss most, Coenen said, that violent exchange of energy. After her fight with Budd at Bellator 174, the two fighters shook hands in the locker room, both of them tearing up as they spoke.

“Fighting someone, it immediately takes your relationship with them to a new level,” Coenen said. “It’s not just about cardio and technique. You feel the energy and aggression of the other person. You feel their determination. There’s something hard to explain, but you exchange a bit of your soul, maybe. You get this connection you will never forget.”

It won’t be easy to adjust to a life without that in it, Coenen admitted. She’ll still train at her gym in Amsterdam, even if she has to remind herself to take it easy and workout “like a regular person” from now on. She’ll also still be a part of the sport in some way, even if it’s not in the cage.

If she’s impacted other female fighters, she hopes it’s by showing them that they have options other than making themselves into sex symbols for male fans.

“I hope they see that they don’t have to pretend they’re not women, but it’s good to realize that you’re a fighter first,” Coenen said. “It’s nice to be marketable, but don’t sell your soul. That’s not just fighting, but for a lot of parts of our society. You want to make decisions that you’ll feel good about in 10 years. I know I’ve learned my lessons in this sport, but now I’m done. I’m OK with that.”

For more on Bellator’s upcoming schedule, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.