This is the story of a senior girl at North Platte High School. Her story shows an emotionally abusive relationship that continually escalated without her truly realizing it. It is easier to look back on a story and realize the unhealthy parts of it, versus when you’re in it. Names have been left out.

“I don’t really remember the small details because I’ve blocked them out, but I remember most of it. I’ve been in a couple abusive relationships where it was emotionally draining and I didn’t realize it and didn’t know how to get out of it. The worst one for me was probably last year, and it was probably from about August until December when I realized that I was done. So basically, he was talking to this girl that he had previous feelings for, and he told me that it was totally fine and they were just friends. He said that she needed him because she was super depressed and was threatening to kill herself and so I was fine with it for the first month. During this time, I think he was trying to find things that would make me want to stay with him, and he would do those things when I was mad. He’d cook me food, or give me back massages, and always just tell me he was super sorry.

I started seeing messages on his phone because he would hide them from me and it made me suspicious, and I couldn’t trust him enough. She was flirting with him, and he wasn’t flirting back, but he also wasn’t putting a stop to it. I told him that I didn’t care if they talked, I just wanted it to be appropriate. It got to the point where I couldn’t even go 30 minutes without checking his Messenger, because they talked more than we did. She’d play a victim from something that was happening, and I’m not saying that it didn’t happen or that he didn’t make her feel better, but she’d tell him what was going on and then throw herself under the bus. Then he would have to come back and tell her how much he cared about her, which I thought gave her false hope, but maybe at one point it wasn’t false hope. He was going behind my back to meet up with her, and at one point he had deleted some messages that he had sent her, and then he started calling her every night that I fell asleep before 11. Instead of just dropping him, I kept saying to myself that I loved this kid, and I would be able to fix whatever was going on. I’m not the type of person to just push things away, I want to fix them, and I never wanted to be the person who just gives up. So, I figured that there was still hope, and at one point he’d realize that she was just toxic. One day I was home sick, and he was supposed to come over right after school. He was taking a while, so I called his sister and she came to my house, picked me up, and we drove to the school. We saw him there with her, and he was holding her, and playing with her. His sister got out of the car, and I was just sitting there with my hands on my head bawling. They apparently had a past with the girl’s family, and it was something legal, and they had restraining orders against each other, and he was breaking it by talking to her. About the time the restraining order expired, they started meeting up.

She would constantly physically threaten me about him, and told me stuff about how my man was comforting her, and asked if he had been consoling me recently. He was still trying to do those things where he was making me feel better, but he wouldn’t stop messaging her. Eventually, I put myself in a group chat between them, and I told him that that was the only way they could talk. I felt like I was being abusive by telling him that, but I kind of pushed aside what he was doing to me and felt bad for putting him on a leash like that and preventing him from doing stuff, because he was doing it anyway. There were certain things that I saw that he did with her that bothered me, and I told him that it bothered me. Whenever I did, he told me that I was overthinking everything and that I needed to knock it off. He told me that he didn’t understand how I expected him to be happy with me when I would constantly be on his back. At that point, I probably should have told him I was done, but I didn’t.

I later heard that he might be sneaking off at night to go to her house, which he had done previously before, and that’s why there was trouble with them. It got to the point eventually where I didn’t care if they were messaging each other because I was so fed up, and just done. I just didn’t want them meeting up in person, because I knew that could be bad. They kept meeting up, and people kept telling me about it. He then told me that I was crazy and that I needed to stop. One day, I came out of a morning meeting, and I saw both of them together talking on the stairs. He was leaning in to the conversation and looked really engaged, and I got really angry because he didn’t even talk to me like that. So I went up the stairs, and I admit I shouldn’t have done this, but I turned around and I slapped him. He told me that I ruined his life and stuff like that, and made me feel horrible.

I had later left on a trip, and got him a gift on my way back. We were talking on the phone, and he let something slip about her that she had to have told him recently. That meant that they were talking while I was gone, and that made me uncomfortable. Then I found out that he had allegedly went to her house one night and spent the night with her. I then told him that I wanted to take a break, and a few days later, someone texted me a picture of both of them holding hands. That threw me for a loop, so I went and asked for a pass to the bathroom, ran down the stairs, told him off, ran back up the stairs, and never talked to him again.”