I've always thought I was aware enough to not find myself in an abusive relationship of any kind. I was confident I could recognize the signs and that I would be strong enough to escape the situation when I saw it was unhealthy. I found out last summer that I was neither of those things.

My first serious, longterm relationship began the second semester of my junior year in high school. I was young, but I thought I was old enough, and I was absolutely smitten with my new boyfriend. We floated through the honeymoon phase for six whole months before there was ever one issue. We were sickening: we spent every second together, we neglected friendships, and we became each others' whole worlds. When our honeymoon phase ended, we crashed hard and decided to break up because of miscommunication. We got back together a week later, realizing our mistakes, and then broke up again several months later only to get back together one last time.

Our last phase of dating officially lasted four months, but I was convinced they were our strongest. We had open and honest communication (so I thought) and the relationship was more balanced in our lives rather than being consuming. I really believed we could make it work. When we hit a rough patch with a lot of fighting and passive aggression, I wholeheartedly believed we would just work it out and continue being solid. Instead, he broke up with me the morning I was convinced we were meeting to fix our relationship. I had to find out a week later, from a friend who was terrified to tell me, that he broke up with me for another girl (who rejected him).

When I learned this information, we had a text fight of epic proportions (the highest school thing one could do) and then didn't speak for the rest of the school year. It wasn't until the night I reached out to him, the night of our high school graduation, that I put myself into an emotionally abusive situation.

Up until that summer following graduation, I wouldn't say my relationship was ever emotionally abusive. There were a handful of instances of manipulation and he would make me feel guilty sometimes, which is never okay, but his good outweighed his bad for so long for me. I saw him as my biggest supporter, and I still think a lot of that was sincere. He always let me vent, he would be my shoulder to cry on then cheer me up, and I trusted him more than anyone. All of these characteristics that made dating him so good are what he used in his favor over the summer before we came to college so that he could get everything he wanted with none of the commitment.

I remember one day so vividly. I was at his house, we were cuddling and he had just told me, again, we couldn't have a relationship (then proceeded to kiss me), and I just broke down sobbing. He held me and asked me why I was crying and I told him, "Because I'm so in love with you, and we can't be together". He just let me cry while explaining to me, again, why we couldn't be together. Once I calmed down, I told him I'm scared because I can't escape us, and that it makes me worried that if I were ever in an abusive relationship then I may not be able to escape it. He then told me how he would never let that happen to me, and how he isn't like most exes because he's a "nice guy" and "he cares about me" and most guys aren't "good" like that. It's so ironic looking back on it that I was already in one of the scenarios I was so scared of.

My time spent with him that summer consisted of afternoons like this one, where he would reinforce my inflated perception of him and use that to get everything he had liked in our relationship without having our relationship be official. He even started dating another girl at the end of the summer, while still keeping me on his string.

The main reason I was able to escape my situation and to be able to look at what I had been blind to not just that summer, but so much of the relationship, was my move to college. I stopped talking to him about a month in because I got sick of him telling me about all the girls he was meeting at his college. I haven't talked to him in months, yet I still think of him almost every day because of the damage he did to my trust and general perception of men.

There are other details, like sentences he's told me that have burned themselves on my brain. The absolute worst is when he told me that he hadn't been in love with me for a few months before he even broke up with me. Being told that and then still being weak enough to forget that and fall more in love with him than I ever was in our relationship really harmed my own self-worth. I don't really trust my judgment anymore, how could I? I was so literally blinded by my love for this person that I couldn't recognize how toxic and harmful the "relationship" I was in had become. I ignored so many signs, excused so many little guilt trips, brushed off rude or condescending comments; I became an expert at making excuses for how he was treating me. My friends all saw it and they were so frustrated with me because I couldn't see any of it. I could make almost any problem okay because I was in love with him. And he was well aware of that.

I haven't really had a guy friend since all of this happened, much less tried to date, anyone. I think it'll be a while longer before I'm ready to try to trust another guy again, especially to the extent that I trusted my ex. I'm still working through what happened and more and more I realize the subtle ways I was manipulated that summer, and even sometimes when we were dating. Intentional or not, what he did was not okay, and it is never okay for anyone to go through. I'm blessed to have an amazing support system that lets me know I'm not alone in this. If you've gone through a similar situation, you're not alone either.