TESTIMONIALS

“Respecting Boundaries”

I was 15 when I first met by abusive boyfriend. I was into him the first time that I met him at my church’s youth group. I had hung out with guys, but I had never had a boyfriend before and I was really happy when he started to pay attention to me. We had been hanging out and then on my 16th birthday he asked if he could tell people that I was his girlfriend. He was funny, smart, nice and hot. I thought that getting him as a boyfriend was the best birthday present ever

At the beginning of our relationship I told him how far physically I was willing to go in the relationship and that I didn’t want it to go beyond that point. He agreed. After we had been dating a few months he started to try to do things physically that I wasn’t comfortable with. He would beg and tell me how good it would be. He never “forced” me to anything, it was more like he manipulated me into doing things that I wasn’t ready to do. I mean, I wanted to do them, but I also wanted to wait. It was a really confusing time. After we had crossed the boundaries I had set and had been sexually active for a few months he told me that he had planned it that way and he had just agreed to my boundaries in the beginning so I wouldn’t break up with him. I was mad when he told me that, but then I just blamed myself for being so stupid and naive. I realize now that I wasn’t stupid or naive and that I have the right to have my boundaries respected in a relationship.

So much of the time he was awesome to be around. He complemented me, took me on dates, and made me laugh. I was in love for the first time in my life. But, sometimes he would say things that really hurt my feelings like that I wasn’t pretty enough to notice, or that his mom didn’t think I was good enough for him, or that he would have never dated me in the first place if he would have known that I was still friends with some guys I had hung out with in the past. He never screamed and he never yelled, he would just say these mean things out of the blue that made me feel really bad about myself. He also told me that there was no way anyone else could love me as much as he did and I believed him.

We dated for over two years and then he broke up with me for someone else. I was devastated. I was convinced no one else would ever love me as much as he did. The only time he ever physically hurt me was after we had broken up. We were both at the same party and he said that I was embarrassing him (because I was drunk, but I wasn’t talking to him or about him) so he physically picked me up and carried me out of the party and then just dropped me into a pile of rocks. I punched him in the face for dropping me. I felt like the worst person in the world for doing that. Whenever we talked about our relationship he would talk about how I had hit him, but never how he dropped me from over his shoulder to the ground as punishment for embarrassing him. For that matter, he never talked about the things that he had done to hurt me, only the reasons why he had done them. When he cheated on me it was because he couldn’t “deal” with my emotional problems. When he spread rumors about me it was because I had told people the truth about our relationship and it was embarrassing to him.

About a year after we broke up I started to realize that I had not deserved his put-downs, jealousy, blaming or sexual pressure and it was not OK that he had treated me that way. When we broke up I was 18 and I didn’t realize that I had been in a dating violence situation until I was 22. I had always thought of dating violence as a punch in the face. Now I know that dating violence can be a punch in the face, but it can also be a lot of other things like jealousy, put-downs, spreading rumors, sexual coercion, and minimizing, denying, and blaming. If someone you care about is jealous, insults you, threatens you, looses their temper, pressures you to do things you are not comfortable with or tries to control you I encourage you to talk to someone. No one deserves to be treated like that.