I moved to New York City when I was 23 years old. At the time, I was still extricating myself from a two year relationship that had become increasingly abusive, despite my initial refusal to see it. I had known for quite awhile—looking back, most likely within the first six months—that we had an often difficult relationship, but as is common with such things, I assumed it was something that I could fix, and continued to try to do so for the next year and a half. I think people tend to misunderstand abuse, particularly of the more invasive but less visible emotional kind. We pity women who stay in abusive relationships but also judge them harshly, telling ourselves that we would never put up with that kind of shit; assuring ourselves that our self esteem is too high for that kind of co-dependent drama. Yet, there is a more pervasive and lingering form of abuse that may not be perpetrated in black eyes and “accidental falls;” a kind of manipulation of one’s very self that in some ways is more damaging than any broken bone. We all know what it is like to be in love—that initial infatuation, when all you can see in the world is this other person, the perfection of them, and if there are any clues to possible personality issues they are easily glossed over by an eagerness to let this one, this relationship, be better than all the others, to make it more meaningful, more lasting, than ever before. So we try hard not to annoy, not to cause fights, not to upset our lover but instead try to be the perfect, sympathetic and understanding person that you have always wanted to be. And you have so much fun; he makes you laugh so hard it hurts sometimes, he gets all your weird geeky jokes, he praises the body you are so self-conscious about. And so you change some things about yourself—maybe you dress a little differently, to turn him on. Whine a little less about your job, his is just as hard. Or maybe you don’t bring up an overdue electric bill because you know he’s had a bad day, or try not to be offended when he shuts you out emotionally, no, really, it’s just that his mother was so cold to him and he never had a dad, he just doesn’t know how to connect, but I can help him, I love him, I can make him better.
I can fix him.
This is the phrase I kept finding myself coming back to, for those two years. I love him, I can help him, I can fix him. Surely that is what a good friend, a good lover, and good person, does, right? They help, they listen, they do what they can to make the lives of the people they love better. So, in our desire to be a good person, and good woman, we push our own needs and thoughts back, so often that it becomes a reflex. And before you know it, you are trapped—unable to extricate yourself from this person who has taken over your life, chained by love and by that desire to help that overwhelms all good sense.
When we first started dating, it seemed as though Luke came along at the perfect point in my life. I was 21 and still a virgin, relatively inexperienced with men, stymied by an unsatisfying relationship that lasted senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, as well as my own dissatisfaction with my body. For two years since then end of my high school romance, I had countless times been at a party, or a bar, having a fantastic conversation with someone cute and witty, only to be dropped like dirty laundry the minute a thinner, more fashionable, girl entered the room. I had, at some point, decided that it was not worth the disappointed, and retreated to an expectation-free life of platonic male friends and a gaggle of wonderful girlfriends. It was these girls, as well as a new living situation and 10 pounds lost, that convinced me to join them going out more often. It was at one of these weekly outings that Luke and I met in a bar in Santa Cruz, somewhat randomly; he was a friend of a friend who happened to be sitting at the next booth. He overhead me make a reference to Eddie Izzard, and we spent the rest of the evening drunkenly quoting lines from our favorite pieces. We met again the next week, and laughed our way through a mutual love of good beer and science fiction movies. It was the laughing that drew me to him initially—I have always loved to laugh and to make others laugh. I was surprised to learn that he was in fact six years my elder, which perhaps should have been a clue to his immaturity, but also deeply moved by his telling of growing up never knowing his father, who had run out on his pregnant (and teenaged) mother. I think I felt some sort of guilt for my upper-middle class two parent upbringing; I had certainly never experienced the things that he had. He was so much like me and yet totally alien. And he kept making me laugh.
In a fit of drunken confidence, I took him home that night, and although clothes were shed, I managed to hold off actually having sex with him until our third “official” date. I didn’t mention at the time that I was a virgin, because I really didn’t know where this would end up going and frankly didn’t want it to be a big deal. I’ve always despised the ideas of “purity” and “honor” that are associated with virginity—frankly I think the cult of virginity has done more to harm women than just about anything else in the long and sordid history of women’s rights. I believe I said something vague about “it’s been a long time,” referring more to dating than anything else. The experience was extremely pleasant, for which I am still grateful. Too many times I heard stories from my girlfriends about their first times, usually hurried encounters before mom and dad got home, or cramped in the back of a car, that were either painful or awkward or both. This was neither. The next morning, when I had to drag myself out of bed to catch and early train back home for Thanksgiving, saying goodbye was almost pleasantly painful.
I think, honestly, that our entire relationship could be summed up in that phrase, “pleasantly painful.” When things were good, they were amazing. We fit like a glove in hand. Our senses of humor, tastes in music and clothes, even our political ideologies were completely in tune. It was so easy to forget his angry emotional outburst, his insults, when he was apologizing five minutes later and offering to buy me ice cream to make up for being a jerk. His drinking had always been heavy, but as our relationship progressed it began to become more and more of a problem. He would spend not only almost every evening at the bar with his friends, but most of his paycheck as well. At first I didn’t really mind, I hung out with them all at the bar and for the first year of our relationship he would usually leave whenever I did, coming home with me to my bed. I got so use to his snoring that when I would visit home, I often couldn’t sleep for lack of it. However, after my graduation from college in ’05, I didn’t really have the same time or money to spend at the dive bars of Pacific Avenue. I was only working part time, and paying rent only by the grace of my overly-indulgent parents, and I was begging to be annoyed not only with his drinking but his absolute inability to come home when he said he would. I’m sure his friends all though I was the clingy girlfriend, calling his cell phone multiple times an evening. Yet at least twice weekly we would have plans, dinner or a movie or just hanging out at home, and he would be three hours late by the time I called him, at which point it was always “Oh, yeah, sorry, be home in 30 minutes,” after which I would wait another three hours before giving up and going to bed. He would inevitably crawl in at 2 am, snuggle up to me smelling of cigarettes and whiskey, and I would pretend not to be angry that he was too drunk to remember he was supposed to be home four hours ago and that the spaghetti was getting cold in the refrigerator.
I’m sure many of you are asking why I would put up with his bullshit for so long. I can only say that I loved him, in all of his flawed nature, and my own insecurities made me cling to what I saw as my only hope for love. I was still young, and new to serious relationships, and I clung to him with a fierceness that looking back is eminently pathetic. But I still wanted to help him, I wanted to be the one to help him quit drinking, get a better job, I somehow felt that I could take the good parts of him and mold them around the bad parts, hiding them behind his better features. I looked always for the positive, and took great joy in those times when things between us were good.
In the end it was our differences, both in drive and in maturity, which brought things to a head. We had moved into together, and we celebrating three months of being able to put up with one another, when I was accepted to Columbia for graduate school in March of 2006. Those three months has been some of the best between us—Luke had cut back on his drinking significantly, and we reveled in a shared space that could really be called our own. He was so happy for me when the letter came from New York, so proud that I had been accepted to a school to which I had always been sure I would never go. For the first three weeks it was a haze of excitement for me, as well as a sort of dumbfounded disbelief that I would actually be attending such a prestigious institution. I was ready, after five years, to leave Santa Cruz, with its beach bum laziness and lack of drive, for the excitement and flurry of New York City. But it wasn’t nearly the same for him. Luke had never in his life ridden in an airplane, and despite nearing thirty, he had in fact never left the borders of California. His immaturity and lack of experience, which at first had moved me to want to show him new places and encounters, developed into a full blown fear of leaving everything he knew. Within a month of my acceptance, he had changed his mind twice about joining me in New York, and had gone back to his routine of alternately abandoning me to drink with his friends and clinging to me, begging me to take him with me, that he couldn’t be without me. Things unraveled quickly after that, and by mid-May we had stopped having sex, and he spent at least once a week on the couch after starting and then refusing to finish a fight. He had turned completely passive aggressive, calling me names and purposely starting fights only to paint me as the bad guy. I think now the only reason I kept trying to work things out was that I was so scared to move all the way across the country by myself. Just before the fourth of July, which was a sort of anniversary for us, we had the fight that made me realize I was completely wasting my time trying to save this relationship. In a drunken fit, Luke had purposely picked a fight, and a physical one at that, but in his strange victimizing way, he kept trying to goad me into hitting him. He kept telling me that he was sure I hated him anyway, so why not just hit him and get it over with, forcing me into the position of aggressor without my consent or participation. I was so angry I couldn’t speak, and honestly did want to hit him pretty badly, just to snap him out of this ridiculous obsession with being the victim. The fight escalated verbally, and finally in a fit of pique, distress, and anger at his insults and cuts to my character, I gave in, and slapped him once, hard, across the face. I t was a huge mistake, and I know it; not only had I given him exactly what he wanted, but I had broken my own rules about physical reactions to anger. If it is never appropriate for a man to hit a woman, neither is it appropriate for a woman to hit a man. I felt like an asshole, both for the slap and for allowing myself to be made into the abuser. I was so turned around I didn’t know what to do, I felt like I was the one who had crossed the line, despite his obvious desire that I do so. Perhaps it was his inability to take the lead, to take any kind of responsibility that demanded that I be the one to irrevocably decide to end the relationship.
To be continued...
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