From the time she was 14, UF Journalism senior Jennifer Collins* dreamed of having a boyfriend like Phil Richards. He was the hot guy who said hello to her in the hallways during high school, the blonde skateboarder whom she always considered out of her league.
When she came to UF and happened to bump into him on campus, their brief encounter led to a date. And another. And another. Soon they were seeing each other on a regular basis, and it appeared as though her dream had finally come true.
“I was so happy. He was nicer than he’d ever been to me in high school,” Jennifer recalls.
But within a few months, the nightmare began. The accusations. The lies. The “tests” of her affection. Once, when Phil left Jennifer alone in a room with his friend Steve for a few minutes, Phil later accused her of kissing Steve.
“Steve says that you kissed him,” she recalls Phil telling her. She couldn’t figure out why Steve would say that when it hadn’t happened. Phil worked her over with more questions and accusations until she broke down and cried.
When Jennifer asked Steve about it a few days later, he denied having said anything to Phil. And when she confronted Phil, he admitted that he had concocted the story to see if she really wanted to kiss Steve. It was, he said, a test.
As the relationship wore on, there were other accusations, other tests. Once he accused her of sleeping with his roommate and scrawling the word “sex” on the wall over his roommate’s bed. Another time, he found a broken piece of her key chain in his roommate’s room and said it was “evidence” that she was having an affair.
“He developed this extreme obsession that I was having an affair with his roommate,” Jennifer recalls. “The thing that really made me so mad was that I hated his roommate.”
Jennifer Collins is a fictitious name, but the hurt and humiliation her boyfriend regularly subjected her to is real. Many outsiders would probably wonder how she could let herself, in the enlightened 21st century, become so easily manipulated. To survivors of emotional abuse, however, there’s nothing mysterious or pathetic about Jennifer’s predicament. Some people know all too well that you don’t need bruises and black eyes to experience abuse.