My Friend Stood By During My Abusive Relationship

From ELLE

I met Jason when I was 22. We were paired as scene partners at an audition for Medea, but as soon as I saw him-tall, blond, brooding-I lost all interest in the script. I followed him out into the cold night, and asked to bum a cigarette, even though I didn't smoke. I just wanted to prolong the time we spent outside.

Soon, Jason and I were seeing each other every night. I had been saving money to go to theater school in Montreal, but this dream paled in comparison to the electric charge I felt in his company. He was intensely charismatic, darkly funny, and completely unpredictable.

When he told me he usually only had sex with virgins, I saw my opportunity.

"No," he said, at first. "Then you'll just get really attached to me. Believe me."

"No, I won't," I lied.

The next morning I emailed my friend Julia:

Julia and I were awkward teens who met on an online blogging platform called LiveJournal in the early aughts. We met for the first time IRL when I was 19 and had just moved to New York to go to acting school. I told her to meet me in the lobby of my dormitory, and that I would be wearing a polka-dotted blouse. Julia, who was 15, lied to her parents about what she was doing that afternoon, and took the bus in from New Jersey. We went up to my dorm room and watched Funny Girl on my laptop.

Since we hadn't grown up together, we worked hard to recap the history of our young lives for each other, like a serialized novel unfolding every time we met. Julia is an intensely curious listener, more likely to interrogate than offer advice or judgment. There is nothing I've ever withheld from her.

I cringe now, reading my reply to Julia's email: "He is entirely out of my league in attractiveness, but really fucked up. He shows affection through physical violence, but at the same time there's something magnetically irresistible about him. I really don't know what he sees in me at all other than I put up with him."

The signs were right there-the cruelty, the violence, my own insecurity, which all fueled the attraction. But it would be years before I recognized them myself. It wasn't until Jason's unexpected death in 2011 that I started to put together the pieces of what our relationship had truly been.

A few months after Jason and I had started dating (by which point I had moved into his apartment), I bought us flights to New York. He'd never been there before, and I wanted to show off the city that I loved. We were going to stay with Julia at her boyfriend's parents' house.

More than showing off the city, I really wanted to show off Jason. There was a lot I put up with at home-his volatile moods, minor public humiliations, the feeling that I was never quite doing or saying the right thing-but in public, I liked being the girl by his side. When he wanted to be, he was smart, funny, and charming. That's the person I thought I would be introducing to Julia.

The three of us went to the Museum of Natural History. On the subway ride uptown, Jason began picking fights with me, and as soon as we got to the museum, he said he wanted to explore on his own. We separated, promising to meet up later. But we never found each other, and our cell phones had no reception inside the museum. For over an hour, I dragged Julia around, worrying about what had happened to him and how mad he would be when we reconnected. Julia got quiet.

When we finally found Jason, she left us alone, and it was just like being back at home-without someone to watch us, we could fight on another level. Jason was hurt that I had abandoned him just like everyone else in his life (a common theme) but he bought me a necklace in the gift shop and we made up. I texted Julia to let her know everything was okay, not realizing she had been calling me for almost an hour from inside the museum, wondering what had happened to me.

I called Julia back later that night. She had gone to her parents' house.

"You're in New Jersey? Why?" I didn't get it. Daily drama with Jason was so routine that I was oblivious to how uncomfortable it was for other people. "Is there something you're not telling me?" I asked.

"There's nothing I'm not telling you," she said. So passive aggressive, I remember thinking. Why can't she just tell me the truth? But at the time I couldn't even imagine what that truth might have been.

Today, when I ask her to revisit that day at the museum, Julia says if it were to happen now, she would say, "Hey Leigh, I'm concerned for you and this dynamic. And I love you and I want to voice some concerns."

I don't blame her for not knowing the exact right thing to say. Instead, Julia had given me subtle hints that what was going on in my relationship was not okay, and that she would wait until I saw that for myself.

Shortly after our New York trip, Jason and I used the rest of my savings to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It had been his idea. I agreed it sounded romantic: He would work and I would write a novel in a state called the "Land of Enchantment."

Once we were isolated from friends and family on the other side of the country, Jason's behavior became increasingly controlling, erratic, and violent. He had promised to teach me how to drive his stick-shift car when we got there, but then changed his mind. He told me he wanted to open up our relationship so he could sleep with other women. I was upset, but he told he it wasn't sexy when I cried-and why should I expect him to want to have sex with me if I was crying all the time? Though it went against all my instincts, I agreed that he could sleep with other women if I could still be his girlfriend. I drank and smoked pot every night to numb the shame I felt.

One night, Jason told me he was going to a party with his new friends and I wasn't allowed to come. He rolled me a joint and told me to go to sleep. Instead, I took a taxi to the airport and escaped home to Chicago.

I remember when you flew back," Julia says now. "You called me and said, 'I left Jason.' And I said, 'Oh my God, that's great news!' And you started to cry, because you had just broken up with your boyfriend. I remember feeling like, This is not helpful. I realized that what I had done for years-telling people to break up with their boyfriends-was the least helpful thing."

Julia's childhood best friend had a "real fucking monster" of a boyfriend in high school. "I hated him and we didn't get along," she tells me. "I would talk shit about him to her all the time. She and I were still best friends. All that happened was that she wouldn't tell me about what was going on with him."

When I was with Jason, Julia says she realized that I wouldn't be her friend anymore if she did the same thing again: "So I thought, I'll wait. That moment was a huge experience for me on how to be a better friend."

While many people would naturally want to do what Julia did with her childhood friend-speak up aggressively, name the abuse, and urge breaking up with the abuser-Julia's later instinct to let me know she was concerned, and then wait for me to choose to leave the relationship on my own can be closer to what experts advise in certain situations.

Sarah Rothe, a social worker with Shalom Bayit, says, "My advice is usually to support and listen to that friend, and validate their experience. Listen to what they're sharing and remind them that it's not their fault. A lot of times, women in abusive relationships get told, 'I wouldn't have exploded, if you hadn't pushed me...' And then they start to believe that it's true." As for encouraging someone to leave an abusive relationship, Rothe says, "Leave it up to your friend, who has maybe not been able to make decisions because of the dynamic of control in their relationship. Let them decide their own future."

Dr. Robert Eckstein, who leads bystander intervention programs at the University of New Hampshire, agrees that the more aggressive route can be counterproductive: "What we generally tell concerned friends is to be patient. You've got to walk that line between letting them know that you care about them and will support them, but also know that they might not leave the relationship right away and, if you push too hard, might isolate from you."

His advice: leave it open-ended. Say, "I just want you to know, no matter what happens, I'm always here for you."

I would love to say that I saw the light and stayed with my parents, but within 24 hours of leaving Jason, I flew back to Albuquerque. He'd promised to change, and I was not yet able to admit that our relationship was toxic.

When our lease ended, Julia called with a lead on a job for me. ("60% was because you were perfect for the job, 40% was to get you away from Jason," she said later.) I got the position and slept on her futon in Harlem for a month. Though I was physically apart from Jason, and we were technically broken up, I still obsessed over him for years, like a drug I couldn't quit. I don't know how Julia had the patience to watch me repeat the same patterns over and over again, but without her steady support-from finding me a job and offering me a place to live, to listening to my stories and waiting outside the bathroom door while I took a pregnancy test-I may never have believed that one day I would finally be done.

Today Julia is a volunteer emergency room advocate for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. She's learned that "it doesn't make someone feel better and it doesn't restore normalcy in a trauma situation to make decisions for the victim-because that's the root of the problem in the first place, that their agency has been taken away. You can't ride like a white knight into someone else's life."

In the end, there was no dramatic intervention that saved me. It took seeing Jason one last time, when I was 26, to realize that we were a nightmare together, and that I was naïve to keep waiting for him to become a different person. I was the one who had to change.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) provides confidential, one-on-one support to people affected by domestic violence, and to concerned friends, family, and others seeking information and guidance on how to help someone they know.