Yes, I’ve been hit, slapped and punched. I’ve had various objects thrown at me, even been spat on. What may surprise you is that I’m a male.
This all happened to me just over three years ago when I was sixteen, I’d gone to a mates house party and there was a group of girls from a different school there, one of the girls was stunning and I couldn’t believe it when she started chatting to me. She had long blonde hair, big blue eyes and was …… well just perfect. I had never had a girlfriend before and was usually shy around girls, but she was so chatty and friendly and we seemed to have a lot in common. At the end of the party we swapped numbers and ended up texting each other until about three in the morning.
It wasn’t long before we were seeing each other everyday, I was the happiest that I could ever remember being. I suppose that I thought that I was in love. All my mates kept telling me how lucky I was having such a “looker” for a girlfriend and I felt proud to be seen with her.
It’s hard to remember when things started to go wrong, but some things stick in my mind, such as when she wanted me to take her to the cinema and I had no money. She went absolutely mad and started shouting and swearing at me. She called me all sorts of names and got so mad that she hit me, first punches on my chest and then hard slaps across my head. I’m ashamed to say that I actually stole money from my mum’s purse so that I could take her. It wasn’t the first time either that I took money from my family so that I could buy Gemma a present or take her out.
Another time, we’d gone to the swimming pool and a couple of her friends were there, she kept making fun of my body, saying that I was fat and couldn’t believe how white I was her friends joined in and were laughing at me. When we were having a drink in the café afterwards I said that I wished that she wouldn’t do that in front of her friends, again she went wild and shouted at me, then she picked up a can of coke threw it at me and then spat on me as she walked off. I can still remember the looks of disbelief on the people’s faces in the café and the total feeling of humiliation as I sat there with blood running down my cheek from where the can had hit me.
Unbelievably, that wasn’t the end of our relationship and we carried on seeing each other for another five months. When I see photographs of myself at around this time I cringe with embarrassment. I have highlights in my hair, fake tan and I’m wearing the worst chavvy clothes known to man. I was also binge eating and making myself sick whilst trying to keep the weight off. Gemma had created a monster.
The end of our relationship happened quite suddenly, I don’t even know what had started Gemma off. We had been into town to do some shopping, I’d been careful not to wind her up and everything seemed ok. The next thing she’s shouting at me in the street, really ranting and raving, I remember looking at her red, screwed up face and thinking that she was really ugly. I just dropped the shopping bags and walked off.
For a few days Gemma constantly rang and text me, she kept changing, one minute shouting and swearing at me down the phone to saying how much she loved me, then how much she hated me, and also that she would kill herself if she couldn’t be with me.
You might think that I was a bit of a wimp, perhaps I was, but it’s hard to explain in writing what it was like. I’ve gone over it in my head loads of times and there’s much more stuff that happened that I’ll probably never tell anyone. All I know is that it affected me big time, and I’m still suffering from an eating disorder now.