Imagine you are a sixteen year old teenager. Lets make you female... You are attractive, street smart, book smart (but you have to work hard at it), and the child of a single mother. Your upbringing was quiet, no drama. Although your dad uninvolved, your mother always made it work to put a roof over your head, food on the table, and was consistent with her expectations.
Now imagine you met a boy, a really nice boy. He works hard, brings home a steady paycheck, is skilled with fixing cars, and is a volunteer village fireman. He is very sweet, likes you very much, and after you decide to enter into the boyfriend/girlfriend stages, he is all you think about. Buying him the perfect birthday and Christmas gifts was a thing. You spent hours upon hours at his house, get to know his family pretty well. His siblings become your siblings, his friends become yours. If this is how it is, and nothing changes, then you feel lucky enough to know that you might have found the person you might end up being with for life.
Several months into the relationship, there are some stumbling points. He doesn't acknowledge your birthday, he starts to act jealous if he perceives any boys as 'checking you out', he demands to know the passwords to your social media as a requirement for trust. You comply, why not? you have nothing to hide. He starts talking about his ex-girlfriend, telling you stories about her, even describing events where she has spoken about you. He wonders aloud if maybe she should be taught a lesson. These hints start becoming more direct, some laced with the idea that you would be proving trust and devotion by teaching her a lesson. It is not how you were raised and you are uncomfortable with his requests and choose to not comply.
The scale that balances happy times with stressful times begins to collect moments, stressful times is the heavier side. You start to withdraw from the relationship. Your mom is noticing what is going on and questioning you about it. You decide that maybe you should step back, take a break, get things back on track in your life. He doesn't agree. He contacts your mother to speak with her about convincing you to stay with him, no luck. This is where it starts to get complicated. There is a point where the nice route doesn't get you what you want. Your mother is not receptive to helping him convince you to stay in the relationship, after all, you are now seventeen, this is normal. You are slightly horrified that he contacted your mother and decide to make a clean break. He begins to panic, he starts tracking your location using social media, showing up wherever you are and acting as if you are still together (to which presents the situation that you feel that you have to reiterate that you are no longer in a relationship) and each time this happens, his reaction is more severe than the last time.
He begins messaging your friends. He tells them that you talk about them behind their back. He gives specific fabricated examples. He describes text messages that he cannot provide screenshots, or any other physical proof of, but the seed of doubt has been planted and some friends decide to distance themselves from you. He begins to call you and threaten to commit suicide. You alert his mother (who tells him to go for it? you decide to give her the benefit of the doubt and chaulk this up to reverse psychology). At one point his suicidal threats are so bad that you tell him you will stay with him out of fear of being responsible for his happiness, thus responsible if he chooses to hurt himself. Two days into the renewed relationship, he starts demanding social media passwords, you end it for the second time. He contacts you and tells you that he is going to crash his truck because life is meaningless without you, hours later he gets into an accident and blames it on icy roads to anyone who asks what happened. This did not persuade you to go back to him.
At this point, he has started writing things on a social media platform (Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram, all of them). Sad quotes about not being wanted, about girls who are not faithful, about broken future plans. Although you have blocked him from seeing any of your social media, people start sending you pictures. There are comments upon comments under his quotes, people that don't know you calling you a cunt, comments saying that you are a cheater (this one was written by his grandmother), it is completely out of hand and out of control. You are now stressed enough that you barely can get through a day of school without bursting into tears over a new revelation that someone has brought to you about your ex boyfriend, stories he is telling them about false things that you have done. He starts telling people that your mother is strung out on drugs, there is no stone left unturned for every faction of your life that he has impacted in some way.
A month after the break up you start to form a potentially new relationship with a boy you have known for a long time, it goes nowhere after your ex finds out and contacts him to fill his mind with more seeds of doubt. This happens a second time a month later. Few more months down the road, you start talking to someone but do not tell anyone for fear that it would get back to your ex and he would sabotage yet another connection that you hope to pursue. Your ex finds a new girlfriend, she is the sister of a close friend of yours. He starts showing up to your sporting events at school with his new girlfriend. At these events he doesn't break his stare as you try to focus on playing basketball, it is palpable and people begin to notice. Your coach mentions possibly having an administrator ask him to leave (it never gets to that - thank god).
Your close friend (and her sister) start to withdraw from you. They both act angry towards you and your friendship become a shell of what it used to be. They end up breaking up.
At this point it has almost been a year. He begins dating a new girl (another person that goes to your school - he graduated from a different school district), at your graduation ceremony as you are walking down the hall, there he is walking towards you along with her family, you change direction and manage to avoid him. The new girl he started dating and you are familiar with each other and have never had negative interactions.
After graduating, with no school events to be concerned about, your mother and you move to a new place out of town and things settle and the quiet is most welcome. Your new relationship is still going strong and you have a great summer together. You start working at Walmart as you attend school full-time at the local community college. Months go by before one day while working, you look up and see your exes girlfriend video recording you on her telephone while you work. You turn and walk away. You need this job and confrontation is the opposite of enabling yourself to keep it. This happens a second time a few weeks later. Then, a month after that, you are working and your exes girlfriend approaches you and begins to physically attack you. She strikes you several times, some in the face, has you backed into a corner, and then disappears. You have no means for defending yourself without risking your job and nowhere to go physically. The police are called, a report filed, and thats it. In this process, you are allowed to look at the video footage of the attack, standing about 10 feet behind your attacker is your ex with a cheshire grin on his face.
Less than two weeks later, before a court date or any notion of legal action happening, you arrived at the mall with your boyfriend when a truck comes charging directly towards your car. At the last moment it swerves and then parks next to your car. It is your ex, and his girlfriend. Your boyfriend and you start walking towards the entrance of the mall with the girl yelling in your direction to stop so she can "talk to you". You go into the mall and are followed from store to store by your ex and his girl. The police are called, your mother, horrified and worried, gets in her car and starts driving towards the mall. They leave before either entity get there.
At this point it is nearly eighteen months since you had been in a relationship. It took several weeks to happen before a stay away order is in place. The court would only grant an order against the person who physically attacked you and not against the person who has instigated months and months of harassment with no signs of stopping. With the physical attack being behind you for about 4 months, you recently noticed a couple of people at your work, vaguely familiar, watching you intently and in a peculiar way (again, yeah I know...) off in the distance you notice your ex and his girlfriends brother laughing hysterically. The people were her parents. With all of this being said, you have no idea when this will stop, you have decided you cannot keep recreating your life to work around any opportunity that he has to 'get you' in whatever way he can convince people to do it for him. You would love to say this cloud has a silver lining. "don't do what I did..." "really get to know a person..." "check for these signs...." none of those things sounds like things you would have listened to when you first starting dating him almost two and a half years ago. You are sure at some point you will stop having to look over your shoulder or endure strangers calling you a "pussy" for not attacking this girl back at your place of work. In a way, you feel bad for her, you know the things he says to manipulate people. God knows what else he is having her do.
Now.. imagine those non-specific thing happens to you. Your Aunt would be very shocked, horrified, and amazed with the decisions of several adults in this scenario.
