I’m guilty of giving people more chances than they deserve but when I’m done, I’m done. –Turcois Ominek

The other night, my husband and I were having this discussion about some of our exes. And while that may seem like one of those absolutely unapproachable subjects for most couples, my husband and I have always been extremely open about our past relationships. Maybe for me, it was because I wanted him to understand a lot of the reasons why I was the way I was. I wanted him to see that I had some really irrational insecurities that had absolutely nothing to do with him. I wanted him to understand that I absolutely cannot fight with people anymore because I’ve just done way too much of it in my previous relationships. I wanted him to realize that I can be really needy sometimes because honestly, I never really had a wholly secure relationship with any other man.

And on his end, I think he just always wanted to be honest with me. He didn’t want me to hear things in passing that would make me question him. He would rather throw everything out there from the very beginning so that I could pick it apart and overanalyze it all. Above all things, this man is painfully honest. Even when he really nicely tells me he would rather I not make a particular recipe again because it’s not his absolute favorite.

My husband started telling me about how one of his previous, more serious girlfriends had been with him ten months and was still unsure about the way she felt about him. My husband is a relationship guy; he never dated for “fun” or to have instant access to horizontal refreshments. My husband always wanted to get married and always wanted to have children. In the ways of the relationship world, he was always very mature because he didn’t play games and he didn’t just hang around people he didn’t care about. If he spent time with a girl, it was because he wanted to, because he wanted things to progress, and because he saw some type of future with them. One of my favorite things about my husband is that in his single years, he was never what I would refer to as a “poon hound”. He wanted a good, quality relationship with a girl he could trust. I’ve always really valued that in him.

After ten months of exclusive dating, it was unfathomable to me that a girl in her young twenties was unsure about how she felt about her boyfriend. My husband had recently told her that he loved her and he told me that she responded by saying she was unable to say it back. Because she couldn’t promise she felt the same way.

This obviously set off about a million red flags in my husband’s brain and although he did love her, he had to move on. “How do you not know after ten months? How do you not even have an inkling?” I asked him a bunch of times when we spoke about it. Sure, for every individual, it’s different but in nearly a year’s time, I would imagine you would have some feelings regarding the person you’ve shared your life with for so long. Maybe you wouldn’t be ready to get hitched but you would know that you’d want to continue the relationship based on how deeply you care about the other person, right?

So he broke up with her, thank goodness, because if there’s anything that my husband hates, it’s wasting time.

But it wasn’t long before she started to peep back in. She had changed her mind when she realized that my husband wasn’t going to settle for someone who was unsure about how she felt. Maybe she did love him and was just scared of the feelings she had. Maybe she was ready to commit more fully than just exclusively dating. Maybe she did want to say those three enormous words back. But it was too late. “I just thought it was convenient that all of a sudden, her feelings changed,” he told me. “When she realized I wasn’t going to stay in a relationship with someone who didn’t know how she felt, when she understood that I had seriously moved on from her, she wanted me back. But exes are in the past for a reason,” he told me.

I’ve always envied the amount of self-respect my husband has. He does not take shit from anyone, not even people that he’s put on a pedestal. A weaker individual might have gone back, might not have seen through whatever this girl was trying to pull over them. Heaven knows I’ve done it a bunch of times in my chaotic romantic history. But not my husband. That door was closed.

It’s so hard to leave- until you leave. And then it’s the easiest goddamned thing in the world. –John Green, Paper Towns

But all of this got me to thinking because I had been through sort of a similar situation with one of my ex-boyfriends. It wasn’t so much that he allegedly didn’t know how he felt about me but I had certainly noticed that when I started to move on from him, when I had unearthed his wretched claws from my back, he started to panic a little bit.

But see, this aforementioned relationship seemed to be a lot more chaotic than my husband’s calm spoken, let’s-talk-this-out counterpart. It seemed as though my husband and his would be ex-girlfriends were able to communicate in a way that was appropriate, even when they weren’t seeing eye to eye, even when they were clearly headed for the next Splitsville exit ramp. My relationships, even the better quality ones, just weren’t like that. Maybe I bring the crazy out in people, maybe I allowed things to escalate with some of them because that’s what I had been used to with my most dominant relationship, or maybe it was just that those men lacked knowledge in communicating respectfully.

Regardless, with one relationship in particular, when I decided to leave, when I decided that I had had enough, I think a few more of his screws loosened. My ex-boyfriend’s mother used to say that he was “never the same” after being hit by a car as a child, that something in him had changed that day and enabled him to be this explosive, somewhat violent creature. To be honest with you, when I left him, I think it was like a Mack truck must have hit him because he went absolutely crazy. Whatever had happened to that car injured, fire smoke clouded, little brain of his had absolutely been a change for the worse when he realized that I wasn’t coming back.

And similarly to my husband’s previous relationship, I think that in the beginning, he genuinely believed that I wasn’t really going anywhere. After all, I had come back so many times and more often than not, even though it was an extremely abusive situation, I was begging him not to abandon our relationship. I had basically set the precedent of relentless forgiveness no matter what had happened, whether my head hit the wall during an argument or he confessed that he had drunkenly kissed his ex-girlfriend at a party that I was conveniently uninvited to, I always forgave him. I don’t know what it was about our fiery relationship that kept me clinging to him but even though I knew things were terrible between us, I couldn’t let him go. Even though he was physically and mentally abusive for a long time, something that I knew wasn’t suitable in a romantic relationship, I stayed because maybe on some level, I justified it.

I had seen my parents fight for years but my father had never even come close to touching my mother out of anger. They would yell, scream and cuss at each other but there was some sort of unspoken rule that stated violence in the home was unquestionably forbidden. I knew all of this, had grown up with this behavior to never put your hands on another person (and I never have) but staying and making excuses for my explosive, firefighter ex-boyfriend seemed so much easier than leaving him. Because to be honest with you, and I see this more and more every day at my job, I seriously didn’t know what he would do if I had just decided to leave. I mean, he wouldn’t even let me step outside to cool down when we were arguing. He would block our little bedroom door with his giant frame and say, “You aren’t going anywhere, Kate. Put your purse down.”

But that’s the thing about domestic violence: leaving is undeniably the most dangerous part of the relationship. I hear people say things like, “I would never put up with that,” and “I don’t understand why she doesn’t just leave,” on a daily basis. And honestly, I could easily go on a spiel about the dynamics of domestic violence and the multitude of reasons why women choose to stay because it’s what I do for a living. But friends, it’s so much more than a job. It’s more than selling a credit card or memorizing a company’s mission statement. This is real life and it’s happening to women everywhere, every day. 

And I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go. –Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

In the beginning, when the initial break-up took place, I think that my ex-boyfriend was pretty certain that I would be back. He had put all these nonsense ideas in my head regarding the fact that no one would ever want to put up with me in the way that he had. He had filled my battered brain with reasons why I wasn’t strong enough to leave, how easily my crazy antics would scare any normal man away, and how unattractive I clearly was. When I look back on all the things he had said to me, when I sort of replay all the alleged reasons why I had to stay in my head, it all seems pretty ridiculous.

He would dictate it like he was doing me some sort of favor, or maybe like he was doing the other men of the world a favor. He had heroically taken the crazy off the streets, had so selflessly prevented another man from having to deal with me. He was keeping an ugly, overweight crazy person safely under wraps from the rest of the single continuum. And he was benefitting me immensely because obviously, I would never be able to get someone to love me. I mean, he had made that one pretty clear.

To this day, I don’t know what it was about me that made him treat me like that. And maybe that’s the battered girlfriend talking, not the domestic violence advocate. But I just never understood what I did to deserve any of the things he did to me, what I had done to merit any of the words he had said. Now that I’ve gotten myself educated and am far removed from that twisted situation, I realize that it probably had nothing to do with me. Violent traits will come out regardless of whatever allegedly exacerbates them if there is an underlying tendency. People say alcohol makes people violent but that’s so inaccurate. If you’re a violent person, it is what it is. The alcohol didn’t make you violent; it just made you not care that you were violent.

And just for the record, my ex-boyfriend was actually pretty nice to me when he was intoxicated. It was when he had a clear head that he was violent, impulsive, insensitive and explosive. Figure that one out.

But in the beginning stages of our break-up, he was actually a lot calmer than I had anticipated. Maybe it was because he had always assumed that I would be back, that he had never taken my threats seriously, or that he was under the misguided impression that I would run helplessly into his arms and beg him to forgive me for even considering dissolving our relationship. Control is a very strange, unforgiving mistress and I honestly think that he believed he still had control even though I was ready to sever all ties with him. He would show up at the school I worked at with iced coffee and flowers, he would smile at the women who worked there and speak about the long night he had had at the station. The bags under his eyes got deeper and his handwritten cards got more emotional, more frighteningly passionate as he spoke about all the love he had for me, about all the things he knew he had done wrong, about how I could never fully grasp how sorry he was for all of it.

He would tell me over and over again in these little Hallmark love letters, that things would change between us, that he would no longer take me for granted because he knew I was a “good girl”, that things had come full circle and he could see now how terribly he had treated me. He used to tell me over and over again in these letters that “it [our relationship] wasn’t over”. He spoke a great deal about the future and how I had to learn to let the past go. “We can’t move forward when you’re stuck in the past,” he would whine to me with that garbage New Jersey accent. He tried to reassure me that it was all going to change, that he loved me and couldn’t picture his life without me in it, and that he could understand now why I thought we needed some time apart. I was right, he was wrong, and things were only going to get better.

And honestly, maybe a tiny part of me believed it. I won’t lie to you and say that I just woke up one day and he was dead to me. The hardening of my heart took a long time and the reality is that he knew exactly how to manipulate me and for a long time, he was really darn good at it. Eventually, after probably months, I realized that it was all nonsense, that he was just trying to say whatever he could to get me back. Sometimes I want to believe that all those tears he cried for me were real but honestly, I know better. He said and did whatever he could to get me to come crawling back like I always did and when that didn’t happen, when he realized he had lost control, things changed.

He became really scary and dangerous.

When I first decided to leave, we were in what I now know is the “honeymoon” phase of domestic violence; the phase where things are sunny and bright, it’s all flowers and romantic Hallmark cards but the reality is that the tension is just budding below the bubbly surface. All your problems are still there waiting for you in this phase, you just don’t know when they’re coming. The explosion is just snowballing until one day you wear the wrong outfit to go on a date and he puts you through the wall while he’s still in his towel from the shower.

While at first my firefighter ex-boyfriend was doing absolutely everything he could to try and rein me back in, I think he was getting exhausted with the continual disappointment. In his defense, I would give him just enough attention to keep him at bay because I was scared of what he would do if he felt like I had slighted him. Maybe I was leading him on in a way that he thought was unfair but it was a coping mechanism; it was the only way I knew how to survive.

I felt like I was honest about wanting to break off the relationship but it was against my nature to refuse to hear him out, no matter how volatile and aggressive he was. I would agree to meet with him only on certain conditions, conveying that he could be scary sometimes and I would prefer to be in a public place. But I was stupid enough to let him pick me up from my apartment. There was one night when I was fairly certain that I would never make it back to my apartment. That he would just abandon my tiny body somewhere in the woods near where I lived, leaving nothing but a suspicious ex-boyfriend who would probably never get tried because he saved peoples’ lives for a living.

I only wish I was being dramatic.

He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and it seemed like the more confidence I gradually gained, the more he became aware of it. He knew I wasn’t planning on sticking things out and it infuriated him. He would show up at the school I worked at, only this time, instead of happily communicating with my co-workers like nothing was wrong, he waited for me next to my car. He would demand that I left with him so we could talk and when I refused, would make a scene that was enough for only me to know about because after all, there were people watching. “Your life is over, sweetheart,” he said to me one day over the roof of my Mustang. The scariest part about that story is that I knew he meant it.

 

Moral of the Crazy: I could tell you about the time that he chased me down a highway local to where we lived while he was pulling a jet ski. I could tell you about how he weaved in and out of traffic, yelling out his window like an animal, seemingly unfazed by the surrounding people watching us. I could tell you about the time that he waited for me one night after I got out of class because I had been avoiding his erratic phone calls all night. I could tell you about how he came out of the shadows that night and snuck up on me, how he tried to stop me from getting into my car. I could tell you about how he followed me that night, how he was pleading with me to answer my cellphone, how he didn’t back off my Mustang’s rear-end until I pulled into the Pasco Sheriff’s Office that wasn’t far from where I went to school. I could even tell you about the time that he found me again on the road that same night (he must have been hanging around, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for me to leave the Sherriff’s Office. But he didn’t just follow me. He followed me all the way to another man’s house (a man that I was obviously seeing because I had justifiably moved on) and actually broke the gate to the community when he was unable to follow me in.

As I’m sure you all can imagine, that didn’t really bode well for my up-and-coming relationship. Nobody wants that kind of drama.

And while I could go on and on about all of that, that’s not really what this blog is about. Although I wish I could justify every victim of domestic violence by sharing their story and holding their abusers accountable, there isn’t enough room on the entire internet for the things I would have to say.

The primary focus of this is to remind people, who may or may not have experience with domestic violence, that a victim’s leaving of their abusive relationship is the most dangerous time for them. I hear a lot of people always question why women stay in abusive relationships but the reality is there could be a plethora of reasons. It could be that they’re staying for financial reasons or because they wouldn’t have anywhere to go if they left. It could be because the abuser has beaten her down to the point where she really doesn’t think there’s anything out there for her. It could be that she’s staying for the children, because as awful as he is to her, he’s a relatively good parent. It could also be that despite how much she might want to leave, she’s terrified of what will happen if she does. It could be that he’s threatened to harass or kill her family members, or that he’s dangled custody of the children in front of her. It could even be that he’s threatened to take the life of her/their children.

And while it all seems so simple to us, in our safe little havens free of fighting and abuse, the truth is that it isn’t simple. It’s not simple at all and in fact, it’s probably one of the scariest decisions these women have ever had to make. I know it certainly was mine.  

I thought that no one would ever want me other than him because he had put that in my head. I thought that I wouldn’t have any support because I had immersed myself in firefighter culture and my only friends were his friends. I thought I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself on my own because he made me believe that I wasn’t self-sufficient, he made me think that I was somehow dependent on him. I thought I was damaged goods and that if I did somehow break out of that crazy relationship, that still didn’t mean I would ever be good enough for anyone else. And above all of those things, I was scared.

I was scared to leave because he was almost six-foot-three and a lot bigger than me. I was scared because he was street smart and really resourceful; he knew how to manipulate anyone to get the information he wanted, including my roommate who always seemed to side with him. I was scared because he was a firefighter with lots of cop friends (that I knew personally and had hung out with a bunch of times) that he threatened could pull me over if he’d “flagged” my car for drugs. (He had allegedly done that to his ex-girlfriend’s car, as well as her parents’ family vehicle.) I was scared because as a civil servant, a person who rescued people for a living, no one would ever believe that he was abusive, that he had thrown a fork at my head, that he had broken a plastic lawn chair over my car, and engaged in tons of other abusive acts. I was scared because he had a pretty big posse of local supporters, including his family that was so warped but somehow always stuck together, and I had none. I was scared because all of his friends, and we’re referring to other firefighters here, had seen the way he had treated me and had just chosen not to get involved.

The goddamn firefighter brotherhood still makes me cringe. The secrets those men hold inside are probably so despicable they would make Tommy Gavin cry.

There ain’t no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it. –Kate DiCamillio, Because of Winn-Dixie

I was having a discussion about this with one of my co-workers. We were speaking more specifically about domestic violence injunctions and how it can be really dangerous for a woman to get one, depending on the situation and level of abuse. (It’s kind of funny when you think about it, right? An order of protection that’s supposed to protect you can put you in more danger than you were in before you sought it out.)

I started thinking about how it’s really just a sheet of paper. I started thinking about how men will just rip right through restraining orders and injunctions for protection like they’re mere suggestions from people who don’t really matter. I started thinking about men who aren’t afraid of law enforcement because they don’t seem fazed by any sort authority, or because like Ben Roethlisberger and my ex-boyfriend, they’re actually really friendly with the cops. I started thinking about all the talk about women’s rights, about the fight for gender equality, and about ridiculous alleged love stories like Fifty Shades of Grey. (I’ll never understand why abuse and controlling behavior is so sensationalized but maybe I’m just being sensitive…)

Then I started thinking about how I dismissed my own domestic violence injunction because I didn’t want my ex-boyfriend to get fired. Because I felt bad that he had been suspended and had his weapon allegedly confiscated. Because I didn’t want to be the heartless bitch that ruined his entire life because she felt the need for a legalized protection order. I started thinking about Melissa Dohme and how she was stabbed 32 times because she had granted her ex-boyfriend “one last hug”. I started thinking about how lucky I was to have gotten away from my ex-boyfriend, what a crazy twist of fate it was that my mom’s dog had eaten through my phone charging cord so he could no longer talk to me, and how guilty I still feel sometimes for abandoning my old roommate and apartment complex, refusing to leave them a forward address and phone number.

I started thinking that that “one last hug” could have very easily been me. I mean, looking back on it now, I had played chicken with my life a bunch of times but it felt like I had no other choice. I started thinking that those 32 stab wounds could have easily been on me and then what would have happened? He would have been protected, he would have gotten a great lawyer (like the way he allegedly had gotten one during the time I had the DVI in place because he claimed he was going to “countersue me” …), a bunch of really credible witnesses to testify on behalf of his character, and probably would have continued to live his life to the fullest.

Telling pathological lies, cheating in his relationships, and battering his borderline anorexic girlfriends. It would never end.

Leaving that individual was perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. And I won’t say that I just woke up one day and stopped thinking about him. I woke up every day, for a long time, wondering if I had made the right decision because I hadn’t really been trained to think for myself. And even years later, well after I was married, it seemed like as soon as I got comfortable, as soon as I hadn’t thought about him in probably years, he would pop up somewhere. He would “accidentally” show up at the store I worked at or conveniently bump into a friend of mine and unload on them. He would tell them how sorry he was for how he had treated me, that I was a “good girl” who didn’t deserve any of it, that I was the one that got away. But he would always make sure to point out, above all things, that he had never laid a hand on me despite what they had probably been told.

I always thought it was funny that he would volunteer this information to our mutual friends despite the fact that they had never actually accused him of domestic violence.

The thing is that it’s in my actual job description to be a voice for victims of domestic violence. And with all of this nonsense going on in the world right now, with all the speeches and the equality marches, with all the protestors and the begging to be heard, I felt like the time was appropriate to remind people about another important piece of women’s advocacy. I wanted to really speak on what hits home for me, the equality that I would love to see in the world, the things that I believe need to be changed. And instead of relentlessly blaming Donald Trump for all of the world’s problems, I decided to take it upon myself to make a statement.

I don’t care if you’re Ray Rice, Bing Crosby, or my firefighter ex-boyfriend: it is never appropriate to put your hands on another person. Not to protest, not to prove a point, and not because your girlfriend is back talking you in a surveillanced elevator. And the victims of domestic violence aren’t just whiny little bitches who have nothing better to do than live in the past and complain. I went to social work school because I was so heavily effected by my own domestic violence experience that I promised myself I would make a difference. I promised myself that I would be the change I wanted to see in the world.

There is nothing better than resting easy and feeling safe. There is nothing better than making your own choices because you’ve chosen to. And there is absolutely no greater feeling in this world than knowing you’ve made a positive difference.

That the things you’ve suffered in your past have actually made a positive impact on another individual. Even if it’s only just one.

Stay strong, ladies. I’m here for you.

There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you one hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place. –Shauna Niequist 

Follow me at my twitter page @thatcrzk8 for more updates and rants about my neurotic abnormalities and celebrity obsessions. Be sure to subscribe to my up and coming YouTube channel to stay up to date on the things that grind my gears, specials about domestic violence awareness, and reasons I love my South African, jerky making husband! More videos to come soon!