Content warning: emotional abuse, abusive relationship
On my daily walk, I was listening to my Spotify Daily Mix and Hilary Duff’s “Stranger” came on. I hadn’t heard the song since I was in middle school. Now, a decade later, I was struck by the way the lyrics connected with the experiences that a friend had shared with me, regarding her time in an abusive relationship.
In honor of National Domestic Violence Awareness month, I asked this friend if she would be willing to discuss these lyrics as a way to share her experiences with a broader audience. She agreed, so we listened to “Stranger,” and talked about her previous relationship.
*Here is part 1 of “Stranger,” a four-part series that is updated every day from October 20 – October 23. Lyrics will be centered and italicized. Comments from me (Amanda) will be denoted with an A; comments from my friend will be denoted with an L.**
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Verse 1:
Nobody believes me when I tell them that you’re out of your mind
L: When I think back on the relationship, a recurring theme was that it was always my fault. I’ll give you a small example. He wasn’t confident in parking curbside because he had bribed his driver’s test person to let him pass on that portion. I think it was $50. Anyway, one time he threw a fit when he visited me at my parents’ house because my parents had both parked their cars in the driveway, which meant he would have to park curbside. He was furious and told me that if my parents weren’t so materialistic and owned so many cars, then he wouldn’t have to park by the curb. I was so overwhelmed by his anger that in the end I apologized to him. That’s how most of our arguments ended. I was always saying sorry. But after the relationship ended and I told this to my friend, she was really shocked. I guess he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would act this way.
Nobody believes me when I tell them that there’s so much you hide
L: This is about isolation and secrecy. Very early on, I remember one of the things he kept repeating to me is “it’s us against the world so don’t tell people about our problems because they won’t understand”.“Us against the world” is highly romanticized in pop culture. There’s this common sentiment of “I don’t care what my friends and family say, I love you anyway,” which normalized it for me. He repeated that phrase a lot: “Us against the world.” The power of repetition. It was basically brainwashing. He talked about how special our relationship was, when it wasn’t; it was just really isolated. But he would say our relationship was unique and he was unique and that’s why no one would understand our problems.
I was always good at respecting people’s privacy. When he told me to respect his privacy by not talking about our issues, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. It was my first relationship, and I thought being in an adult relationship meant that you and your partner deal with things together, without outside help or judgment. He didn’t like that I was close to my friends and family. So I began to disconnect from my support network. And that was a big problem. In a typical day, you would check up with your friends and tell them updates and use them as a sounding board. But I didn’t have that anymore. So I started to lose a sense of what is real.
A: I didn’t know that anything was wrong with the relationship, but I felt on some level that you weren’t doing well. I remember during that time, I would insist on weekly hour-long phone calls, even though sometimes you would ask to put it off because you weren’t feeling well or because you knew I had stuff going on. It’s true that at the time my life was crazy, I was founding MHU and I was taking Orgo and doing all the premed stuff. But I remember feeling like if I didn’t adhere to our weekly phone call, I would lose you completely. You would just float away.
L: Yeah, you were religious about those phone calls. Those calls were a weekly reminder that another person cared about me, cared about what I had to say. I had lost my voice in the relationship. And in these calls with you, I had to express myself. My whole life was “How was he doing?” and you kept asking me how I was doing.
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From the National Domestic Violence Hotline: “Domestic violence (also referred to as intimate partner violence (IPV), dating abuse, or relationship abuse) is a pattern of behaviors used by one partner to maintain power and control over another partner in an intimate relationship.” https://www.thehotline.org/identify-abuse/understand-relationship-abuse/
Thank you to my good friend, L, for taking the time to talk through these lyrics with me and for sharing your story with a broader audience. Thank you to Todd Gibbs for providing the list of resources for Dartmouth students below.
For Dartmouth students, here are some resources and initiatives regarding sexual assault, sexual or gender-based harassment, dating or domestic violence, or stalking:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n-NF475K0QoLxzi6AtAvaWFt64iT1bbDh15lyo2cd2c/edit?usp=sharing
~Amanda V. Chen ‘21
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