My Boyfriend And I Were Secretly Having Phone Sex. One Day He Made A Threat I Never Saw Coming.

I remember he said it like a fact. Calmly — an if-then statement. To my teenage ears, it didn’t sound like a threat. Paul didn’t sound like a calculating monster saying the words to control me. He was just informing me what was likely to happen if I hung up the phone on him.

He was going to kill himself.

Sometimes, where once was love, there becomes a web. Sometimes, if you’ve been caught in the web long enough, it feels unclear who is the fly and who is the spider.

When I was a freshman in high school, I met a boy online. This was in the early 2000s, when young people visited AOL chat rooms and lied to each other’s queries of “A/S/L?” Paul and I became friends, and then fell in love. 

Back then, meeting a partner online was considered desperate. I’d wanted a boyfriend but a primarily online-boyfriend seemed like the best I could attain. In the beginning it felt like we were play-acting romance, gesturing at a pale impression of what a real-life, in-person relationship would be. As months passed though, what started as a game became something more robust.

Paul was from a big city, and he seemed so worldly to me, a kid from rural Maine. He knew so much about music, sports and movies, I was always learning something from Paul. Plus, he was funny. There was a lot of laughter. 

We chatted on AIM. We talked on landline phones with prepaid calling cards. Paul and I made our relationship official when I was 15 and he was 16. We were together for three years, long distance for all of it — visiting several times a year when school breaks and parents permitted.

The phone sex began innocently enough. We were young, horny, and several states apart. Phone sex was special punctuation — an exciting interrobang to our growing love. It made me feel desired, and therefore, powerful. Sexual relationships were something adults had with each other — how Paul and I talked was a deliciously grown-up secret.

Over time, the flirtatious, sexy chatting became expected and a daily occurrence. We would talk late into the night, and I would perform for him, narrating exploits which were mostly fabricated. The phone sex felt like a private realm between the real and the unreal. We both had desires, and this felt like a relatively safe way to explore them and to strengthen our bond.

At first, I think for him, the novelty of merely speaking with a girl who purported to be nude was titillating enough. But Paul became habituated to my routine, and soon begged for novelty, so my little shows began to adapt. He wanted more raunch, more degradation of me, more time before climax, just... more. A 20-minute activity became an hour, or two, every night. I was falling behind on schoolwork and not getting enough sleep. I loved Paul, but I grew to dread what he was asking me to do.

I never confessed to anyone in my life what I was participating in, because I was ashamed, because I didn’t know how to put it into words. I had transferred to a boarding school with a heavy course load, and I spent my time anxiously dodging roommates, and juggling homework and extracurricular activities. When I said I was too exhausted for our nightly show, Paul became alternately pushy and pathetic. “I’m addicted to you,” he would tell me. “You did this to me. I love you. I need you. You owe me.”

The phone sex was not the only problem. Paul found other ways to exert control. He hated it when I went to parties, hung out with friends, or did anything that “pulled us apart.” He especially hated the idea of me using any substances, even though he was not a teetotaler. He always said if I drank or used drugs, I’d do something I’d regret — lose control. What he really meant was that he would.

I first thought seriously about leaving him at the beginning of 12th grade. My attempts to break up involved long, circular telephone conversations that left me shivering from the emotional whiplash. I always got talked into staying. It was around this time his “I need you’s” morphed into “I can’t live without you’s.” From there it was a hop, skip, and jump to “If you hang up on me, I’m going to do it.” I loved him. It was hell. I was stuck.

I generally don’t feel — and rarely have felt — like a victim. I’m much more likely to look for my culpability in any given situation because I want to believe I have control over my life. I think most of us want to feel that way about our paths. Paul sought to control my behaviour by expressing his own psychological distress as if it were something I had power over and the responsibility to alleviate. He convinced me I was the spider and he was a hapless fly, and I believed him, even as he coiled the sticky strings around me.

Shame is isolating. It builds walls. It feels insurmountable. Shame is also aging, inserting the false impression that to be an adult means to handle everything by oneself. My parents had met Paul and his family, but revealing the problem to them never felt like an option. I had been taught that sex is healthy and normal, but I knew I wasn’t having “healthy and normal” sex. I wanted my parents to be proud, and I was certain that by engaging in the phone sex, I’d somehow broken their trust. I wanted to protect their opinion of me — wanted them to keep believing I was good. 

I think it’s crucial to communicate in our cultural conversations about escaping abusive relationships that you don’t have to be blameless to ask for help. Whether or not I’d done anything wrong, at the time, I’d certainly internalized that I had.

When a partner threatens violence against themselves to get what they want, it remains violence. If what the partner demands is sex, it is sexual violence, no matter what was agreed to or done willingly in the past.

What I believe now is that even if he needed help, as a person trying to extract myself from an abusive relationship, I was not an appropriate person to be his support system. He needed to seek help somewhere else. I assume if he needed to, he did. No matter how much I loved him, and no matter how much I wanted him to live, ensuring his safety should not have been my responsibility.

Two days after my high school graduation, I was on an overnight trip with friends. I was in a basement, sipping a beer. I took a puff off a joint for the first time. It was a rare good night where I could just feel like a normal kid. 

I’d left my cellphone in my bag — after an hour or so, I checked the time, and saw I had 44 missed calls from Paul. The sheer number was enough to dislodge me from the pretend reality where I was in a “normal” relationship. Forty-four missed calls was so “not normal” that it gave me permission to stop play-acting that everything was fine. In that moment, I remember laughing. Laughing made him seem small, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel small, which was exhilarating. I texted him: It’s over. Don’t call me again. I turned my phone off. I took the battery out for good measure.

In thinking about this relationship, I’ve always attempted to parse a distinction between the performance of sex and actual sex, between the internet and the real. But our lives, more than ever, happen concurrently in both digital and fleshly, analog worlds. We must care for ourselves in every room we enter, because they’re all real; our safety is important in every one of them.

So who is the fly and who is the spider? Ultimately, I don’t think it matters to me. What matters, in the end, is the ending. It was physically painful — writing that last text hurt in my chest, in my gut. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

The experience left psychological marks that have taken time to come fully into focus. For the several years after, I plunged into my adulthood unaware I was carrying hang-ups about sex and intimacy — though my sometimes avoidant, sometimes compulsive behaviour in relationships was probably evident to the people close to me.

A few years after college, I hit an emotional wall — the problem was not simply that I’d never addressed old wounds, but that was certainly part of it. Life can be hard, and new trauma doesn’t erase earlier ones. But I’ve worked to be happy and functional. Therapy has helped. Medication has helped. Writing has helped. Listening to other people share similar stories has helped. A decade of marriage to a kind, patient person has helped. I’m thankful my life has grown to the point where the memory of my high school relationship is a difficult footnote, rather than the all-consuming, shameful core of my story.

There’s a photo of me from the morning after I broke up with Paul, snapped by a friend. In the picture I’m sitting on a futon in a room with cheerful yellow walls. I’m smiling at the camera, wearing a T-shirt, and, for some reason, a pith helmet. I look rested, relieved and very young. I go back to this photo sometimes, to remind myself that after leaving, there was a sunrise.

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist from rural Maine, living in Western Massachusetts. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Passengers Journal, Fugue, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the author of several collections of poetry, most recently the full-length collection “BIG MONEY PORNO MOMMY” from Game Over Books.

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