6 of ♦s

I’ve dealt with this situation before. It didn’t go well.

It was with my best friend of 3 years. I met her during my last year of high school. She’d had this boyfriend for about a year or so, at that point. I never knew he was abusive until about 8 months into our friendship. We would all hang out together, and I could never tell. They’d fight a lot, but it was never serious. I never saw bruises. I never saw him mistreat her. But they would generally fight about a lot of dumb shit. I thought he was cool. We ended up being friends. I ended up dating his older brother for about 3 months. Some of our friends started to tell me how her boyfriend had hit her in the past and called her names. A mixture of “slut”, “bitch”, “stupid”, “dumb”, “cunt”, and “whore” that I’d never heard before. I soon learned that he was on drugs. And soon I started to see it. I picked her up from his house once and her window was down when he ran up to the car and slapped her in the face. I sped off hoping I’d ran over his toes, but I didn’t.

It got much worse. Black eyes and bruised ribs. He’d throw her to the ground and spit on her. I repeatedly would tell her to break up with him. I had just turned 18, I didn’t really know what to do. His parents were uber-religious Mormons who thought their sons could do no wrong, despite the fact that the son of theirs that I dated had recently gotten out of jail for racing and drug possession with intent to sell (let’s not talk about my past choices right now, k?). She said she wanted to get away from him. But that she couldn’t. He lived two blocks from her house. One time after a concert, when my friend and I dropped her off, he ran up to her as she was walking to the door, hit her, grabbed her purse and took off running with it (I now always wait for my friends to get inside). She chased him back to his house where he went through her phone, accused her of cheating, poured bleach in her purse, and then threw it out his window to where she was standing, along with her phone which he’d broken (he broke about 5 of her phones - but “he always gets me new ones”). He got deeper into drugs and started getting even more psycho. He would sit outside her bedroom window talking to her for hours. Saying things like “I wrote your name on some bullets today.” She got scared. I told her she could stay with me. She did for 3 months. Three months of which he would follow me around trying to get to her. Three months of him harassing me, even my mom, calling repeatedly til someone answered so he could threaten me. He was too smart to leave messages, such a shame. He was always around me, driving by the house in different cars (his parent’s, sister’s, or friend’s) so I could never tell if it was him, and being in the backyard at 3 AM - on a fairly regular basis. I went crazy. I never slept. I felt like a fucking crackhead, running from one side of the house to the other to check again and again that the doors and windows were locked. I should have called the police. But I didn’t want my friend to get mad at me (I should’ve called the cops). I hid it from my mom as best I could, but she figured it out. My mom ended up calling his parents and telling them all the shit he’d been doing. His mom didn’t believe a word of it. He had his family fooled. But my friend stayed away from him. Or so I thought.

One day when I was getting home from work, I saw them parked in a car together down the street, smoking cigarettes. She said she just wanted to talk to him. I was fucking furious. She said he apologized and that he really loves her. I told her she couldn’t stay at my house anymore. I couldn’t deal with him. But I didn’t stop being her friend. Needless to say - he didn’t change. It got worse. I took her to get a restraining order. She never filed the papers. One night we were supposed to go to some club in Hollywood (she worked illegally for a promoter, so despite being 18 and 19, we got in everywhere), and she called me, pissed off, accusing me of telling her boyfriend where we were going. It was by far the most absurd accusation, I couldn’t believe she was serious. He somehow found out where we were going (he used to put voice recorders in her sisters’ car and near bedroom windows - SERIOUS creeper stalker this one), and he said that I had told her. He knew he had to get rid of me. Because I wouldn’t stop trying to get her away from him. I told her that if she believes him, then she’s fucking insane. I never lied to her. I never wanted anything bad for her. Countless times I had put her happiness before my own. I spent a summer in fear that my car’s brakes would give way at any moment, that my mom would get hurt, that he’d set my house on fire, that he would kill my dogs and cat. You know that movie Fear? I pretty much lived it. Because whenever he couldn’t get to her, he got to me instead. And so I said fine. Fine, if you believe him over me, then fine. You’ve made a choice. I’m done.

I was pretty self-righteous about the whole thing. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wanted her to be happy and I wanted what was best for her. But I didn’t do it right. I should have gotten adults involved (technically we were adults, but only in years). I should have told her grandmother, whom she lived with, and her mother, who lived a few hours away but was married to a cop. I should have called the police so many many many times. I was 18 and stupid. Our group of friends did talk to her on more than one occasion - but it was hardly an intervention. It wasn’t done right. It was mostly yelling and asking her why, why, why. In some sick way I enabled her. I defended her. I kept with the whole, “it’s not her fault” mentality. And I didn’t want her to think I was against her or judged her for it. I wasn’t going to tell her how to live her life.

I have a tendency to put the happiness of a best friend ahead of my own. I was too busy doing that to realize that she’d never put mine at the forefront of anything. There were no apologies. Not that she could control his actions, but there wasn’t even a concern for my well-being. It was inevitable. She was going to do what she wanted to do anyway, regardless of what I thought, said, or felt. I thought things would change. She thought only of herself. I should probably mention she was also on drugs… but at the time, I wasn’t much better. And she had gone back to him many times before without being on drugs, so I try to distinguish that from being the reason why. But in the end, the decision was simple. Sure, I could’ve tried to blur the lines and somehow resolve it so that we could still be friends. But the truth of the matter was that she didn’t care about me. And I finally knew it. So what kind of friend would I be then? Everything had changed. It was never going to be the same. I had to leave.

I still think of her often. There is one person that I still talk to, who still talks  to her. Supposedly, her former abusive drug-addict of a boyfriend changed, but they finally broke up. She’s been in another relationship for about a year now - equally abusive, if not worse. I don’t know if drugs are still a factor. But I do know that I should have done things differently. I loved her more than any friend I’d had at that point. But I’m pretty sure love doesn’t mean consistently putting their happiness over your own. Not if it’s mutual.