They all start out the same. The first few months are amazing and you think that it’s all too good to be true. Romantic dates, deep conversations at 2 AM, sitting on the porch staring at the stars together, and laughing so hard that you’re literally crying. Trust me, I know how it is. You find yourself losing sleep because your naive mind wants to think that he’s the one. He’s perfect, right?

Wrong.

A year went by and his dark side started to slowly crawl out from underneath the bed where the monsters I had nightmares about as a kid used to live. Now he’s the monster.

It didn’t happen all at once. It was like he tied an invisible leash around my body and as time went on he started pulling the rope tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe anymore. Here’s the catch: the leash was only invisible to me.

He was sneaky about how he did it, almost like he had a plan from the beginning. Everything started out on cloud nine. Then he started going through my phone to look for anything he could use against me, and making sure that I wasn’t like him when he was alone. That quickly escalated into him telling me who I could and couldn’t hang out with, what I could and couldn’t wear, where I could and couldn’t work, where I was and wasn’t allowed to go.

He forbid me from seeing my best friend. He wouldn’t let me go see my family. He wouldn’t let me go get my nails done by myself, or go to the mall by myself. His insecurities were killing me from the inside out.

Looking back on it now, it was simple. I was happy, and then I wasn’t.

But during that dark, delicate time it was so much more than that. One moment he was twirling me around in the kitchen kissing me and calling every lovely word in the dictionary. The next moment we were screaming at each other so loud that I honestly felt like I was going to pass out.

Every couple fights, though, right? This is normal, he clearly loves me and I clearly love him.

I ignored the fights, his uncontrollable anger, and his irrational urge to be in control and I focused on the kissing and twirling. You’re probably asking yourself why I put up with it. Why didn’t I leave?

In all honesty, I didn’t want to. I loved him. I thought what he was doing was normal, until one day it was very, very obvious that what was happening wasn’t normal. The twirling turned to pushing, lovely terms of endearment turned to cussing, and lust turned to fear. Yet the love never faded. It wasn’t all bad all the time. In my opinion, the good still outweighed the bad.

Then one day (I can’t tell you exactly when) it took a turn for the worst. I looked in the mirror and saw a shell of the happy, bubbly person I was two years prior. I felt empty and I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. So I made the decision to leave. I packed up my stuff and explained to him that I couldn’t be with him anymore. I instantly saw a flick of anger go through his eyes and I could feel the blood drain from my face as pure terror took its place.

As he turned and rushed away, he started shouting, “If you’re going to leave me then you might as well kill me.”

I can’t tell you exactly what was said or how it happened because I had so much adrenaline pulsing through my veins, but the next thing I knew he had the biggest, sharpest kitchen knife in his hand and we were in the middle of the street at 1am. He got down on his knees and pressed the knife into his wrist. The blade pierced his olive skin and dark, red blood flowed down his forearms.

As he went for round two I grabbed the knife and threw it as hard as I could, cutting my own hand in the process. He instantly was on his feet running for the knife in the pitch black street. I lunged onto his back and tried to force him to the ground to get him to calm down, but he hit his head on the pavement so hard I could feel the thump. He screamed louder than I’ve ever heard anyone scream, and I just held him as blood poured from his head and dripped down his forearm. Covered in his blood and scared to death I cradled him in the middle of the street and whispered “I love you, I’m not going anywhere” over, and over, and over again until he finally stopped screaming.

The next day we talked and worked everything out. Things between us started to get better. I blamed myself for everything that happened and guilt ate away at me day in and day out. I figured if I loved him enough, he would change. If I could get him to love me like I loved him, he would stop. Oh, how I was so far from being right. Just as quickly as things got better, they got worse again.

I tried to leave a second time and he actually locked me in the bathroom to prevent me from leaving. I screamed as loud as my tiny lungs would allow me to in hopes that a neighbor would hear and call the cops. I laid limp on the cold tile as I looked up into his empty, brown eyes and I saw nothing. No regret, no guilt for making me cry so hard, no recognition of him making me lose my sanity in the cracks of the walls in the bathroom. After what felt like hours of screaming and being trapped, he let me out after I promised I would stay with him.

Again, you might ask why I stayed, and again, I can’t give you an answer.

I didn’t think it was abuse because he never hit me. There were no bruises to say “Hey, GET OUT NOW AND DON’T COME BACK!”

As if the previous signs hadn’t added up perfectly like 2+2=4, I gave him another chance. A couple months later, I was standing in front of his house covered in glass as he sat in the back of a cop car. Photos were taken, details were documented, I wrote and signed a police report, and watched the officer drive off with who I thought was the love of my life in the back seat. But the ‘love of my life’ just hit me in the face and threw an Xbox controller at my head so hard that when I ducked and it hit the wall directly behind me it exploded into a ton of tiny shattered pieces.

An abusive relationship is so much more than makeup covered bruises, shoving, threats, and shattered doors. An abusive relationship is him telling you that you can’t wear yoga pants to school. It’s him not letting you go spend the night at your mom’s house because you miss her. It’s him following you to and from work to make sure that’s where you were going. It’s him threatening to kill himself every time you build up the courage to leave. An abusive relationship is far more than just physical abuse, it’s emotional too.

I tried to love the abuse out of the abuser and it ended with him in a jail cell and me forever changed by the series of events that took place during those two terrifying years. Before you ask yourself one more time why I stayed with him, you should first concern yourself with why he was okay with letting his fist come into contact with my cheek bone.