Why I Stayed

Untitled Part 1

In 2014, I was sitting in my ex's living room, waiting for our daughter to get her bag to come to my house for the weekend. We had our struggles up to this point, but at this time we had established a tenuous truce. Jay's wife, Lisa, had mentioned some horribly inconsiderate thing that Jay had done for the sake of humor, which was typical of him. Jay's sense of humor never evolved past the preteen phase in which kids have zero consideration for who might get hurt in a prank. Think Bam Margera setting off fireworks in his parents' bedroom, except Jay was struggling financially and nobody was filming.

Lisa appeared to feel like his inconsideration was unique to her, but Jay has had the same sense of humor and total lack of empathy since high school, where she'd met him. I had a hard time feeling sorry for her because she knew what he was like well before they began dating and she agreed to marry him. In response to her complaints, I told a story from 2002, when Jay and I were living in our first apartment:

One night, he was late picking me up from work again. When the car pulled up, it was full of people. Jay was in the backseat. His best friend Andy was in the front passenger side, and Andy's girlfriend Liz was driving. Our friend Steve was in the back with Jay. Jay scooched over to sit in the middle as I climbed in, as though he was doing me a favor. Not a minute down the road, he hit my leg with the back of his hand and frantically gestured for me to roll down the window. His cheeks were puffed out. I hurried to roll down the window while yelling for Liz to pull over, but it didn't matter. Jay attempted to vomit over me and out the window of the moving vehicle. He missed epically. If any of it cleared my lap, I'd be surprised. I was absolutely covered. The door was covered. My bag was covered. Since I worked with children, I'm no stranger to bodily fluids of all sorts, and the first instinct is perhaps to feel sympathy for Jay being so sick. I've nursed him back to health more times than I can count, but this wasn't a stomach bug. He and his friends, with the exception of our driver, Liz, had each bought a bottle of children's cough syrup and chugged them before picking me up. At some point I know it was a thing for rappers to sing about syzzurp, which is cough syrup mixed with juice or soda, so Jay decided to try it without diluting it. Our car smelled like vomit for a week. Jay laughed, told me to lighten up, and said something to the effect of "Damn, I'm sorry, I can't believe that happened," while continuing to laugh about it for the rest of the evening.

So, in 2015, as I told the abridged version of this story, Lisa looked at me incredulously. Then she asked, almost in disgust, "If it was so bad, why did you stay?"

I didn't have a good answer. I rolled some snappy responses around my head, but none of them really explained what it was like for those six years. I answered flippantly, "I was young and in love," with the roll of my eyes. Subconsciously accepting the entirety of responsibility for Jay's actions.

Since then, I have participated in Reddit forums and Facebook posts about domestic violence, and this question is the most commonly asked. Many people seem to think domestic violence statistics are blown out of proportion and that it usually isn't as bad as victims claim it is. Cynics wield this question as a "gotcha," suggesting that by mere dint of staying in a terrible situation, it must not have been terrible at all. Nobody would allow themselves to be abused without constantly planning their escape. Some people believe that most cases of abuse are false accusations used by women to ruin the lives of their former lovers. Gotta be careful not to put your dick in crazy—one word and they'll have your ass thrown in jail for abuse, and everyone will always take the woman's side. Others love to point out how men are also abused but are often not believed because the justice system favors women. Some like to differentiate between justifiable assault and abuse. Then they all wonder why more women don't speak out about abuse.