Dear Sister,

For a long as I live, I will never understand why you still love him. Why you don’t see anything wrong with what he’s done to you.

We come from a family where every single relationship has ended in divorce, we don’t really have a grasp on what a healthy relationship is, but this is not it. You should not spend 50% of the time you are with him stressed. You should not allow him to hurt you the way he does.

About a week ago, your boyfriend tried to rape you. He tried to force himself inside you and when you tried to run away he hurt you. He called you a bitch and a buzzkill even after you spent an hour and a half telling him no.

That night you did talk to him, and he apologized. You forgave him. You told him ‘we can’t last the whole relationship without hurting one another.’ Yes. This is true. But attempting to rape is something else entirely. You should get through a whole relationship without that ever happening.

He told you the whole time he was only thinking of how much he loved you. I want you to tell me, when you think of how much you love him, what do you do? You pull him close and whisper in his ear. You grab his hand and squeeze it tight. You kiss him slowly for as long as you can. You do not assault him. When he was doing that, the only thing in his mind was ‘I will have sex with this girl, no matter how many times she says no. She’s just making it harder and being a bitch.’

He played the victim too! He said ‘it’s just because my ex did the same thing! It’s all I know. I’ve dealt with so much depression and anxiety that’s why I did it.’ I have dealt with anxiety for years and never has it led to me assaulting someone. Our father, mother, grandmothers, and friends have all had anxiety and depression and have never tried to rape someone. And that is not all he knows. He has lived through the metoo movement and taken sex ed in health, he knows it’s not okay.

You’ve spent the past few days crying. I keep asking ‘why are you just sweeping it under the mat’ and you respond ‘because I still love him and I’d lose him if I did something. Plus, I would feel bad for him’.

You are fourteen, so am I. He is your first love so it’s hard for you to compare it to anything else, but it’s WRONG.

Not only that, but he is rude and manipulative. He tells you that if you leave he’ll cut himself. He takes your phone every day to go through it and he checks your location constantly when you’re not talking to him. He’s constantly telling you what you’re not doing right and putting you down and has no grasp on consistency. He spent a month flirting with his ex while still dating you. He forces you to send him nudes and take selfies of yourself and send them to him even when you aren’t in the mood. He frequently talks about marriage with you, at fourteen and fifteen, and how it could never work because you are not Christian. And then he tries to convert you.

He has called me desperate. He has admitted to not liking me. He has threatened to punch me in the throat. He has told me that he is better than any therapist I could have. He refuses to face time when Im in the room because my laugh annoys him too much. When I turned down a friend of his, he supported and helped that friend harass me.

I will keep all of this to myself. If I ever told someone you might not talk to me for months. Your boyfriend would be out to get me for all I know. But you can do something, and never in my life will I understand why you don’t.

(Sorry this is just something I’ve wanted to get down in writing for the longest time, I haven’t had anyone I could talk to about it)