If you are a regular follower of our blog, you will know that a post called The Deadbeat Boyfriend is our most popular. Another comment has been placed that tore at our heartstrings. I am placing it here on the front page in hopes that  supportive comments will help her get out of a terrible situation.

I’m seventeen years old. I am a survivor of both physical and emotional abuse. I’m an honor roll student, I was able to skip sophomore year of high school and here I am, graduating in merely a few months. I’m not so sure about college though. My dad keeps “forgetting” to get the money ready for the applications. They’re due in a week. Over two years ago, I met this guy in gym class. He made me laugh. He was only ever prepared enough for gym to not flunk. I really liked him. The only thing was that I would be switching schools soon. I told him that I would be leaving and going to a private school (it’s a school with on-sight therapists to help me overcome my PTSD) and he sounded sad. The day before my last day, he asked for my number and asked me out. The first few months were spent with him making up lies about his parents and himself. I wrote it off as him just trying to impress me and being a stupid guy. He told me that his dad would steal his car keys and hide them along with his phone for no reason. That his internet would constantly be unplugged on him. That his parents hated him. Once I met them, I knew this was far from the truth. I was stupid enough to ignore the lies.

He used the excuse of his parents hiding his car keys to get out of hanging out with me. Sometimes we wouldn’t see each other for weeks on end. Then something happened. Something rather serious. My mom purposely drove her car head on into a tree. She was in the hospital, every bone in her body broken or shattered and deep wounds. He took off work for a week and spent that week trying to hold me together. My mom was schizophrenic and had been trying to kill herself ever since I was a toddler, sometimes in front of me. At the end of the week, she died. Yet he continued to make excuses to leave work and hang out. We were with each other almost every day. His job started threatening to fire him. When things got heated, he ended up quitting. He spent two weeks unemployed, doing nothing before he even started looking for other jobs. He did latch onto one, a better job, with more hours and more money.
I moved out of the house sometime around here. I was living with my neighbors. He started canceling plans last minute and being a real jerk. He would make me fee bad and con me into giving him blow-jobs. He would yell and scream at me and call me names. We started fighting all the time, after never really fighting before that. When we hung out it was always doing what he wanted to do and never what I did. He would touch me inappropriately in public and when I told him to stop he refused to, and people would be angry at me for letting him touch me. In a moment of stupidity, I suggested we have sex. We prepared, got the protection we needed, and eventually did it. Four days later he texted me saying he didn’t feel ready to be in a committed relationship. I still hadn’t recovered from my mom’s death, and needless to say I ended up overdosing on painkillers. I almost died. He took me back, saying he was sorry and didn’t mean anything he said. My neighbors had kicked me out. Fast forward to last spring.
We were supposed to be hanging out at my house, but he was angry at me and didn’t want to anymore. I wanted to talk about it and talk through the problem instead of staying mad. He kept telling me to get out of the car. I refused. Then something I didn’t expect happened, he opened the door and attempted to throw me out. He grabbed onto the flesh on my back and kept twisting it until I started screaming in pain. He kept hitting my back (I was curled up in a little ball) and twisting my skin and clawing me and cursing me out, and my back was in so much pain I couldn’t think. I finally toppled over and fell out of the car onto the pavement, and I couldn’t move. I remember hearing him drive off. I just stayed there. I kept thinking about what had happened in the past and crying. I don’t know how long I was there for, but he came back and forced me to get up. He dragged me into the house and herded me upstairs like I was a sheep. He brought up some ice for me and took off my shirt to apply it. All I heard was “Holy ****…”. He didn’t say anything else until I looked in the mirror. There were bruises everywhere and there was blood soaking through the skin. It was ugly. He cleaned me up and applied the ice for awhile before leaving.
His ex girlfriend and him randomly started being in contact again. I haven’t mentioned her before so I’ll describe it now. When we first started dating they were really close friends. Then they had a falling out, and he thought nothing of her but a slut and trash talked her every chance he got. They stopped talking, and I was still her friend. One day, after six months of them supposedly not being in contact, he cradled me in his arms and said he’d have to cancel his plans with me the coming Saturday because he was going to a Halo competition. I knew something was fishy since it was Halo 3, which can be played online. He wouldn’t have to go to the person’s house. I let it slide. A few days later we got into a fight. It turns out that he was actually going to his ex girlfriends house, where nobody would be home, to “hang out with her”. I told him not to. He asked why, and I said “Why should I approve if you lied to me?” Next thing I knew, she called me cursing me out, said that she was so much better for him than I was and that they had a “connection”, she then said that I was crazy like my mother and that it was no wonder nobody loved me. She called me a ton of hurtful names, and when my boyfriend found out about this, he DEFENDED HER and refused to stick up for me. He spent all his time following this playing World of Warcraft.
That’s when the wrist incidents started happening. Whenever he got angry he’d grab me by the wrist and twist it so hard that I felt like it was going to break, or he’d pull my arm up behind my back until I felt my shoulder popping out, or he’d choke me. I wanted to go out on dates and have fun, he wanted to stay home and play video games or watch TV. He’d make me feel really bad about “forcing him” to take me out somewhere (he lives very close to everything) so we’d end up only ever going where he wanted and getting what he wanted. I never had a choice. We fought constantly. We’d call each other names and things would start to get out of hand. He was refusing to go to school of any sort at this point, having graduated high school. For a second time he tried to make plans with his ex behind my back, but I discovered it and it was nullified. Girls from his work were hitting on him and trying to get him to hang out with them or go on dates. He kept saying he got along better with girls than guys and that he just wanted to have friends. I’d found out from a friend that also worked there that it was obvious these girls didn’t just want friendship from him and he knew it. I said no. He would flirt with him over the phone. I asked him to stop. He kept saying they were just friends. Eventually, he did delete them from his phone and stopped talking to them.
This past summer, he got more violent. I’d been dieting to lose weight, and he started forcing me to eat really unhealthy foods. I started gaining the weight back and kept struggling to keep it off. He made it so that I would feel so bad if I didn’t eat the food he bought for me, that I’d have to eat it. His two best friends and I threw him a surprise birthday party. He didn’t appreciate it. Things are blurry here. During the fall he saw me less and less, making up excuses and lying to me about what he was doing in his free time. I saw another one of his ex’s names in his phone. He supposedly had dumped her for me. During the beginning of our relationship she called him repeatedly talking about missing him and all these things. He made it out like he hated her and she was harassing him, and when I took the phone when she called one day and told her off the calls stopped. Her number appeared in his phone again. I asked why. He said they just wanted to catch up. I broke into his email in November only to find out that he was active on his gaia account which he’d supposedly closed a year ago. I logged into his gaia, and then I saw something I wished I hadn’t. For the entirety of our relationship, which we were days away from our two year anniversary, he had been flirting EXPLICITLY with her through private messaging. She was sending him naked pictures to his phone and he told her a bunch of lies about me, saying I was a crazy psycho and that I was unintelligent and stupid and that he hated me and was just using me. He told her he wanted to meet up with her in person because he still wanted to have sex with her. They’d been in constant contact, having an online relationship behind my back. I confronted him, and he showed up at my house saying he was sorry and he’d break off contact with her. He told her off. But he was nice about it. My trust for him was shattered.
I was in the hospital the week before christmas for reasons i won’t get into, and it was pretty much a very hard time for me. I didn’t trust anything he said, and he kept calling me and insecure bitch and saying that I am controlling of everything he does. This went on and on. Over January we kept fighting. Then I found out that his ex girlfriend (the one he made plans with behind my back) had showed up at his work and tried to get him to come to her apartment. He said he’d never talk to her again, and he had promised me previously that he would walk away if she contacted him. He didn’t. He asked for her number and put it in his phone again, and she kept trying to flirt with him through text messages. I contacted her and told her to stop, and she responded by verbally abusing me, repeatedly calling my cell phone for days on end, and sending me horrific texts saying I should kill myself. She’s done this on and off every few months, to the point where I considered pressing charges. He refused to stick up for me once again.
Since the beginning of January he’s been making me pay for everything. I’m not allowed to have a job. I get a certain allowance from social security every month, which isn’t much, and that’s what I have to get the things I want and pay for school lunch. He demands that I pay when we go out, or that I pay for myself. I’ve been finding myself out of cash and desperate for money. Then, on the small occasions when he pays, he makes me feel like I freeloader for it and complains for hours about how poor I make him. During an argument about this, he cheered me up by saying we’d go to free pancake day at ihop in February. I’d never been to an ihop. I was excited. Skipping up to a few weeks ago, we got in a fight. We were play wrestling and I’d accidentally hurt him.
The next thing I knew, I was on the floor and he was slamming his heel into my chest as hard as he could, then shoving his knee into my diaphragm and choking me, laughing the entire time. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I stayed there for a long time. He went back to playing video games for a good half hour. He forced me to curl up in bed with him, and I tried to pull away. He started trying to strangle me just for trying to get off the bed, and when I finally escaped from his grasp and went to get off, he kicked me really hard in the back. I tried to get onto the computer to IM somebody and ask for help or something, but he would kick me away from the laptop every time. He taunted me and kept asking why I wouldn’t say anything, then started punching me repeatedly and trying to suffocate me again. He held me down and kept trying to get in my pants, but I kept trying to squirm away. I was upset. I was crying. I should have left him then and there.
I came to school the next day with long bruises on my next shaped like fingers. My close friend there noticed right away, and was really angry about it. This friend is refusing to talk to me because I didn’t break up with my boyfriend. More fights occurred. For the past six months he has refused to look at schools, refused to think about a career option, and then picked an option that is easy but refuses to apply to any tech schools. He refuses to go out anywhere new. Says everyone’s pressuring him. Makes excuses not to drive. And then last minute, he said I wouldn’t be going to the free pancake day at ihop because it’ll be too crowded and he doesn’t feel like going. I couldn’t find another ride, and was pretty angry that the one time we’d be doing what I want, he found a way out of it.
The arguing continues. He makes me happy sometimes. I do love him. I don’t know how to escape this relationship. I feel like it’s best to just let us drift apart on our own. But I am alone in this… Completely alone. No supportive parents. He’s isolated me from most of my friends. The friends I had left won’t talk to me anymore because I let him treat me like this….
I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve been the selfish one. Making him take me places and stuff, I don’t know. Am I really being that selfish…? I don’t know.