I Was in an Abusive Lesbian Relationship. People Didn't Want to Believe It.

I met her at the beginning of summer. She was a catalogue of contradiction — rebellious and strait-laced, fearless as well as frightened, a woman who seemed to be riding the back of the world, holding on with one hand, and to her, I was a small cup, held beneath Niagara.

She told me she would give me the world. She pointed out the holes in my patchwork skirt and the rips in my dungarees, she took me to clothes shops, took away my bracelets, dressed me in sensible jeans and plain white tops, and bought me two of each while I laughed at the thought of a “girlfriend uniform.” 

As autumn crept in, I found myself alone with no friends, family, or job. I was an ocean whirling down a drain, abruptly thrust into a life of parties and bushfire friendships, people whose names were forgotten the next morning, with only the lip gloss reminder on the rim of their glass that I scrubbed clean in a kitchen that wasn’t even my own.

Then winter came, the ground froze, the wind rattled the flags of old leaves between the bones of the skeleton trees, and I found myself as a reflection, in the blue-gray window of a house that wasn’t my home, looking out at a world I no longer recognized.

Over the next few months, I noticed I was losing weight and my hair was falling out. I would stand in the shower, with the tightness of my breath in my chest and I would hear her voice in my head. Every single day she would tell me that I should always put her first, that she should always be top of my list. 

Above my friends. Above my family. Above my children. 

She took me to Bingo once. We sat at sticky-topped tables and she drank pints of warm beer while I sipped flat cider slowly through my teeth, a trick I had learned to slow down her attempts to get me drunk.  

People don’t want to believe that abuse happens between two women. Women are supposed to be nurturing and gentle.

I won 150 pounds that night. But when I claimed the prize money, she held out her hand, and I gave it to her. 

It was then, in that hesitation, at that moment surrounded by the noise of the bar and the sideways glances of other people's eyes who silently asked, Are you ok?… that I realized this wasn’t love. 

It was abuse, and I hadn’t noticed until that moment. 

I’d been gaslit to the point where I had no reality or independent thoughts of my own. I had become a rag heap for other people to pick over. I had nothing of myself. And all the while I held onto the old cliche, that somehow, at some point, things might just get better.

She used to leave me to-do lists every day.

One: Give both fridges a good clean and throw out old food. 

Two: Locate and put all electronics on charge.

Three: Change and wash the bedding on all beds.

Four: Clean and tidy the whole house - hoover, dust, polish, sweep, bleach etc. 

Five: Wash and hang out clothes. Make sure they’re dry before I come home.

Six: Walk dogs and pick up all dog shit in garden.

Seven: Make sure dinner is cooked by the time I get home. 

Eight: Tidy up all the kids' mess and ensure the whole house and garden are spotless. 

There were other humiliations, too. The kind you say with averted eyes when the police ask you to repeat yourself. Or the kind you say with a nervous laugh that covers the memory of violence and pain because nobody believes you when you say it was another woman who raped you so many times.

I couldn’t say no. But I never said yes.

Just like my son didn’t say yes when she asked him if he wanted to go out on the paddleboard on the day of that spring picnic, because she told him he “would be a baby” if he didn’t. 

She took him out into the sea, and then, “just for fun,” she tipped him in. My little boy, who couldn’t swim. I went in after him. I could feel the board bumping against the top of my head. And I was screaming his name underwater and grabbing at handfuls of seaweed and nothing.

And it seemed too long.  

But finally, I felt something—a fist…a hand…and I had handfuls of him, and I was pushing him up above me, through the surface of the water, out towards the sky and the splintered sunlight. And he was crying. And he was ok.

And he was alive.

I called the police after that. I told them how she’d crushed sedatives into my food. How she’d only let me wear the clothes and shoes she bought for me, and how she had completely destroyed me from the inside out. 

I remembered the inconsistencies in her stories. I remembered she would tilt her phone away from me when I came near, and how she spun me lie after lie, and I, like a fly, was caught in her web of such carefully and meticulously spun deceit.

And I know what she’ll do. She’ll tell everyone the same stories she told me. She’ll tell them all how I reacted. But she will never tell them what she did to me to cause that reaction. She won't tell them how she screwed herself into me, bit by bit. Burrowing under my skin and into my flesh, into every vein and muscle and bone, until I was bewitched by this woman who would pick me up like a puppet when she wanted me, and kick me to the ground the next, telling me I was disgusting and ugly, and talentless. And the awful thing is, when I ripped her out of me, there was this void left behind, this gaping, aching wound with rotting edges that I had to fix.

As soon as she was gone, I felt the cold air rush in to fill the space where she had been. Suddenly I was full of everything, feeling everything and noticing everything. I had been a ghost in my own life.

I don’t talk about it much, because there’s this unspoken belief that abuse between two women is unfathomable, impossible even. People don’t want to believe that abuse happens between two women. Women are supposed to be nurturing and gentle. Even when I told my story to the police I could feel their disbelief: How could a woman abuse another woman? How was it possible that a woman could rape another woman? 

The disbelief and having the experience minimized by friends, family, and the legal system just because she was a woman caused the most excruciating loneliness and exhausting hopelessness. It’s like a funny sort of embarrassment. We feel disbelieved, diminished, and confused, like maybe we’re making it up, or maybe our abuser was right, maybe we’re just overreacting. We want to be heard, but no one wants to listen.