By Anonymous:
Note: As a part of Love Matters and Youth Ki Awaaz’s ongoing #BearNoMore campaign on raising awareness about Intimate Partner Violence, we carried out a blogathon inviting you to share your experiences and opinions. The tremendous number of responses only show how important it is to discuss the issue. This post is one of the contributions made to the blogathon.
I met him on a social networking site. I kind of knew who he was but I knew he didn’t know me. He was charming. He was handsome. And he liked me. That “Howdy? 😀” was pretty much all it took. It started off great. He was everything I wanted. I knew he had a history of relationships that had gone wrong but he was going to be mine and I knew I’d never give up on him. Soon, I was living with him. And even sooner, I gave up on the rest of the world. I just had to be around him all the time. The kind of happiness I felt with him alone was more than I had ever felt in my life.
I soon noticed that he was quite possessive. But I liked it. It felt more and more like he wanted me all for himself. It felt like he was falling in love with me and I was already there. Then he started prying on many aspects of my life that I didn’t want touched. My past physical relationships were something that I had never revealed and when he investigated and found out, that brought out the worst I had seen in a person.
It started 15 months ago. The beauty and purity of the relationship that I treasured from the day I found it just got lost. I blamed myself for so long. I cursed myself for not telling him the truth in the beginning. I accepted every punishment he gave me. I knew he wont trust me again for a long time but I was determined to do anything he wanted.
It started with asking me for naked pictures whenever he got angry irrespective of where I am and hurling abuses at me. It broke me. He’d call me names and he never let me go anywhere other than my college classes. He would ask me to click pictures of where I am to prove to him that I wasn’t lying. He would ask screenshots of my call logs, messages and forbid me to talk to basically any guy. I was doing all of this. I had turned into this machine who would do all these things efficiently. And when I made a mistake he would hurl abuses and threaten, initially with my pictures and then with just leaving me.
This went on till the time I was absolutely alone. He was sick paranoid about the smallest things. If I couldn’t account for even 5 minutes of my life, he’d think that I’m doing things with guys. I was realising that what was meant to be a punishment for me was turning into a sickness. My parents gave up on me. They barely gave me money since I was studying away from home and couldn’t be trusted. I started depending on him for all the expenditure whenever we met. And he never missed a chance to make me feel like a ‘worthless whore’. He complained about how I was the worst even in bed. I was broken, damaged and a dud. I didn’t have career dreams and my grades went down and I was alone and lost. This continued till I didn’t want to live any more. 12 months, this went on. I’d cry almost everyday. He’d curse almost everyday. I broke.
And then he left me. I tried my hardest. Lost my life. Didn’t have one person who would ask me if I was dead or alive. And he left because I had forgotten how to smile, laugh and be sexy. He left because I was sick. I was depressed.
When I tried to get back on my feet, I tried to contact my friends after a really long time. There was one question everyone asked me, “why did you put up with it?” I asked myself that too. It was just that little voice whispering in between my sobs, “just a little while longer.”
Now he is back in my life. And it might be longer.