The first time Ryan yelled at me, we had been together for two weeks. He had just told me that instead of hanging out with me that night like we’d planned, he was going to “go get drunk” because a friend had upset him in some way. I responded with something like, “Wait, really?” or maybe, “Are you serious?” and the onslaught began. He screamed at me over the phone for maybe somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour while I hid in the stockroom at work and tried to calm him down. He said I was a selfish brat. He said I was controlling. He said other things, all at the top of his lungs. Afterward I attempted our first breakup, and Ryan responded that I didn’t deserve to have a boyfriend anyway if this was how I treated him. Then came the intense love-bombing that would become the cord connecting me for the next two years, the breakup soon forgotten. The first time Ryan told me he loved me, we had known each other for one week, and I was so intoxicated by the intense affection that had already dominated our first seven days, I said it back.
That pattern repeated a lot over the course of our relationship: Ryan doing hurtful things, me expressing my hurt, and then Ryan punishing me for voicing my hurt with verbal and emotional abuse. I am not going to recount every fight or list each instance of abuse. I will not describe to you the worst of them. Not only would it be impossible to list something that so permeated my life, but it causes me a great deal of anxiety to relive those moments. It’s also not the point of this post. But I am choosing to share some things—choosing to share them, because for a long time I felt afraid to publicly say anything about how Ryan treated me, still afraid of the wrath I was used to incurring any time I said or did anything Ryan did not like, even years after we split. He trained me with his rage to keep my mouth shut.
Ryan and I dated off and on for about two years between 2015 and 2017. We briefly broke up several times in between, and Ryan often used breakups and silence as tools of manipulation as well. There were multiple periods that lasted weeks during which we were not broken up, we were not together, and Ryan was in full control of how and when we communicated. If I broke those rules and contacted him, he verbally abused me. If I became tired of his games and stopped reaching out, he would initiate contact and say he wanted to be with me. I fell in love with Ryan and truly cared for him—the pattern of intense connection alternating with abuse was confusing and left me desperate for his affection. Every time he said he wanted to work it out, I thought maybe something would be different, and I wanted it so badly, I accepted behavior from him that I know most people would quickly run from.
When I met Ryan, he was in the process of getting divorced and explained to me he was coming off of a very bad year. There were a number of painful things that had happened to him in that year, and I believed his anger and heavy drinking were a result of that, and maybe one day when he got better, he would be nicer to me. Early in our relationship, mutual acquaintances who found out we were dating kept telling me what a great guy he was. So many times I heard the word sweet. Behind closed doors, Ryan would scream at me, call me a bitch, a moron, retarded, a child, a spoiled brat, crazy, an idiot. I didn’t understand. I felt like I was missing something. Sometimes I felt like it was my fault, that I was somehow making him this person.
He said a lot of terrible things to me. He weaponized my close relationship with my father against me often, saying things like, “What would your father say if he knew you treated me like this?” He frequently accused me of not loving him, of being the manipulative one, even as my love for him was so desperate and unrequited that it was pathetic, even as he told me—on more than one occasion—how pathetic I was. His most favorite insult was to call me a child and a spoiled brat, which should have been hilarious to me. I grew up with far less than Ryan did, in a much less stable household, and at times during our relationship worked two jobs, seven days a week. I lived alone, paid all my bills myself, and paid for most things that Ryan and I did. I paid for everything because Ryan barely kept employment. He said having a real job would compromise his dream of being a musician or a writer. It was not hilarious, because I knew Ryan said these things because he thought they would hurt me the most. The low blows involving my dad and the spoiled child insults didn’t even make sense—my father loathed Ryan and I didn’t even have full days off from work. He said them because he sensed he was hitting on things that were important to me, and his goal wasn’t to say something true—it was to inflict pain.
When I try to explain to close friends what the abuse was like, it feels like the obvious thing is to talk about the screaming and all the terrible things he said. But I don’t think that really gets across to someone who wasn’t there what it was truly like. The thing that most captures what it was truly like is this: When Ryan and I would be sitting on my couch watching TV, and I got up to cross the room and go to the bathroom, I would check my face. Because if he detected any hint of an attitude, it could trigger a tirade that could last for hours, or days, or weeks.
He eventually accused me of being cold, robotic. He said I talked like we were in a business meeting. I was like that because I was terrified to move in a way that might trigger him. I was terrified of accidentally making the wrong facial expression. I was terrified to speak freely and give him any reason to be angry at me, and so I said everything with extreme caution. During fights, if you want to call them that, I probably did sometimes sound like I was in a business meeting. I wasn’t allowed to use sarcasm or be flippant or sound harsh or sound angry or sound sad. He never said I wasn’t allowed; he didn’t have to. His reaction told me everything I needed to know. I was cold because I was frozen.
On occasion I would try to stand up for myself and I would say something forcefully, and what I got in response, I can’t type. I will say it was always verbal, mental, and emotional in nature, but it is too painful to recount. So some of you who know him may have been told stories of instances where maybe I said something “mean” to him or however he spins it—I assure you, I was punished heavily for it.
It was like this every day, every week, always. We would have good days but I never relaxed. I never stopped checking my face. Sometimes he would try to be a better boyfriend and sometimes we had cute dates (that I paid for) and sometimes we supported each other’s dreams. But most of the time, it was confusing and scary and very, very painful. Ryan kept me away from his friends, who I gather largely dislike me, but he got to control the narrative. Like most narcissistic abusers (and I believe this applies to Ryan), he is charismatic and friendly and charming with nearly everyone else in his life. I have heard people describe him as warm. Sometimes I look at him and it seems so obvious how phony much of that charm is, but most of the time I can see why people believe him. I did too, for a long time, even as he was telling me how worthless I was.
There were other factors in Ryan’s life at the time, like his drinking which he has been very public about, that contributed to how awful that time was as well.
The end of our relationship took several months before it was fully over, but it was set into motion by our couples’ counselor when she told us during our second session that Ryan was abusing me, she could not continue to counsel us, and I needed to leave the relationship immediately. I had told her nothing about the abuse—Ryan did. He was so confident that I deserved his treatment of me that he told her the truth during our session, recounting for her an incident that had happened that week. She listened while he spoke, occasionally glancing at me with a look on her face like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Ryan contends, to this day I’m sure, that she was a man-hater and had it out for him. However, we chose her together, and they had formed a friendlier relationship during our first session than she and I had. She was a neutral third party and she leaned forward in her chair and told me to run, in front of him.
It took several months before I fully severed the relationship. When I finally did, Ryan continued to attempt to contact me for several months beyond that. He showed up to events he thought I would be at, and began contacting friends and family of mine asking them to intercede on his behalf. Ryan barely knew most of the people he reached out to. Several of my friends encouraged me to file a police report (which I did not) and were afraid the behavior would escalate to more serious forms of stalking or more direct contact with me. I was not sure what to expect but knew things in abusive relationships tend to escalate when the victim leaves. I called my father, who called Ryan, and after that all attempts to contact me or my family stopped.
During this time, I was very active in the spoken word community in and around Richmond. I helped run Slam Richmond for about a year and went to various poetry open mics three or four times a month. Ryan talked a lot of shit about the spoken word community while we were together and said he preferred being “a lone wolf.” He was not active in the larger poetry community and mostly did readings when he published a book and held his own signing. The open mics I frequented were among the events Ryan started showing up at during his campaign to get me back, particularly the ones put on by River City Poets. I had several conversations with Joanna Lee, the founder and organizer, both in writing and in person, informing her that Ryan had been abusive to me and was engaging in stalking behavior, and I did not feel safe. I sat across from her in tears and told her if Ryan became a part of this community, I would quit spoken word, because I could not be near him.
Joanna told me she didn’t feel comfortable specifically asking someone to not come to her events, but that she would not book him to feature or invite him to participate in events. In one message, she said, “We have your back.” Joanna has booked Ryan numerous times to feature at her events since that conversation, including on a recent Sunday night, which is sort what led to this post to begin with. I made a Facebook post bitching about Joanna’s continued support of a man that she knows abused another member of her community, and people from that community started reaching out to me, and I decided to finally say my piece.
Why now? It’s a valid question I’m asking myself. It’s been nearly seven years since we broke up. I know Ryan is sober now and appears to have improved himself to some degree, and I don’t personally care what that is. I know he hasn’t changed because the shit he still talks drifts back to me, and I’ve heard how he demonizes me. I know what really happened, and if he’d truly changed inside, he wouldn’t still say those things. I think there are people out there who want to know that this happened. In fact, I know there are, based on how many people messaged me after my Facebook post and asked for his name for their own safety and the safety of their communities. Ryan is allowed to have friends and girlfriends and whatever else he wants, and hopefully he’s nice to them. But I’m allowed to tell my story, and this is the first time in seven years that I didn’t feel terrified to tell it. After I made the Facebook post, I felt encouraged by the support, and I now feel ready to say all of this. I am so accustomed to thinking, if I say what Ryan did, even if it’s just to him, it’s going to be so, so bad after. My chest seizes up and all I can think is, He’s going to tear me to shreds. I was in therapy for two years after Ryan and I broke up. I was diagnosed with PTSD and was in a very acute stage of trauma for at least the first year. I have recovered enough that I’ve seen Ryan from afar a couple times and felt okay, but the thought of saying what he did takes me right back into the thick of it. It was so often just voicing to Ryan that he’d done something to hurt me that set him off the worst.
I have mostly stopped doing spoken word. Joanna’s support of Ryan was a large factor in that. Over the years I had moved away from slam and into more “page poetry,” and Joanna’s events were often closest to what I was looking for. Knowing that she supported Ryan made those events feel less safe to me, and I made less of an effort to attend until eventually it was rare. There are other reasons I do less spoken word these days, and other media I have shifted my attention to, but this was a major contributing factor.
It’s not up to me who engages with Ryan and who doesn’t. I’ve never asked anyone not to except for family. But if you do, I likely won’t be around you for my own self-preservation. There are a couple old friends of mine who maintain a friendly relationship with Ryan, however distant, and I don’t really talk to those friends anymore. I have never told them it has anything to do with Ryan or asked them to change anything—everyone is entitled to whatever connections they value, but I can’t be near it.
I called out Joanna because she said she would not book him and then continued to—she can feature whoever she wants, but don’t lie to my face. It especially stings when it’s another woman.
Please remember that abusers typically are not abusive to most people in their lives. The abuse is generally hidden and directed at select people, or sometimes just one person. Many abusers are very social, charming people in the rest of their lives. I’m sure Ryan has been an absolute doll to the vast majority of people who will make to the end of this post, but this is what he did to me.
**Edit, 8/31/2024: I wanted to add a clarification regarding the paragraph where I describe “checking my face.” Because the example I provided referencing crossing the room to go to the bathroom, I think many people will think I mean I checked my face in the bathroom mirror. This is not what I meant. I would mentally check my face as I was crossing the room in front of Ryan, regardless of where I was going, to make sure it didn’t look like I “had an attitude,” because this could trigger rage from Ryan, even if I thought my face was neutral. I have thought about this since I originally posted the blog, and wanted to add the clarification, because this one behavior modification on my part is a crucial part of describing my experience to others. Thank you all for the support.