Part 1: The Day I Met Him

I was 15. It was a warm September morning, the first day of weekly American Government class in the church basement. I noticed him right away. He was the quiet, awkward one, tall and skinny at 6’ 5”. Add in his bandaged leg and crutches, and he was hard to miss. All the other guys in the class were loud, arrogant, hungry for attention. He sat in the corner, quiet and observant. He seemed different, but in a good way. He did not demand attention, but rather sat quietly waiting to be acknowledged. The next week, we started at a homeschool co-op together. We were both sophomores in high school, so we had all the same classes. I thought it was destiny.

As the weeks passed by, I fell. I fell hard. He made me feel seen. He made me feel loved. All I could see was the sharp contrast between him and the other boys his age. He was so respectful. The weeks turned into months, and we became more serious. He carried the groceries in for my mom. He always looked her in the eye and said hello, asked her how her day was.

I wish that I knew then what I know now about covert narcissism. I wish I knew that he was so carefully calculating my every move from that very first day. I wish I knew about mirroring. I wish I knew how much of a chameleon he was. That every time he entered the room, he was testing the waters. He was checking his audience and determining which mask to put on.

We dated for six years. Even in the first year, there was already a pattern forming. I would set a boundary, he would violate it. I would confront him, he would apologize profusely. But days later… stepping over the line once again. Every time, a little bit further than before. We lasted through high school and a long distance relationship when he was 13 hours away for college. There were so many moments while he was gone that it felt so wrong. I even broke up with him twice. But I always went crawling back to him. I didn’t realize it then, but he knew how to guilt me. The gaslighting had begun so early on, but I didn’t know what was happening, and I had no language to describe it.

When we were in college, he would go hours without answering my text messages or phone calls. When he finally did answer, I would explode in a fit of rage, questioning how he could be so inconsiderate.

But by the end of every single conversation, I was the one apologizing.

I’m sorry I’m so needy. I’m sorry I’m so clingy. I know I need to give you space. I don’t want to be that annoying girlfriend. I want you to enjoy college, I want you to be friends with other girls. I think that’s when the gaslighting really started. When he realized that he could lose me, and so he turned up the volume of making me feel crazy, while also preying on those parts of me that felt like I could not live without him.

Because just three weeks before I met him, my dad died suddenly. He knew how emotionally vulnerable I was. He knew that I had trauma bonded with him. He knew that he was the only person in my life who I would call up on the phone and sob to when I missed my dad so much it physically hurt to breathe. He had gone through his own heartbreaking and traumatic experience of losing his Grandma just months before we met. When I talked about my dad, my throat thick, heart racing, he got it. At home, I shirked away from the topic, for fear that it would trigger tears in one of my siblings or my mom. But with him, I felt safe.

I remember one of the first conversations we ever had, over Facebook chat. It was about my dad, and his grandma. He opened up and told me the horrible things he saw, the images that kept him awake at night. In the moment, I remember being blown away by his ability to share those vulnerable parts of himself.

I wish that I could go back and tell that 15-year-old girl that emotional intimacy does not equal emotional safety. That you can pour out every fiber of your love onto another individual, thinking that it is changing them for the better, without realizing that you are actually losing yourself in them, that they are sucking away pieces of you, little by little, day by day, until you wake up 28 years old and you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

After six years of dating, I stopped listening to my gut. That intuition, that innate sense of knowing that every woman is born with—he had successfully silenced it. After six years of dating, he was a professional. He had morphed completely into the man that he knew I wanted to marry. He had morphed into the man that was cherished and loved by my mom, and my siblings, and every single one of my friends. He walked the walk and talked the talk.

And I married him. At 21 years old. I signed the marriage contract and gave my heart away under the law. There were no red flags that day. There were no alarms going off in my head. There was only pure joy. Absolute bliss. I really, truly believed with every fiber of my being that my heart had found its home. Because I had stopped listening to my intuition years before.

Because listening to my intuition meant that I was crazy. Because that wasn’t what he really said. That’s not what he really meant. That’s not what really happened. I was confused. I was mistaken. I was just overreacting.

I’m just overreacting.

Those months before the wedding were the honeymoon phase I never got. It was all smooth sailing, and emotional intelligence, and empathy. It was all the best of behaviors.

I wish I knew that it was all a facade. It was all part of the end game. Get the ring on my finger, dig the claws in, twist my emotions around so completely, that the fear of leaving would be greater than the pain of staying.

The second night of our honeymoon, I woke up at 3am and he was not in bed next to me. In my dazed, half-asleep state of consciousness, I could just barely make out light streaming out of the cracks of the bathroom down the hall in the Florida condo we were staying in.

But it wasn’t just the bathroom light. The light kept shifting and changing color. Like there was a video playing on his phone screen.

But I went back to sleep.

And I didn’t ask him about it the next day.

Those first few weeks after I said “I Do” were when that feeling in my gut started to come back. When I began to realize that he was not the disciplined man I thought he was. That his actions and his words were not lining up. That the intense emotional closeness I felt during those years of dating were not adding up to true emotional or physical intimacy. I pictured in my head that marriage would feel like staying up late talking for hours with a best friend, a soulmate who felt like home.

But it was actually emotionally checked out by 6pm every night. Hours of TV shows and movies, a drink in hand, when alcohol had never, ever been a part of our relationship. An inability to go any deeper than the level that I was at—because I didn’t know that all those years, he was mirroring my emotional intelligence. Mirroring my ability to go deep, to process things verbally, to churn things over in my head for hours and hours until it felt right.

And that’s when it really began. The losing myself in him. The loss of my identity. His darkness began to swallow me whole.

And just three months after he whisked me away in my Pop-pop’s tan convertible Mercedes, my wedding dress gently blowing in the wind, it happened.

The first breach of trust.

For so many years, I convinced myself this story wasn’t worth telling. Thank you for reading.

Continued in:

Part 2: The Trap

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May 31

And just three months after he whisked me away in my Pop-pop’s tan convertible Mercedes, my wedding dress gently blowing in the wind, it happened.