The Story of S (cont)

A little aside is in order before I start--yes, everything is fine today. He and I resolved the fight as usual. I think we will be fight-free for at least a little while now. And the cycle continues.
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S and I were spending a lot of our time outside of school together. Like I mentioned before, he went to a regional tech school, so I saw him in evenings and weekends. The fact that he lived up the street made up for the fact that we went to different schools.

Once I got my license, things got even easier. Things also got more complicated. See, at this point, I was still a virgin, and not incredibly eager to... not be. S was not a virgin, and did not enjoy behaving like one. He was lobbying hard to take it further than I wanted to.

Once I started sharing my brother's car with him (thank goodness we get along), S and I got into the habit of driving to a new development behind his house (it was in the early stages of building and no one lived there yet) just for some privacy. Well, ok, we wanted to make out without his mother walking in on us. That is why I was there anyways. I figured out pretty quickly that he had his own reasons.

I don't really know how to explain what happened, because I am still a little unsure myself. All I know, is that we ended up doing things I remember telling him I didn't want to do. I remember telling him to stop, which he did (about the third time I said it). I remember dropping him off and driving home and feeling filthy, guilty, shaken. I remember feeling like now that I was broken, I had to make the relationship with S work.

Since the damage had already been done, and I didn't want to think about what had happened, I started having sex with S on a regular basis immediately. He apologized for the night in the car, and I accepted his apology because it helped me erase what had happened.

It wasn't long before my parents found out. My Dad claimed that he had been looking for my medical insurance card in my purse, and had found a condom wrapper in there. At first they were calm. My Mom said that she was going to bring me to the doctor to get me checked out and put me on the pill. It was uncomfortable, but at least they were handling it okay.

The next day, they were like different people. They spent about three hours yelling at me about how I was too young to be having sex. Asking me what they had done wrong raising me. Forbidding me to see S anymore. My Mom said that she wouldn't take me to the doctor, because it would only encourage me to continue doing it. She told me that I needed to stop. It was pretty much the worst three hours that I can ever remember having--and definitely the last time that I ever spoke to my parents about sex. How could I tell them that I hadn't really wanted to do it? How could I explain any of that to them? So I didn't. I just cried. Then I went upstairs and cried on my floor until I fell asleep. Things were tense in the house for weeks after that. My brother had left for college and it was me alone against them. My Mom would ask me about once a week after that if I was "abstaining from sex." I would say "yes," because it was what she wanted to hear. They never took me to the doctor.

I still saw S, even though they forbade it. I would drive up to his house before driving to school in the morning, telling my parents that I had to get to school early for one reason or another. After a couple of weeks, my parents realized that telling me not to see S was not going to stop me from seeing him. They relented, and things more or less went back to normal.

S had a nasty side. I saw it come out that one night in the car, but it got worse as the newness of our relationship wore off. S was insanely jealous, and hated that I had male friends. S would get spitting mad at me when I wore an outfit that he thought was too tight, or too short, or anything that drew any sort of male attention. If I had been older, I would have known that these were all warning signs of an abusive relationship. At the time, I knew that they weren't good things, but I didn't know that things could get worse.

The worst thing was how aggressive S would get sexually. I don't even know how to write about this without just being blunt. He used to force me to have anal sex with him, even while I was crying and clearly in pain.

I started to become isolated from my friends. S monopolized my time. He would get jealous or mad if he didn't know where I was and who I was with. I had to stop hanging out with my male friends outside of school, because S threatened to go vandalize their houses or fight with them.

Obviously, leaving S crossed my mind, but I was afraid to do that. He would make offhand comments about how he would kill himself if I ever left him. I didn't feel like I could talk to my parents about the problem--after our little sex talk--and I didn't want my friends to know that anything was wrong. So, I stayed with him.

Those weren't the only offhand comments he would make either. He would "joke" that maybe he would get me pregnant so that I would never be able to leave him. I tried to brush the comments off as jokes, but was constantly worried about that.

Soon, his family decided to move an hour and a half away, to the place his parents had grown up. S had graduated high school, an his younger brother was just starting high school, so it seemed like the perfect time for them to buy their dream house where they had always wanted to live. The move didn't break S and I up. By that point, he had finally gotten his license, and the car was all mine with my brother at college. My parents almost seemed to have given up trying to do anything about my relationship with S. I could tell they didn't like it, but we had been together for over a year, and they knew that they couldn't do much about it. After S and his family moved, I would see S every weekend--alternating between him coming and spending the weekend at my house, and me going and spending the weekend at his.

S tried to go to community college, but didn't last long. He got a job at a hardware store, which he was pretty miserable with. His mood got worse.

With S so far away, I was more free to finally hang out with my male friends again--or so I thought. I had one male friend who I would drive home from school. One day, when I got home from dropping him off, S was waiting in my driveway. He had skipped work that day, come and waited outside of my school to check up on me and followed me home. He was so angry that I had driven my friend home, that he locked himself in his car, took out a razor blade, and started cutting his arm yelling, "look at what you're making me do." My parents weren't home at the time.

Eventually, the distance emboldened me to actually break up with S. I ended it. He was angry. He claimed that he took a bunch of pills that night but threw them up before anything happened. I tried not to let his words get to me.

I started hanging out with D, who was a great support during that time. S would occasionally show up at the pool hall, or wherever I was with D, and try to start a fight. I kept telling S that it was over and he needed to leave me alone.

One day, I came home to find my bedroom destroyed. My stuff was everywhere. I realized my diary was missing. S had our garage door code, and I immediately figured out that he had driven down, let himself in, and gone looking for my diary. A few days later, he turned up and returned it. That was the last time I ever saw him.

I was always afraid that he would turn up again. Freshman year of college, he emailed me to tell me that he was in the Army. He said that he had gone to my high school graduation and knew where I went to college and wanted to stop by on his way to training. I wrote back and told him that I didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. That was the last I heard of him until the incident with Facebook this year.

I learned a lot about red flags from my relationship with S. I often wonder how what happened during that relationship affected how I deal with men. I don't know if it does. I don't really know what to take away from it except--thank goodness that is over and I came out of it in one piece.