A 2 Year Abusive Relationship - And Then He Disappeared
I’m sat at the top
of the stairs,
i’m waiting and it’s late
now. It’s been late
for a while.
I sat at the top of the
stairs waiting for you to
come home,
for years.
two years later,
you finally returned,
but I’d packed up my bags
and moved house by then.
- and I waited for you for a long time.
I wrote that poem in 2016. After the boy that swung like a pendulum between love-bombing and your standard emotional control, suddenly reappeared in my life and decided that he had made a mistake by disappearing from my life.
Love bombing is the process of showering a person with excessive and over-the-top affection and attention, it seems romantic, but actually, it’s used to gain control or manipulate.
My relationship with this man, let’s call him T, ended about seven years ago. As toxic, dramatic, intense and surreal as it was for the almost two years that we were together. The ending was just as confusing. Maybe it all was.
After approaching me initially through my Tumblr poetry blog (we are talking circa 2011, guys), where I wrote angsty, sad poetry about how angsty and sad I was. He was going to be going to the same university as me and had found me through a magazine interview I’d done with the uni’s literary society. After exchanging messages for a while, we met a few weeks later at an open day event that I happened to be working at.
This is effectively a story about how I was in a serious relationship with a ghost. A ghost that disappeared, leaving me with a flat with rent and bills to pay, a cat and no idea what had happened. I don’t actually believe that a single part of our relationship was real or that T told me a single true thing.
Confusing is how I would ultimately describe our almost two years. After we’d been dating a few weeks, we were having a conversation about our families, and I revealed that I was from a working-class background, whilst he considered himself to be from a middle-to-upper class background. He was visibly upset, almost pained. He told me I was really well-spoken for someone ordinary.
There was a pause before he laughed, but this narrative would ultimately frame our relationship, I just wasn’t quite good enough for him. He would regularly tell me that his family expected more from his partner, that his grandad always expected him to end up with someone that could at least ride a horse properly. These comments could appear randomly and be rewarded for anything from not having a holiday home in France to not wearing my hair up, the way he liked it.
The first time I met any of his family, at a large family gathering at his grandad’s in Winchester, I got into a heated debate around South Africa and whether or not it was for the best that apartheid had ended. And spent the evening correcting a family friend who insisted on calling Zimbabwe, Rhodesia. This was before I was served dairy for my main course at dinner – despite reminding T several times in the lead up to the party that I had allergies.
T berated me for weeks after about how I had embarrassed him, made an unnecessary scene (I asked the waiter if there was a dairy-free alternative) and how I had disrespected his family and him by causing arguments at a party.
The night that we got engaged, I had asked him if we could spend more time at his house as I felt that it was unfair on my best friend for him to be endlessly at ours. This resulted in a situation where he berated me harshly for hours, before crying and him telling me that he needed me. Subsequently, I spent hours reassuring him that I loved him. During the night, he calms down and he tells me that it’s just that he feels so much for me that he can’t bear to be away from me for even a second. He asks me to marry him and suggests we move in together. I said yes.
Oh 2012-loni. What were you thinking? Honestly, I guess I was thinking that I was sad, desperate for love and here was a person claiming that they were drowning in their love for me. It’s a bit flattering. Plus, I wasn’t keen for a repeat of the night’s conversation where I had to confirm and re-confirm my feelings for hours, so I said yes.
T was filled with these huge stories that wouldn’t be out of place in the cinema, for example, why his birthday on his passport wasn’t the birthday we celebrated (apparently due to some money-laundering scheme that a family friend got him wrapped up in…). Or why I hadn’t met any of his friends. Or the uncle that was going to send him the money to pay for his half of the deposit for the first flat we rented and mysteriously never transferred it over and was never heard of aga - resulting in me paying our full deposit. When I asked what happened about the money, he would become defensive, insisting that everything was ours now, we were in this together.
In general, if I didn’t really question too much what he thought or push too much, everything was fine. As fast and hard as the love bombs could rain down on me, so could the manipulation and kneading and working at just who I was. Looking back, I realise now that he not only wanted but needed me to be sad, insecure and lost.
We plodded through my last year of university as he became increasingly jealous. He would accuse me of flirting with pretty much any man that we came into contact with, saying things like, you just can’t help it, can you? He would insist on sitting next to me in the library for hours whilst I wrote my dissertation, not working himself, just staring at me or reading over my shoulder and asking ‘are you sure that’s what you want to write next?’ Or texting me through the day and sending endless follow-up messages if I didn’t reply, even whilst in class. He would randomly go through my phone and emails. There would be days where he would be furious, assuming that something he read on my phone was mocking him.
I graduated in June 2013, and I fell into my first proper job weeks later, that summer was intense. Jealous and controlling, he would be waiting to answer the front door in his dressing-gown as I got home from work. Going into meltdown if I was later home than anticipated or missed the train, aggressive if I even touched my phone in the evenings. He repeatedly told me that if I had been giving someone else my attention all day, the least I could do was give him my attention all evening.
I was waiting for the new academic year to start, head down and just pushing through to September so that he would be at least preoccupied during the day and wouldn’t feel so abandoned. Daily, he would tell me to quit my job. When I was offered a place on a master’s course at our university, he repeatedly told me to take it, so we could be together all day again. I did take the position, but I also kept my job, and he was so upset, believing that I was choosing this job over him. It didn’t matter that he didn’t work and how were we supposed to support ourselves if I quit this job.
Two weeks into the new academic year, I came home from work, and he was gone. His stuff, him, everything. No warning, no notice, nothing. I called and called and called, he finally answered and told me that he loved me and still wanted us to be together but that he needed some space. His mum had helped him move into private student accommodation and would be paying his rent, so he could figure things out. I was devastated, confused and felt untethered, but we made plans to get a coffee the next day and talk through it all. He stood me up.
Luckily, there was a six-month break clause, and I was able to get out of our contract fairly painlessly. It was a mess, but the flat was at least sorted, my sister and I moved in together and I started to move on. Until I chased up the deposit, which the estate agent had returned wholly to him and he kept it.
Never actually managing to get a response from him, my sister would see him at uni and confront him. He also texted me to threaten me with ‘powerful family lawyers’ if I didn’t drop my pursuit of defamation. Ultimately, my sister hounded him at university whenever she saw him until he sent me my half of the deposit.
I didn’t cry. Is that important? It was to me at the time. I just started to slowly re-build my life, except without the ability to trust anyone. When he randomly reappeared almost a year later, asking for the things that he left behind when he moved out, including his favourite dressing gown, it was laughable by this point.
Destroyed by this strange rollercoaster, I stayed single for a year, concentrating on my work, my friends and trying to work out who I was now. But once I started to date again, I just couldn’t trust anyone and would panic that I was going to be left again. I stayed single for another eighteen months.
However, T was to make another appearance, when I bumped into him in the street near our old university, he texted me that night asking if I wanted to get a coffee and catch up. Morbidly curious, I thought I was going to get the closure that I had been waiting for.
We met up and he told me that he missed me, that he couldn’t stop thinking about me and that it was a mistake to give up on us, that he still loved me and wanted us to move back in together and buy a house with his recent inheritance money. As if it had been like a week since he ghosted me. As if it hadn’t been TWO AND A HALF YEARS!
We did not get back together but I did get an answer as to why, he thought I was cheating on him. I asked him had he not considered a conversation about this? He said that he had considered it, but the trust had already been broken, but he was willing to try and build it again. Since I had never been unfaithful, I was confused as to how the trust could’ve been broken but I knew that I couldn’t go backwards. The spell was broken, some sense of self-worth re-built, it was time to put this whole traumatic saga to rest.
I haven’t thought about T in a long time, I generally try to just look forward and besides, I’m happy. Fully content with plenty of soul-joy, there’s almost a disconnect between the person that I was and am now. However, it still impacts me, I think. Insecurity and imposter syndrome plague me, for the first two years of my current relationship with Scott, I was convinced that he would randomly leave. When I hadn’t met Scott’s friends after a year, I was sure that it was happening again and was ready to run. I’m sure that I was difficult to love, untrusting, skittish and cautious.
It had all been boxed up and put in a filing cabinet near the back of my mind. Until a lady reached out in October 2020, she had spent six months in a relationship with T back in 2016 and had a similar experience. She was looking for some kind of confirmation or validation that what she went through actually happened.
Just seeing his name pop up on my phone gave me a panic attack. I took a breath, opened the filing cabinet and began to unbox the years of my life that I spent living on eggshells, in a relationship with a ghost. We exchanged examples of the lies he told, of the ways that he reduced us, the timeline of strange events as we tried to pinpoint what was real and what was a lie. Ultimately, I think all of it was. I think he has a type: sad, lost women that he can control and swing between love-bombing and berating.
I discovered that he took credit for my writing and Tumblr acclaim (the audacity!) and that years later, he still believed that I embarrassed him at that family party and that he still believes that I cheated on him, enough to bring them up when in a new relationship. I guess I’m the ‘crazy’ ex.
As I unpacked what was real and what wasn’t, it becomes clearer and clearer that I spent two years living in a controlled haze. That there was a calculation to informing me that I had put on weight or that I just didn’t have what it took to be a writer. That telling me that I looked like a whore as I was putting on make-up for work, had an intention and goal. That he had a type, a pattern and for a while, I fell victim to it.
The craziness of this whole story has become an anecdote that I tell at parties when bad relationships come up. You know, I’ve gotten really good at the timing and pauses, I’ve gotten really good at placing the emphasis and incredulity in the right places, that you would almost not realise that it had actually happened to me. There is such a disconnect between who I am and who I was, that it’s almost like it didn’t. But after letting someone spend two years telling me what I felt, and thought wasn’t real or important enough, at least I’m in charge of the narrative now.
I feel lucky that this is just a chapter of my life and not the full story. That I’ve looked through the memories of this actually, incredibly shit time, and I’ve placed them back in the box knowing that they don’t hurt me anymore. My life has moved on, I have moved on.
Scott regularly tells me how he could live on the way it feels to see me happy. That to see me genuinely smile tops him up on all the soul-joy he could possibly need. And that is the kind of love that I want. This is the kind of love we all deserve.
I think at the time, I put up with it because he said he loved me and because he wasn’t physically hurting me, so it didn’t feel like a big deal. But it was, my capacity for trust and love was shattered for years, and I just didn’t truly tell anyone how terrible it was day-to-day. I think because I didn’t realise how bad it was day-to-day until it wasn’t my routine anymore.
In my loving, supportive relationship, it’s crystal clear how terrible the situation was. If you feel stuck or trapped, there are plenty of organisations that can help or at least help you start to untangle yourself from it, including Refuge, Citizens Advice and women’s aid.
Written by Saloni Chamberlain
Hi, I'm Saloni, loni to most! A native Londoner, I've recently relocated with my partner and our two cats to sunny Weston-super-Mare, where we run an award-winning, planet-happy card & gift small business. Alongside this, I work as a freelance writer (everything from journalism to copywriting) and I think I'm generally quite funny!