True Life Story - "My Girlfriend Made Me Hit Her"
By Jocko
Septmeber 18, 1999
I met my ex-girlfriend, we'll call her "Jenny" to protect her anonymity, at a party I had at my house last year. She had a boyfriend at the time, and I didn't really know her that well, but I had seen her in the halls and always thought she was cute. It might have been fate or it might have been dumb luck that her boyfriend got really drunk and verbally abusive about mid-way through the party, so I helped him to his car and sent him home. Anyway, Sarah looked sad after he left, so I went to talk to her about it. We ended up talking until 2 am, about our lives, our parents, our goals, our futures, even our rashes. It turned out we had exactly the same rough, red, itchy patches behind our knees. Neither one of us knew what it was, but we both thought it was neat.
A few days after that night, Sarah broke up with her boyfriend and we started going out. Everything was good at first, we'd go to the mall and spit over the rail onto people sitting in the food court or go the movies and she'd blow me in the back row. Times were great and I thought they would never end.
But about a month or two into the relationship, things started to go slightly downhill. I was ready to take our relationship to the next level, but she was reluctant and nervous. Now, I am a big guy, so I don't blame her for being a little nervous about riding Jocko Junior, but c'mon…we'd been dating for like two months already. Finally she made me so frustrated that I had to rough her up and scare her a little to get her in the mood.
After that, she started doing things that would get me really mad sometimes, so mad that I would have to hit her. I didn't mind it that much at first because I used to wear a really big class ring which kept it from hurting me too bad. So I just ignored it. I didn't want to deal with what was happening and where I could see the relationship going.
But gradually, this started to happen more and more often, and I'd have to hit her even harder or sometimes punch her in the stomach just so she'd shut up. One time, she caused me to break my class ring on her jaw. That ring had cost a lot of money and meant a lot to me, so it made me feel really bad to lose it. Yet still, I let it go. I didn't want to face the fact that she had a problem and our relationship was now careening out of control.
A few months went by, and there was a lot more of the same. She would purposely put me down or try to make me feel jealous by looking at some other guy, and so I'd hit her to let her know how much hurt I was feeling inside. Then she would start crying, so I'd hit her again, and she'd cry and scream louder, so I'd have to hit some more. It usually ended with me punching or kneeing her in the stomach to knock the wind out of her or lightly strangling her till she passed out. I think this was her sick idea of foreplay.
It was toward the middle of my sophomore year when all this started to really take its toll on me. My grades were falling because I couldn't concentrate in class. I was always wondering where she was and what she was planning on doing to me; I knew she was against me and suspected she was probably cheating. Plus, my knuckles were always red and swollen and it was starting to affect my game. I was worried that my coach or my parents were going to find out; I could only hide my bruised and battered knuckles so long under mittens and gloves and athletic tape. I didn't want anyone to know that my girlfriend was abusing me, so I continued to hide the physical signs and deny the truth even to myself.
But finally one day it all came to a peak. Sarah and I had a particularly bad date where she whispered something to me right at the most important part of the movie and made me miss it completely. When we got to the parking lot, I threw her against the car and started punching her even harder than I thought I could. She started screaming and other people in the lot were looking, so I kept hitting her to make her shut up. I truly believe God or my guardian angel intervened that night, because if the other people in the parking lot hadn't noticed and come to my aid, pulling her away from me, I probably would have ended up breaking my hands and having to sit out the rest of the season.
After I got home that night, I looked at my knuckles in the bathroom and for the first time, I noticed blood that wasn't hers. I cried. I called her later that night and told her I had finally had enough. I broke up with her. She cried, and told me she was pregnant, but I didn't cry. To me, it felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I had escaped from the abusive relationship that had been tearing me up inside for several months. I never spoke to her again. Her parents took her out of school when they found out she had behaved like a total slut and gotten pregnant. I don't know where they moved to, but those are the consequences of having unprotected sex. I am a firm believer that people get what they deserve in life. As for my injuries, they healed in about two weeks, and the rest of the season was stellar. Dropping my abusive girlfriend was the best thing I ever did.
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