Love By A Thousand Paper Cuts

Don't marry your high school sweetheart.

If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, that's what it would be. Not that I would have listened. I was young. I thought I was in love.

For eight years, I thought I was in love.

That's not true.

For about five years, I thought it was love.

At sixteen, I swore he was the one. We fell head over heels for each other; we did it all.

First kiss. First base. First awkward, sweaty sex in the back of his mom's Dodge Neon.

And of course Junior prom, senior prom, graduation. He was at every birthday, every holiday celebration: Christmas, New Year's, Halloween, Fourth of July. Even St. Patrick's Day. My family loved him.

Loves him.

Looking back, it's the first red flag. But I didn't know I mattered yet.

He moved in with us when he turned eighteen. His parents hated me.

Hate me.

We lived with my parents for two years, and it was like a dream come true. Yeah, he'd make little comments about how I was gaining weight, but he was just concerned about my health. He just wanted the best for me.

He took me on dates, made me dinner, called me sweet names.

Broke my phone when I gave my coworker my number. But he apologized and bought me a new one. A better one.

Kissed me on the forehead and made me lunches for work and always bought me little gifts at the gas station when he drove me to work. He always drove me to work after that. Always picked me up.

He just wanted to make sure I was safe.

And he totaled my car. It was an accident, but he assured me it was okay. He already had a car, so I didn't need one. I had him to drive me places. And isn't that better than having to go alone?

Then he proposed. I was elated. He was the love of my life, of course I said yes.

My mom and sister got to planning everything, running around making decisions and telling me about them later. His mother decided she wanted to be involved in the planning; if she couldn't decide who he married, she would settle for deciding how he got married. And she certainly did.

She offered to buy my dress, and Daniel said I couldn't tell his mom no. It would be rude. So I accepted. She even gave me a pretty generous budget.

"Call it a wedding gift, dear."

When she called me dear, I thought she was finally starting to accept me. So I was actually excited about the dress shopping.

I picked out several dresses that were just gorgeous, and I felt beautiful in them. At first.

She pointed out the ones that gave me back rolls or made me look trashy because of my large chest, the ones that made my arms look fat and the ones that made me look like I had cankles.

She said she didn't want me looking terrible on my wedding day and looking back to regret it, and if she was paying for it, she wasn't going to let me get something that would ruin the wedding day. She said it was because she cared.

So I let her pick a dress. Something modest, something expensive. Something I felt like an American Girl Doll wearing, in the worst possible way.

I went home and cried that night.

I cried the night before our wedding, when I was alone with my thoughts and my overwhelming doubts. And of course, the guilt for having doubts.

And then I became Mrs. Nicolson, and we moved into our own place. A place with his name on the lease.

His place.

They say the first year of marriage is the hardest. They're wrong. If the first year is hard, it will only get worse.

The comments about my weight turned to lectures.

"You're so lazy now. You think you can let yourself go? Just because we're married now, you get to stop caring?"

So I got a gym membership, cut my calories, went running every morning before work.

Until he stopped taking me to work. I'd get up and ready to go, and he'd be nowhere to be found. I'd call and reach his voicemail.

It wasn't long before I got fired.

He stopped paying for my gym membership after he decided I must be cheating on him at the gym. After all, why couldn't I just work out at home if I didn't have somebody to impress there? A yoga mat's cheaper than a gym membership anyway.

And just like that, every piece of my independence crumbled. I belonged to him.

I stayed for five years after that, doing his dishes and cleaning his house and making his dinner and tending to his every whim.

Two years in, I found hair in the shower, different than the natural brown of my hair. Long, curly, blonde. He called me crazy, and screamed about how I must be looking for a reason to leave him if I was focusing this hard on something so small and stupid.

He kicked me out that night, froze the cards so I couldn't get a hotel room. I didn't have any friends to stay with. So I walked seven miles in the dark to my parents' house, and when I got there, they were upset with me.

He'd called them while I walked, and essentially accused me of planting the hair there so I could start drama. And instead of backing me up or thinking critically for even one second, they decided he must be right. I must be trying to ruin a good thing. I was such a problem for him.

All he wanted was a happy relationship, and I insisted on ignoring him and making false accusations and nagging him about irrelevant things.

Why couldn't I just do better?

I remember thinking, "Someday I'll be happy. I just need to hold on, get through the hard parts. Someday I'll be happy."

Then something shifted.

When the pandemic hit, his world got so much smaller. I guess something about being stuck at home all day everyday with nowhere to go drove him crazy. How inconvenient that must have been.

Those three years broke something in him. Even when things opened back up and restrictions were lifted, when he was able to work and go out with his friends and go to the gym and exist freely in the world, the void never left his eyes. It's like the mask didn't fit anymore.

He came home one day while I was making dinner, the sound of boiling sauce and searing chicken interrupted by the slam of the door and the hammering of my heart. He kissed me, and slid his hand up my shirt. I told him I wasn't in the mood.

But he kept touching me. He pulled my tank top down, and when I tried to pull it back up, he smacked my hand. Hard.

I told him again, more firmly, that I wasn't in the mood, and walked into the living room.

He followed me.

And I'll never forget the look in his eyes—vile, inhuman—the moment before he shoved me down face-first into the couch.

That night, I laid in bed beside him like nothing happened. I didn't sleep. I didn't cry.

I waited.

I waited for him to go to work, and I started researching. Found a women's shelter a little over five miles away. I'd already walked further than that in worse conditions, so I packed a go bag and I ran.