What is Love? Baby Don’t Hurt Me
Strong, confident, and powerful: the collective experiences of women who overcame abusive relationships.
BY: IRENE JONAS
Content Warning: The following article contains mentions of domestic abuse/violence and potentially triggering imagery.
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Art by Daniel Gomes // THE UNDERGROUND
“What would you recommend for bruises?” I asked the employee at Sephora. My right arm had splotches of foundation rubbed into it, trying to cover the deep purple handprint that was left from the weekend prior.
She looked at my arm and then back to me. She wanted to say something, I could tell. But instead, she helped me find a thick foundation that easily covered what I so desperately wanted to hide.
I don’t remember the first time he hit me. It might’ve been the spit that jumped from his mouth onto my face when he yelled or the heavy indents that his knuckles left on my chest.
It might’ve been the time I tripped over his foot down the stairs and he told me I was clumsy. Or the time he told me there wasn’t any food for me but had seconds himself.
I do remember going through the bottles of foundation, painting on my own sort of camouflage. My entire makeup routine was based on “how to cover a bruise” tutorials on YouTube and help from sad-faced Sephora employees.
I wrote in my journal about how good of a person he was, how I had hoped to marry him in Las Vegas and own cats together. I thought I’d stay with him forever—he was my first boyfriend, after all.
“What is love? Baby don’t hurt me,” Haddaway sings on his hit 1993 song with the same title. I found myself expressing the same sentiments: I didn’t know what love was and I didn’t want to get hurt. In my experience, the words “I love you” never took away the hurt my abuser caused.
The Canadian Family Violence Initiative (FVI) describes family violence as “abusive behaviour that can be physical, sexual, psychological, or financial” that occurs within relationships established on kinship, intimacy, dependency, or trust. This also includes spousal, or domestic, violence.
Female victims account for 83 percent of domestic violence in Canada. On average, every six days a woman is killed by an intimate partner and one in five women will face a form of abuse in their lifetime.
Transgender and gender-fluid folks are more likely to experience domestic violence than cisgender women. People who identify as LGBTQ+ are three times more likely to report assaults. It is important to mention that the women featured in this article identify as cisgender.
I started dating Blake because he was funny and thought I was pretty. After years of feeling like I wasn’t good enough, Blake came into my life and made me feel like I was. He showered me with compliments, listened to everything I said, and told me he loved me on our second date. The beginning of our relationship felt magical. We were in a fairytale. We’d have picnics under the stars or find ourselves dancing around under falling snow. As long as we were together, we could take on the world.
Quickly, the fairytale started falling apart. Blake would lie. A lot. He would lie about his past, his family life, his job. He lied about his drug abuse, telling me it wasn’t an issue anymore even though he was often would be high around me often. He would comment on my body, telling me in the midst of my eating disorder that I was fat. He would tell me things and then when I brought them up later he would tell me I was crazy. Blake’s constant gaslighting and manipulation made me feel like I actually was crazy.
One of the worst times Blake hit me was while we were in his car. It was an unprovoked attack. It wasn’t the worst because of the impact or the marks he left on my chest, it was that when he hit me the first thing I thought was, “this is my fault.”. I took the blame for what happened, and told him I’d be better. To Blake, nothing I did was better.
I hadn’t told anyone about what happened to me because on one hand, I was ashamed. I felt like I had truly caused Blake’s abuse and deserved it. On the other hand, I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone because I thought I was imagining it or making the abuse seem worse in my head. The switch went off when I confided in a friend about a fight Blake and I had, during which where he shoved me down the stairs during it. She looked at me and said, “Irene, that is abuse.”.
I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but having a friend tell it to me straight put it into perspective. I want to say I broke up with Blake immediately, but I stayed with him for months after. I was scared to leave. Scared for my safety, but more because Blake had become so normal in my daily life and I was terrified to be without him.
He broke up with me. I fell into a deep depression, lost an immense amount of weight, and couldn’t move from my bed. I didn’t know how to be myself without Blake. Once I finally told my therapist about him, we started more trauma-based therapy and I started to talk about what had happened to me. I still sometimes have dreams about him or get nervous that I’ll run into him. I have a more difficult time opening up to others in fear of any type of abuse. But overall, talking to a therapist and really working through the trauma of being abused has made me realize that it wasn’t my fault.
I was young and inexperienced and it was not my fault that Blake did that to me. He found a girl that was kind and naïve and used that for his own manipulative gain. I learned in therapy that I am a survivor of what happened to me and I am not to be defined by it. Just because somebody abused me does not mean everyone else will.
Art by Irene Jonas // THE UNDERGROUND
Reflecting on my own history of suffering from domestic violence, I felt compelled to speak about it. I spoke with four women about their personal experiences. Exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly of the relationships provided an eye-opening realization: all of us had been abused in our first serious relationships.
Domestic violence and domestic homicide are highest for women ages 15 to 24. While Taylor, Rachel, Amber, and Reese detail the abuse they endured at the hand of their partners, they also explain that they were in their late teens or early 20s throughout these first relationships.
Naïvety and not being able to compare the relationship to another seems to be a big factor that contributes to young women staying in abusive relationships. During my relationship, I found myself sometimes believing that the abuse I was enduring was normal. There was a part of me that would whisper “this isn’t right,” but the other part of me would scream “BUT I LOVE HIM!”
Whether the abuse these women faced was emotional, physical, or sexual, all four of them prove that victims of abuse are never alone in their battle and that there is life after what they thought was love.
“At the beginning, being with him made me feel unstoppable,” says Taylor, “like I was the luckiest person in the world to be chosen by a man who seemed like he could have anyone.”
Taylor dated Neil when they were 21 and 24 respectively. Explaining that Neil “always seemed prepared to protect [her] no matter what,” Taylor quickly found herself falling in love. They planned a future together, full of adventures and plans for a family.
“The first red flags were when he started to get upset with me for spending time with friends, especially other men,” Taylor says. She then saw him exhibit other signs of anger, often directed at his mother. These signs included belittling her, screaming at her, and physically throwing things.
“It wasn’t long after that [when] the anger turned towards me.” Whether Taylor set Neil off or someone else did, she always wound up being the person attacked. This then led to physical, verbal, and psychological abuse.
An incident that sticks out for Taylor is that one year on St. Patrick’s day, Neil cancelled their plans because he was angry. Taylor decided to go out and enjoy the night anyways. Neil found her location through Snapchat, went to the bar she was at, dragged her into his truck by her hair, and proceeded to physically attack her. A police SUV parked nearby pulled him over. The officers took Taylor home in the back of a cruiser.
“I attempted to tell the officers [about Neil’s abuse]” Taylor says, “but they said it ‘wasn’t worth it’ and I was better off just ‘going home and sleeping it off’.”
Taylor did not tell anybody about the abuse until the very end of their relationship, when she broke up with him.
“[Neil] had a track record [of] being angry,” Taylor says, “so I was afraid the response [from people we knew] would be something along the lines of ‘well what did you think would happen?’ – and it was.”
“Those feelings of luck being the girl he chose turned to understanding that the other girls knew better to stay away,” Taylor says. The fear of speaking out due to judgment from others and the inaction from the police left Taylor feeling hopeless. Instead of feeling safe around Neil, she felt terrified for her life.
Rachel understands that fear all too well. When Rachel was 19 she began dating Stephen, who was 20 at the time. They connected over their mutual love for writing, and his initial encouragement and positivity made her fall for him.
“I began to feel like something was off a few months in,” Rachel says. “I felt so much empathy towards him because of his mental health problems that I didn’t really question it much.” Stephen would often use his mental health as an excuse to manipulate Rachel mentally and emotionally. He would turn conversations around to make himself the victim.
It wasn’t until one major instance that Rachel realized she was in a dangerous situation.
“He lost it on me in the car,” she says. “I was driving him to work and then [he] spent the entire day barraging me with text messages about how he hated my family, my friends, himself, and all the people around him. He would switch between berating me about every aspect of myself and threatening to kill himself.”
Rachel says, “It was during this particular incident that I started to feel like I might be in danger if I stayed with this guy.”
Deciding to break up with Stephen proved difficult. He told Rachel that she “wasn’t allowed to break up with him because it wasn’t a mutual breakup.” He wanted her mom to “talk some sense into [her].” He cried and continuously threatened suicide.
Both Taylor and Rachel felt fearful for their lives and the lives of their partners. Victims of abuse feel powerless when leaving their abusers for fear of retaliation, and abusers can threaten suicide as a manipulation tactic to control their partner’s actions. In extreme circumstances, retaliation can also lead to homicide. Women are reported to be 6 times more likely to be killed by an ex than a current partner. Motives can include escalation of arguments, anger, and jealousy.
“In your first relationship, you don’t really know what kind of love you should be accepting, and what isn’t love at all,” says Amber, a woman who found herself in an abusive relationship when she was 20 years old.
Amber met Jeff, also 20 at the time, through a mutual friend group. They started dating because they both genuinely liked getting to know each other. Emotionally and sexually, Jeff began to pressure her too quickly into doing things she didn’t want to do. Amber found that she was constantly doubting her trust in him and often felt guilty.
“I don’t think I really understood what had completely happened until about a year after he broke up with me,” Amber says. “There was no particular incident that made me realize it was abuse, but there are a few big moments that, in hindsight, I see as pivotal moments towards the downfall of our relationship.”
Amber decided not to tell anyone about these big moments. She would vent to her roommate about fights that were happening, but would never let on about the emotional and sexual violence incidents. Telling very few select friends and making sure to omit specifics, Amber blamed herself.
“Physically, I lost a lot of weight. I didn’t sleep, and it showed in my ability to perform daily tasks,” Amber says of the impact Jeff’s abuse had on her. “Mentally, I failed every class in the semester that he broke up with me. I experienced a lot of depression and cried almost daily for months after the fact.”
Amber felt alone, saying that she “didn’t talk to [her] family about it because they are conservative in nature and wouldn’t be comfortable [with her] talking about a sexual relationship.”
Intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV) includes any form of sexual assault that occurs throughout an intimate relationship. Police-reported sexual offences are committed more often against women. In 2013, Statistics Canada states that 98 percent of police-reported IPSV cases are female. The Canadian Women’s Foundation reports that women who suffer from sexual assault often blame themselves for the abuse rather than the perpetrators. This then makes it more difficult for them to speak up about violence.
“I started dating [them] because they gave me attention,” Reese says of Jay. Reese was 19 and Jay was 18 when they started dating.
“I knew I was gay but I wasn’t out of the closet. I so badly wanted to date a woman and this person showed me the attention that I wanted and allowed me to explore,” Reese says. “I liked that they lived on their own in Toronto and were big in the gay scene.”
Reese was drawn to Jay’s outgoing nature and that they were living a life that was so different from her own experience. Then, the mental and physical abuse started. Reese was subjected to name-calling, manipulation, kicking, punching, and more.
In one memorable instance, Reese and Jay were grocery shopping together. Jay belittled Reese, mocking her for pushing the cart too fast, too slow, walking too loudly. Nothing Reese did was right. Finally, Reese realized she couldn’t take it. After several years of this relationship, she walked into another aisle, abandoned the cart, ran out of the store, and drove home.
She did not call or text them and they never called or texted her either.
“It wasn’t until it was over that I realized it was abuse,” Reese says. “I didn’t speak about my relationship with anyone while I was in it. When it ended, I started opening up and people started saying it was abusive.”
Abusive relationships are far too common. I wish I knew that when I was in the thick of my own. Like these women, I too didn’t tell anybody the extent of what was happening to me. Fear of retaliation from my partner, wanting to be the “cool girlfriend” that understood everything, feeling empathetic due to his mental health problems, and feeling like nobody would love me ever again always came in the way of me leaving.
I was young and naïve and thought that “I love you” could fix everything. Now, I know that somebody that abuses you does not love you.
Rachel, Reese, Amber, and Taylor have taken years to understand and work on the lasting trauma domestic abuse has left on them. The confidence that radiated off of these women during our conversations was impactful: they are not weak women who were abused, they are strong women who overcame it. Their collective experiences show that there is so much more than what has happened to them.
Art by Irene Jonas // THE UNDERGROUND
“After I finally learned to use that term [abuse], I began to have an easier time coming to terms with it,” Rachel says. “After it happened, I became friends with someone who had also been in an abusive relationship and having someone to talk to that understands has really helped me.”
Rachel also explains that seeing a therapist for a few months, being open with people in her life, and using her experience in her writing has helped her work through the lasting impacts of abuse.
When asked what advice she would give to someone who may be in or coming out of an abusive situation right now, Rachel says, “You are not alone. You are not stupid for what happened to you and it is not your fault. Also, I think it’s important to stress that emotional abuse is real abuse. It doesn’t have to be physical for it to be real.”
Reese explains that although she doesn’t think about it often and it no longer leaves her feeling sad, she still has some trust issues from it.
“My advice would be to try to keep as much support around as possible,” Reese says. “It will be hard to leave the situation but having a good support system will make a huge difference.”
Amber has taken what she’s learned, applied it to herself, and let it help her make decisions in future relationships.
“People always say that love isn’t easy, and isn’t always glamorous,” says Amber. “I grew from it by learning exactly what I will not and cannot tolerate in a partner. I have gained significantly stronger communication skills in my new relationships and have become selective about who I let into my life. I’ve never fully gotten over it, but I became peaceful with it after about two years of reflection.”
Amber says that she has had support from her close friends and has also sought out two therapists over the past few years. Two pieces of advice she has: feel and forgive.
“You have to force yourself to feel all of the pain as it comes—it will come in waves—and never suppress any of it,” Amber says. “Also, give yourself permission to forgive. Acknowledge that your partner was growing and also learning how to love in their own respects. Forgive yourself for not asking better of yourself, and forgive your ex-partner for using you as a stepping-stone in their journey of figuring out how to love.”
Taylor credits the death of her abuser late last year to be one of the factors that helped her move on. Living in the same city as him made it harder to move on from the memories of abuse. After everything that had transpired between her and Neil, she never felt safe enough and was always on guard. After his death, Taylor realized that he couldn’t hurt her ever again.
“It took away the aspect of terror from my life that he would be lurking around any corner or dropping in randomly,” Taylor says. “I’m still struggling with certain parts of it but not being scared of him coming back all the time has made a monumental difference.”
“It felt like my voice was taken from me during our relationship, and slowly returned in the years following,” Taylor says. “There are still times where I catch myself being too lenient with how people are treating me or what they’re asking from me, but I am able to recognize it better now and am not afraid to speak up when it seems someone is taking advantage of me.”
As per advice, Taylor says, “it’s such a cliche thing to hear, but you really truly do deserve better. It won’t get better overnight, it won’t go away all at once, and it will be hard as hell, but once you’re on the other side you won’t regret the mountain you climbed to get there. No one should have to live in fear or pain, especially at the hands of the person they love.”