I Won’t Be Friends With People Who Support My Abuser, And That’s Okay

Break-ups are never easy: the tears, the heartbreak, the loneliness that follows. Every romantic comedy has taught me that as long as I have an optimistic attitude towards the future and a solid group of quirky yet supportive friends, I would make it out alive.

But what happens when, after a break-up, you have to break-up with some of those friends too?

This is not about picking sides. When a relationship ends, usually both parties head back to their respective friend corners with little-to-no drama. Your friends will say “You could do soooo much better,” while their friends will tell them “Well, we NEVER liked so-and-so anyway”. It’s the typical they-said/they-said where nobody is really wrong and yet somehow, nobody is ever completely right either. You two weren’t good for each other. It wasn’t a perfect match. They weren’t your your soulmate, your kindred spirit, your One Tree Hill. They were just a blip on your radar of love, and now it’s onto the next one.

This gets much more difficult to navigate when a relationship ends as a direct result of ongoing abuse.

It’s been six months since I had to kick my ex out of our cozy two bedroom apartment in the heart of West Hollywood. We had a storybook love ripped from the pages of a WeHo fairytale: An up-and-coming producer goes into Starbucks before a shoot and has a meet-cute with a barista, and not even a month later they’re madly in love. It all happened so suddenly. Four months in and he was meeting my parents. The following month, he was moving in with my roommate and I. It wasn’t until the nine-month mark that I started to really see the signs. The anger issues, his constant substance abuse (weed and alcohol were his go-to), and his “holier than thou” attitude towards my closest friends. They had made it clear that they didn’t approve of him (they noticed these signs much sooner than I did), but if he made me happy, they wouldn’t get in the way of that.

The first time he hit me, I didn’t know what to do. I was angry. I was scared. I was hurt. The second time, I was more confused than anything. Hadn’t we talked about how this would never happen ever again? Over the course of our relationship it would have four times in total (once being while we were at his Mother’s house for Thanksgiving), but I found myself making excuses for him every time. He was drunk. He was angry. Maybe I deserved it. All of these were wrong. The only excuse for this behavior was that he had his own issues that he refused to acknowledge, which manifested as emotional outbursts. I would confront him about his abusive tendencies and his substance problems, but every time he fought back with the same responses; you’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re talking about, why can’t you just let me live how I want to live and stop controlling me? He said these things so often that I actually started to think I might be a crazy control freak who refused to let his significant other out of the house. This is called gas-lighting, and is a very common practice for known abusers to implement on their significant others.

After the second time I caught him doing cocaine (the first happened in the middle of the physical abuse), I decided that was it. I had seen lives ruined by the drug, and coupled with the physical and emotional abuse, I didn’t want that path for myself. I told him to get out of my apartment (he never co-signed the lease), and made him pack everything up that weekend. It was 3 AM and I was calling everybody I could think of. My mother. My best friends. My roommate. All of the people I had confided in every time any amount of physical or emotional abuse had been thrown my way. These were the people who would become my support system during all of this, the people who would help me be strong, and remind me to be brave.

Going into our relationship, he didn’t have many close friends. A few coworkers he would go out with from time to time, but nobody I could pin-point as a “best friend” type. That should have been a red flag from the start, but I brushed it aside. He quickly became friends with one of my close girl-friends at the time, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Her and I had our squabbles and dramatic moments together, but I never thought after all of this happened, that she would decide I was the one in the wrong. Maybe he never told her about the abuse. Maybe she knew and just didn’t care.

She was the first casualty of the break-up, driving off with him that night in a cocaine-filled rage. And while I do still feel a sense of friendly obligation to her, I realized recently I had to let her go. Not because I was done with our friendship, but because if she chose to associate with my abuser, then she was glossing over all that he had put me through, and deciding of her own free will to ignore my feelings altogether.

There have been others in this same boat, who I have consciously decided to “uncouple” myself from. They’re not bad people by any means. Some of them I actually considered to be close friends. But they choose to remain blissfully ignorant to what this person is capable of, whether it be because they want to remain “out of the drama” or they just simply don’t care enough to form an opinion one way or the other. And that’s fine. But for my own sake and mental well-being, I can’t actively be friends with them. The idea of them meeting up with my abuser over drinks or taking selfies at a party together is simply just too much for me to handle. It makes me feel like I was wrong. That I deserved that he did. That maybe I am being crazy about all of this. But I’m strong enough now to know that is not, and will never be, the case.

When you’re in an abusive relationship, you look to others for support. You find strength in those around you, even if you can’t find it in yourself. I had people in my life telling me for months to leave him, begging me to finally end it when I felt I wasn’t strong enough to. I could see where they were coming from and understood exactly what they were saying, but it was as if I was trapped behind a glass wall, a brighter future just within sight but no way to pass through to the other side. I allowed myself to become trapped in this mindset, and it wasn’t until I felt the ultimate sting of betrayal that I was finally able to take control of the situation. My friends all rallied behind me, offering places to stay when I felt lonely, fresh cooked meals when I couldn’t bring myself to eat, and most importantly, people to listen to me while I talked, and to hold me when I would inevitably break down mid-sentence.

If there are people in your life who still choose to associate with your abuser, it’s okay to leave them behind too. You’re not being dramatic. You’re not asking people to “choose sides”. You’re not being crazy, or unreasonable, or any of the other gas-lighting words your abuser loved to throw around (his was “psychotic” in my case). You’re choosing the best path for yourself, to allow yourself to heal properly and fully and embrace the prospect of love once more.

I’ve been on enough Tinder dates since to recognize that I’m not ready to seriously date right now, because I’m still in the “healing” stage. I’m not ready to find love again. Mostly because I’m still trying to figure out what “love” actually means to me. It’s like that picture that either looks like a rabbit or a duck. You can tell yourself over and over again that there’s no way that picture could possibly be a rabbit, because you only see it as a duck. But suddenly, you look at it from a new angle and realize “Huh, I guess that is what a duck looks like” and now your entire world is turned upside down. Don’t be afraid to take the time to heal. And don’t be afraid to cut those loose who hinder the process.