The first couple of minutes are spot-on for how it feels to be "groomed" by your abuser. They treat you like a princess while they target you for abuse; they're preparing you for abuse. The rest of the relationship you spend trying to return back to "the good old days" when they were actually grooming you. The closest you get to that 'perfect love' state again is the "honeymoon" stages of the cycle of abuse; it just gets worse but you blame yourself and change yourself to appease them. First, abusers befriend their victims; abusers want their victims to love them and trust them. After a while, when abusers get comfortable, abusers stop apologizing; they start saying it was your fault that they manipulated you, that it was your fault that you fell in love with their lies; and when they "discard" you, they tell you that you were just too foolish to understand that they were abusing you the whole time, that you should have known better than to let them keep come back begging you for another chance and claiming they've changed.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/invisible-chains/201902/how-domestic-abusers-groom-and-isolate-their-victims
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Maturing in Love by Rhizome Olivia Quondam
ChickLitMaturing in Love is an anthology guide of adulthood with poems, stories, essays, and blog posts about mature themes, learning self-love, adult-relationships, social issues, and life lessons from growing older. *The blog posts are topic introductions...
