I’ve said before that I watched a friend leave her abusive boyfriend. I’ve decided to write about that in greater detail. Here is the first part of that story.
I met her in a class in college, and we were both amused by how similar we were. Detail-oriented hard workers, who had trouble in leadership positions because we were both such people-pleasers that it was hard for either of us to ask others to put in more effort, or to correct their mistakes. Between the two of us, we put in well over 50% of the work on a group project that involved six group members.
One day before class, I saw her kissing a man who was quite literally twice her size. She might be 100lb soaking wet, and he was over 200. Seeing him, I took a disliking to him. I tried to place the feeling. Perhaps because he has a man bun? I wondered. I shook it off. It’s none of my business.
(As an aside, I’ve had this flash of intuition on at least three other occasions, when meeting the significant others of people I knew. Every time I’ve had this sense of doom, the relationship has ended in a royal mess.)
At one point, my friend was wearing a turtleneck. But it failed to fully cover the bruise on her throat. I took her aside. “What happened?” I asked. She put her hand over the bruise. “It’s my brother,” she said after some hesitation. “He hurts me sometimes.”
We talked for a while, and she told me she lived with her mom and brother. Her mom was at least somewhat aware of what her brother was doing, but didn’t put a stop to it (I suspect she didn’t know what to do about it). My friend lived in fear of her brother, locking doors whenever possible, to give him fewer opportunities to torment her. She wanted to move out, but couldn’t afford to.
My then-husband and I had lived with roommates on multiple occasions, and we had an extra room at our place at the time. “You can move in with me,” I said. “You have to get away from him.”
She declined, clearly embarrassed, and I thought that was the end of that. But then, a few weeks later, she asked me if the offer was still on the table. I checked with my then-husband, and said yes.
The people who helped her move were myself and her boyfriend. She had a vintage vanity that she clearly cherished, but as they took the mirror off to move it, they’d discovered that the screw holes were stripped. As they brought it in to the room at my place, she told me she was worried the mirror would fall off and break if we tried to use the same holes. Having done some woodworking previously, I told her we could just start new holes. I got my set of drill bits and started comparing bits to the screws, to find one that was just a bit thinner.
Her boyfriend got impatient at this. “Just screw them in,” he said. “You don’t have to drill a hole first.”
After my friend had expressed such worry and care over the vanity, I was shocked at this. “The wood might crack and break,” I said. “It will take barely any more time to drill a hole first.”
He relented, but I felt justified in feeling prejudiced against him. He clearly didn’t care much about my friend’s feelings.
As I would soon discover, I had not saved her so fully from physical abuse as I’d thought. Her boyfriend also didn’t care much about causing her pain.
The story continues here.
The man bun is one clue. Was he wearing socks? That's another clue of a psychopath lol.