25 Domestically Abused Men Reveal Their Horrifying Stories

Her: “Didn’t your prof give you a reference?”

Me: “No, she said to look it up online.”

Her: “SHE!?”

Commence beating. But she managed to convince me this was my fault. I don’t know how, why I never questioned it. She turned me away from my friends, and pretty neatly isolated me. I did hit back once, and the guilt I got in return was worse than anything else. Of course, she made sure she told everyone she could that I’d hit her. Funny thing is, a guy walks in with a black eye or bruises all up his arms, no one asks what happened.

If I got away – say by locking myself in the bathroom or just walking out the front door (if I could get past her to it) she would start destroying my things. My laptop, my guitar, my PC, game consoles, board games, card games. Anything and everything. And I fucking proposed to the loony bitch. From where I sat then, nothing seemed strange about that. I thought that was normal, somehow. My parents weren’t like that, but that didn’t mean anything to me.

Then one night I found her cheating. I say found because caught isn’t the right word. I’m pretty sure she wanted me to know. It’s like 3am, and I hear her making noise in the living room. I get up and go out to see if she’s ok – and she’s fucking some guy right there in the middle of the floor. I just walked into our bedroom, grabbed a box, grabbed a few toiletries from the bathroom, grabbed my guitar, and left. All I said on the way out was, “she’s your problem now.”

I drove for about an hour, then sat in the bed of my truck in a parking lot, playing my guitar til dawn while I mulled over what to do and where to go. I had just started a great new job and had reacquainted with an old friend there. I drove over to his house and asked if I could crash there for a couple days while I figured things out. I knew he had a spare room and no one else at the house. He was happy to let me stay there, and I wound up living with him (and contributing towards rent, bills) for a few months while I got things back on track.

She called me later to try and fix things, and I politely just told her to go fuck herself.

That was almost 10 years ago and I’m still fucked up by it. My last girlfriend did a lot to make me realize what a normal relationship is, and I wish I hadn’t let her go…she was perfect, but deserves better than me. She observed that the weirdest questions freaked me out and made me dodgy – because they were the sort of actually innocent (in her case) questions that would lead to me getting beat. I tried to cope with it, but I find it’s easier to just be single and do as I please. I’ve thought of dating again, but I just found myself measuring the last date’s sanity and decided that couldn’t be good.

I later found out that the violent ex has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder).

24. Leave after the first sign

I watched my step dad be verbally and physically abused for years by my biological mother. She is physically tiny, he’s average size.

One time he finally restrained her (holding her arms down to her sides so she would stop hitting him) and she called the police, claiming he assaulted her. She kicked him out, changed the locks etc. Threw away pictures he had there of his dead parents. Everyone believed her stories except those like me who knew her.

He put up with that for years and years, he loved her and didn’t see the monster she was. When he finally divorced her he had to pay her a LOT of money every month for years because she never had a job when they were together. She ruined the beautiful innocence he had.

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