I spent ten years in an abusive relationship with my ex-husband.

It’s taken me three and a half years to be able to write that sentence.

***

The first incident I really remember happened when we’d only been dating a year or two, shortly after I moved into his place. I’d gotten in the habit of folding his PJ pants and putting them on the bathroom counter, so they’d be ready for him after he got home from work and showered. I didn’t do it one day – I don’t remember why. I forgot, or I was busy, or I didn’t see them on the floor.

He pushed me over the side of the bed and spanked me. Hard. Hard enough that it hurt, a lot, much more than was fun. When I asked what was going on, he said he was punishing me for not folding his pajama pants.

***

Abuse is rarely obvious. It starts slowly, creeping up on you, until your sense of “normal” is so far from okay that you don’t have any idea how much is wrong.

You probably read the bit above and said to yourself, how on earth could she not see that as abuse?

Easy.

We’d been playing around with a bit of spanking in the bedroom. It was something I’d said I’d be interested in trying. So when it happened, I thought that I hadn’t been clear enough about what I wanted or that I wasn’t enjoying what was going on.

I tried telling him I didn’t like being “punished.” That it hadn’t been fun or exciting for me when he did that. I couldn’t quite articulate what about it I didn’t like, though, just that I didn’t like it. I don’t remember exactly what he said, just that he didn’t listen to me and said something along the lines of, I said I was masochist, so I should like getting punished.

I walked away from the experience feeling like it had somehow been my fault. But also, I don’t think I ever folded his PJ pants again.

***

Abusers are masters at making you doubt yourself. Again and again, my ex-husband refused to listen to me. He told me what I thought and what I felt. He did it so often, and so forcefully, that there didn’t seem to be any point in speaking up for myself.

There were words I had to excise from my vocabulary because he didn’t like when I used them. “Worry” was one. I wasn’t ever allowed to worry about things – I could only feel concern. “Hate” was another. If I used these words, he would tell me that I was wrong. I wasn’t worried about something, I was concerned. I didn’t hate a thing, I disliked it.

***

By the time I was done with law school, there were people I wasn’t allowed to see, either. He never said it in so many words. Instead, he told me he didn’t like hanging out with certain of my friends. He couldn’t ever give me a good reason why, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about. I thought the transition from “my friends” to “our friends” was a normal part of the relationship escalator. It seemed to be how everyone else did it. I attributed the fact that it became harder and harder for me to make friends to my job at a law firm, since I was working crazy hours and didn’t have much time for anything else.

***

Abusers isolate. They make you feel that they are the only source of comfort, the only one you can turn to. They get upset when you go elsewhere for your emotional needs.

A few years, after Harvey Weinstein, after #metoo, after my Facebook feed became flooded with my friends’ stories of sexual assault and rape, I wrote about my own rape.

My ex-husband was furious. Not at the man who raped me. At me. For daring to tell my story to my friends, to the Internet, to total strangers – but not to him. Even though he knew about it, even though he’d watched me struggling with rape triggers for months.

***

I got out. I met someone who slowly and gently and kindly told me, over and over, that it was not normal. And by that point, I’d had enough to grab that lifeline and hang on.

***

I’m still not out.

Yesterday evening, at custody exchange, when I asked him to use my preferred name and not my given name, he said “I’ll call you whatever I want.” And then called the police to force me to give him a document to which he is legally entitled but does not need – and which I had said I would give to him at the next custody exchange.

***

I have been silent about it for three and a half years. I rarely tell my friends how bad it was. I haven’t said anything to his friends or family. I didn’t want it to get back to him, because that would make the abuse worse.

***

But. I watch woman after woman come forward with their own stories.

And I have learned these past three and a half years that there is nothing I can say or do that will make any difference at all in the way he treats me.

So I am saying it. My ex-husband is abusive. What he has done is not ok. It was not my fault. And my voice is worth being heard.