By Survivor Connor
I was about 14 when this happened, and I didn’t realise it was domestic violence until a I was 16.
When I was 14, I started texting this guy who was 16. His name was John and we instantly had such a great friendship, we would text daily and facetime and call constantly, he was a really big part of my life even before we started dating. I never got any weird feelings about him, he always seemed so nice, so when he asked me out I was so happy, especially because it was my first gay relationship after coming out.
It started off fine, but only for the first few days. About a week into the relationship, he asked me to send through selfies and I did, and he sent me a screenshot of my picture as his wallpaper; at the time I thought it was a little weird that he’d done that so quickly, we’d only been dating a week and we weren’t very serious, but I ignored it and passed it off because it wasn’t anything wrong, it just felt a bit weird. Then he started texting me rather sexual messages, and considering I was 14 at the time I found them very uncomfortable, and even when I asked him to stop sending them he wouldn’t. That was about a week and a half in, and it was my first big sign that this wasn’t a good relationship. After that, he very quickly started saying he loved me, that he didn’t know what he’d do without me, and that I’d saved him.
Two weeks in, it all got too much; everything felt way too quick, he was ignoring my boundaries and sending me sexual messages, and was constantly telling me how much he loved and needed me and couldn’t live without me.
It was just over two weeks in that I decided to break it off, and that’s when things got worse. He called and texted me for hours begging me not to leave him because he couldn’t live without me, and started telling me that he was going to kill himself if I left him and that his death would be on my hands. At that point, I managed to block him on all social media, and thankfully he didn’t know where I lived, so I felt safe that it was over.
However, he managed to get into contact with my best friend, who sent me a message the next day saying that he’d been texting her and saying that he was going to kill himself because of me. He also send through photos of him cutting himself and telling her to show me because it was ‘my fault’. She blocked him too, and we put him behind us.
Even years after the relationship, I carry a guilt around with me. Even though he never physically hurt me, I still have the mental scars from it. For months I worried that he was actually going to kill himself, wondered whether I’d actually caused his death, tore myself up over him, and even debated getting back together with him so that he wouldn’t do it. Thankfully, I didn’t, but even today I haven’t had a relationship since I dated him because I’ve felt so scared of it happening again, of feeling that overwhelming fear I felt for so long after him.
To this day, the only person who knows I had this relationship is my best friend. My family still don’t know, neither do any of my other friends. I was embarrassed and scared, I didn’t know what they’d think, whether they would think I was overreacting, whether they would blamed me, whether they would tell me I shouldn’t have left him, whether they’d judge me for being a male victim. But I wanted to share my story here, because as a gay male victim of emotional and psychological abuse, I hope that my story can show that other people should never feel like they have to stay with someone who is causing them fear and threatening them.
