It’s 2015. You’re a senior in high school about to graduate. You meet a boy from a different school nearby. You start hanging out and he makes you so excited that you can’t even sleep. He texts you sweet things and you FaceTime a couple nights each week, staying up super late. Your friends will tell you they’re so happy for you. You hang out and go on fun dates and get to know everything about each other. You start dating and think everything is perfect. You think to yourself, “Have I finally found a good guy?"

But the answer is no.

As the months go on, he starts to get mad at you over stupid, childish things. He starts to blame you for everything that’s going wrong in his life. He tells you that he’s right and you’re wrong in every situation. He calls you names and acts like a complete jackass when his friends are around. He makes you cry because of how badly he treated you one night but laughs in your face when he sees the tears streaming down. He talks to other girls on social media, whether it’s Snapchatting, Facebook messaging, or Twitter DM’ing, and tells you that you’re crazy for thinking he would do such a thing when you get suspicious and finally say something. He takes pictures with you to post everywhere, just so everyone knows that he’s in a relationship and it’s “so perfect,” but it’s not.

You start to see that he cares about posting your relationship on social media to see how many likes it can get, more than he cares about the actual relationship in real life. He ignores your texts and your calls rather than communicating about the problems. He makes you cry yourself to sleep, wondering what you did wrong. Your parents and your friends tell you to break up with him. They say, “There’s something that’s just off about him. He isn’t a good guy.” You defend him and plead that he’s an awesome guy and that you’ll never find anyone better. You start to just feel comfortable and don’t want to even think about leaving. You suffer through the days, wondering when these horrific feelings will go away and wondering when he will change. But, he won’t.

One day, he breaks up with you because he “just can’t do it anymore.” But you’re thinking, “Can’t do what? Can’t secretly talk to other girls on social media behind my back anymore? Can’t make me cry every night as you yell at me and make me feel horrible about myself? Can’t be with the girl who was with you through everything, even though she shouldn’t have been?” But the truth was, I couldn’t do it anymore either.

This relationship was killing me from the inside out.

I wouldn’t eat very much, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t focus on my first semester of college courses. I was so worried about what he was doing, it made me sick. There was no trust at all (obviously), and that’s one of the main things you need in a relationship to make it work. I was a wreck, but I was too afraid to leave when I should have. This is what a toxic relationship did to me. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me, even though there wasn’t.

While I can’t go back in time and end things with him sooner, I’m glad that I learned a valuable lesson along the way. Don’t ever let anyone treat you less than you deserve, no matter how much you think that maybe it will get better. It’s almost 3 years later now and I’m in an amazing relationship and couldn’t be happier. I’ve finally found the guy I’ve been waiting for. He treats me even better than I deserve and made me realize how a relationship should be. It’s not about posting on social media for everyone to see. It’s not about making sure everyone knows how happy you guys are in public, even though privately you sit in silence trying to figure out when it all went wrong.

It’s about putting all you’ve got into the one person you truly love; the one person you know won’t let you down.