It all started with a party.
Not the big, crazy kind of party you’re probably picturing. It was a small New Year’s Eve celebration of roughly a dozen people: the friends I'd known for so long I considered them family. The next day, I was talking with my boyfriend of around 3 months, and I told him I’d had a couple of drinks (probably 4 or 5 over the course of the entire night) with everyone else, since I’d crashed at my friend’s house.
His immediate response was to break up with me, tell me I’d betrayed him by drinking, and hang up the phone. Of course, he wrote me a long apology (via text) the next day, telling me that he was sorry for breaking up with me, that he loved me, and didn’t want to control my behavior. But, he warned, if he ever heard that I was drinking again, he’d dump me.
That was the first time I’d noticed something was seriously wrong with my relationship, but it wouldn’t be the last.
In reality, our relationship was probably doomed from the start. There were a lot of little things that we tried to change about ourselves and each other to make the relationship last as long as it did. It started with small things, like the fact that he wouldn’t kiss me if I wore lip gloss or chewed gum (which I did habitually). Then it escalated to changing how we dressed, and spent our free time. By the end of my freshman year, I would get panic attacks whenever we fought and he started yelling at me, and then he would try to hold me to make them better (which often made them much worse.) As you can see, our relationship reached the point where it was completely dysfunctional long before we ended it.
One day I woke up and realized I no longer had an identity of my own. Sure, I was involved in a lot of things outside of my relationship, but people didn’t see me as an RA, or a member of my sorority, or anything else: they saw me as this person’s girlfriend. More importantly, I didn’t see myself outside of the relationship anymore.
Though this story wasn’t a pleasant one, and there’s a lot left unsaid, I think it’s important to tell. There’s a fine line between a couple that’s really great and happy together, and the couple that I’ve just described to you. My ex and I looked happy for the vast majority of our relationship, which lasted over a year longer than it probably should have. We laughed and joked together, went on long trips, and even talked about our future with certainty. But underneath the surface there were so many problems that we both just refused to address or resolve. Sadly, a lot of my friends saw pieces of this, but were never able to have those conversations with me about what an unhealthy relationship looks like. After we broke up, they finally told me what they thought of my ex, but this was all too little, too late.
If there’s anything you can take away from my story, please here this: if you see something, say something. It's the phrase the Department of Homeland Security uses in airports and subways to influence people to report suspicious behaviors, but it applies to relationships as well. And I’m not just talking about physical abuse. If you have any indication that there’s something not quite right about your friend’s relationship, whether it’s a change in their behavior or just a weird moment or look you saw, talk to them about it. It’s possible that they’re just really happy in their relationship and you just ran into them on a bad day, but the truth is that it’s probably a lot more than that.
Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t easy to have conversations with your friends about their SOs. They might ignore you, get mad, or even shut you out completely. But looking back, my biggest regret is not listening to the few voices that told me to reevaluate my relationship, because those are the people that truly matter, and the people that I can still call my friends after the breakup. Be the kind of friend that you want to have, and be honest with your friends, and even yourself, about what you see in the relationships around you.
