Tw: Emotional abuse, privacy violation

“I was 21 years old when this happened. I had just started dating a guy who I knew from school and had reconnected with. He was nice and sweet in the beginning. Over a couple of months I realized he wanted to have sex with me. I wasn’t against having sex with him, but I just needed more time to get comfortable around him. He started trying to convince me every chance he got. Around this time, I had grown to be quite comfortable with my body. I like phone sex and used to send him pictures of me in lingerie. The agreement was that he’d delete the pictures later. 

As time passed, he got more and more possessive and tried controlling my life. He would ask me to not meet my male friends. If I did, he would constantly keep texting and calling me when I was out. He would also check my phone and read my conversations with my friends. I am a very social person and have a lot of friends and I am very grateful to have such good friends. He’d fight with me over that too, “You have so many friends, I don’t have anyone other than you.” Once we fought and I decided not to go to a friend’s birthday party and he actually came outside my house to check if I was home. 

Another time, we got into a fight because he didn’t want me to meet my closest friends because he is a guy. I said, “But you can’t tell me what to do. Who are you to decide for me?” He said I had to listen to him because he was my boyfriend and when I refused he threatened to out my ‘special pictures’. I didn’t know what he was talking about and when I asked him, he said, “The ones in which you are only wearing bra and panty.” Until then, I was under the impression that he’d deleted those pictures. He had lied. 

Suddenly, I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. My body went cold. My heart started racing and I couldn’t breathe. I just said okay and sat down on the floor trying to get my breath back. I couldn’t think straight and for an hour I just sat on the floor. This was how my first panic attack was triggered. A million thoughts ran in my head about the worst things that could happen. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do. For almost two weeks, I avoided any fights and did what he told me to do. I had many panic attacks in those two weeks and was scared the whole time. He kept pushing me to have sex with him and threatening me. One day, I finally had the courage to say to him, he can do whatever he wants and he will surely see a police complaint the next day itself. I blocked him from my social media. He sent me an e-mail the next day saying he had deleted the pics and begged to not take any action. I didn’t want anything to do with him so I didn’t reply. 

We had a lot of mutual friends, he told some of them that I had cheated on him and that’s why we broke up. I made sure my close friends knew what had happened and his friends eventually did too.”

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