MARY • FEMALE • 53 • JAPAN
Growing up in the U.S., I was very shy and insecure. There were few people I could have called friends, and almost no boyfriends. Sometimes, I felt anxiety over whether I would ever have a boyfriend. My family also thought I would never find a boyfriend, but I wanted them to be wrong.
During my third year at university, I met J at the Catholic community center on campus, which was called Christopher House or Chris House. In that year, J and I never spoke beyond polite greetings, but I felt attracted to him. Sometimes, I heard him speaking to others about his faith in God, and he sounded like someone who had his life together. I wondered if he could help me feel more peaceful about my future. Additionally, I found him physically attractive, though it didn’t seem that many girls did. He was six feet tall and extremely thin, which was a body type I liked after growing up in a family where I was constantly called fat. J’s teeth were crooked and stuck out of his mouth because, as I later learned, his parents couldn’t afford to have them fixed. But his teeth were only a small part of him, and the rest of his face looked nice to me.
Eventually, I asked him for a date, and he was very surprised but said yes, and we began dating.
Red flags popped up right away. J wanted to spend every moment with me when we were not in class or our part-time jobs. At first, it was exciting, but he was isolating me from friends. We did spend time with a few friends from Chris House, but J was very fond of making unkind remarks to me in front of them. He criticized the way I dressed, did my hair, spoke, wrote the letter “J” when I sent him love notes, and the fact that we weren’t born in the same year or town so didn’t grow up together always in the same class at school. I felt bad about myself, but I put up with this treatment because if I broke up with J, then I wouldn’t have a boyfriend anymore, and who knew when or if I would have another one?
Friends would later tell me they didn’t like watching the way J treated me or hearing the things he used to say to me, and they could tell I was unhappy. Sometimes, I managed to tell J I didn’t like something he said or did and would he please not say or do it anymore, but he just laughed. He believed that because he was such a good Catholic, God would let him do anything he wanted as a reward. I didn’t think this was true, but I couldn’t prove so to J. But why did I have to prove anything?
The moment I knew I had to split up with J was when he mentioned a pop song he liked and said, “Mary, I like to think of that as our song. I know you don’t like it, but I pretend you do.” I was gobsmacked. If he was going to pretend he had a girlfriend built to his specifications, what did he need me for?
When I told J we were finished, he cried and begged me to reconsider. He kept talking about how much he would miss having a girlfriend, but not that he would miss anything about me as a person. That’s how I knew he never loved me. He only loved the way it made him feel to put me down. I never regretted leaving him. Only four months later, I met someone else, and though we weren’t meant to be together forever either, he treated me better than J. Now I’m married to a wonderful man, and my family still can’t believe it and tell me I should go back to J. I’ve learned to love and respect myself enough that I will never let anyone treat me as badly as J did again.
