50 Shades of Grey: I was Ana

About two years ago I started hearing about the perfect man. His name was Christian Grey, and every woman I talked to said how wonderful he was. These women were talking about him like he was a real dude, so I kept asking my stay-at-home-mom self, “Who the hell is Christian Grey? Is he some new actor?”

So, I did what anyone would do – during naptime I googled this man women were treating like he was God’s gift to humanity. I was expecting a combination of my husband, Clay Matthews, JJ Watt, and Chris Hemsworth to pop up on my screen. That didn’t happen, and I was even more baffled why women were so hot for this guy from a book. I started to read the synopsis of this thing, and I was unimpressed and worried that the women of America would think that this monster was sexy – the perfect man they were calling him.

As I read more and more about him and the book, I started to see that what I was reading wasn’t romance. It was domestic violence. Until recently, I had been very quiet about my own experiences with intimate partner abuse. Truly, I had really only spoken about it with friends and family. I don’t like people to see me as a victim. I’m a survivor. I’m strong, and I really, really detest weakness in myself.

As I read I began to realize that the romanticizing of these books was becoming more and more prevalent in society around me, so I started to tell people – women – that Christian Grey was a textbook abuser. That was not received with grace from most of the fan base.

In fact, when I compared my own abusive relationship with the one between Christian Grey and Ana, people were angry with me. They called me a prude, and they said they understood why my first husband would cheat on me – I probably only like to do “it” missionary style. I even had so many go so far as to tell me that if I stayed longer, I might have changed him “with my love like Ana did to Christian”. Yeah, sure. That’s why our domestic violence safe houses and shelters are so full. It is because those of us who leave just aren’t tough enough to stick it out and suffer through the abuse until one day our partners are “changed by our love”.

I met my first husband when I was 16. By the time I was 20, I had given up my massive scholarship based on my own scholastic merit to marry him. He was a year older than me, and he was in the Marine Corps. The emotional abuse started before we were married, but the physical began after I got pregnant. He beat me up and in the process caused a miscarriage, murdering our first child. The second time I got pregnant was no different. He beat me profusely many, many times, and after almost losing my son, I decided to try to save enough money to escape.

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