It took three months after I left my fiancé to call myself a victim of abuse.

I rolled these words around in my mouth, feeling their edges scrape the soft insides of my cheeks. If I called it an “abusive relationship,” did that make all of his actions “abuse?” Couldn’t I just pour everything into a sifter and gently shake free the good parts and throw away the rest? Could I keep the nights spent in a pile of pillows by the fireplace and leave behind the times he chased me down the stairs shouting? If his actions were abusive, did that make him an abuser? Would I always have to call myself a “victim” the same way I call myself a woman or a daughter? Or was this a label that I could shed later? And if so, how much later? There were so few memories I wanted to hold on to, and they felt too fragile. I wasn’t sure whether this single word would be like a sharp breath hitting a dandelion, scattering all the seeds, and leaving a bare stem.

He had chosen me. Standing in a grocery store on a Monday afternoon, he walked up and called me beautiful. He followed me out and asked for my phone number as I loaded groceries into the trunk. He was a homebody, but went to comedy shows and jazz clubs to spend time with me. He always paused the TV or turned down the music when I spoke, and I thought all those things together must be love.

These niceties took on outsized significance because he was my first serious relationship. The feeling of being chosen had been so powerful that I willed myself to believe that even when he’d started walking out of the house when I was speaking, or breaking things when he was angry, he still loved me. As he slowly took his kindnesses back one by one, I adjusted and learned to live on less. He had been my first love and there was something so appealing about that fantasy. How nice it would be to neatly tie a ribbon around this story and say that I had gotten this right on the first try.

I learned to tiptoe around his emotional landmines and winced when he compared me to exes or told me I wasn’t sexy enough. Over time, I dimmed the parts of me that he criticized and tried to become more of who I wasn’t. My fear of abandonment kept me doing the calculus of our relationship. Were there still more happy days than bad ones? Had this particular cruel stretch been longer than the last? Could we still have the kind of life I pictured for us? My anxiety tried to catalog every pattern of behavior to track them to types of events, seasons, or times so that I could work around them and find my next foothold.

My fiancé had a sex addiction that he’d hidden for most of our relationship, binging pornography and hiring strangers for sex. His confession came devastatingly late in our relationship. After four and a half years, he’d blurted it out and immediately asked, “Are you going to leave me now?” I felt like his question was a test, so without thinking, I proved my loyalty. Long before I knew, I was sensitive to each shift in his mood, every clipped word, and cold, narrowed look. I’d respected his intense demands for privacy. I’d learned to brace myself against being called “needy,” an insult he deployed casually when I so much as asked him about his day.

The appeal of finally being needed by him convinced me that his admission would bring us closer. Even though I told him I would stay, and we could overcome this together, a tiny nagging voice in the back of my head said, “This isn’t fair.”

When he adopted the title “addict,” he said it meant I could no longer have expectations of him or the relationship, and I wasn’t allowed to ask about his therapy. He treated his behavior like another person living within his body. “That was my addict talking,” became a common phrase in our house as he brushed the blame off his shoulders. When I committed to him, I’d never imagined a scenario in which I would leave him because he was ill, but I considered it often. He used this label to distance himself from his actions, but I didn’t have the option to stay in a relationship with only part of him.

He never hit me. He screamed at me, broke things, and made our home a place where I wasn’t safe. One night after he’d berated me within earshot of my friends, I got in my car and drove to a 24 Hour Fitness across town. I parked facing the neon signs eating a salad I’d picked up at a nearby grocery store and intermittently turning the engine on to adjust the temperature. I was comforted by the consistent trickle of people coming in and out, ensuring that I wasn’t alone. Should anything happen to me, someone would hear. I stayed there with my locked doors and the strangers who kept me company until my phone lit up and buzzed with his pleas for me to come home.

Over the course of our relationship, he withdrew more and more. We no longer went on dates and when we were invited to events, on the occasions he didn’t stay home by himself, he spent the evening punishing me. He would refuse to look at me or speak to me and tossed my hand aside when I reached for his. I made excuses to my concerned friends for his palpable resentment saying he had social anxiety or was under a lot of pressure at work, and I concealed my own mix of nerves and anger. While I searched my mind for what I might have done to elicit this treatment and dreaded what he could say when we were alone, I was also angry that he’d chosen this for us both. That when I would look back at those weddings, or that birthday, or the weekend trip with friends, what I would remember most vividly were the silent drives home. He’d speed and weave down the freeway while I dug my nails into the fleshiest part of my palm. He was racing to get back to his computer behind a locked door, and I was silently counting the freeway exits until I could curl up in my own car in that familiar gym parking lot where I would let out the breath I’d been holding.

Our early memories made the abuse easier to accept. Knowing who he had been and seemingly could choose to be again was enough to keep me tethered, even when the smiling photos on our walls no longer resembled the unhappy inhabitants of our house. I wonder if he ever thought of himself as an “abuser.” If that word gnawed at him as he sat in our house alone while I turned the key in the ignition to warm my hands as the headlights spilled over a mostly empty parking lot. Or maybe that burden belonged to his addict.

The worst of his abuse happened during the nights when I woke up to him yanking my clothes off and forcing himself on me. Sometimes he pushed a heavy hand into my back, pinning me to the bed while I squirmed to get my face out of the pillow. At first, he said he didn’t remember: “It must be involuntary, like sleepwalking.” Over time it happened more frequently, and he joked about it, calling it “sleep molesting.” Eventually, he swore it was the only way he could maintain an erection. I knew that he was only attracted to me when I was unconscious, but rather than defining it, I would turn over and hug my arms tightly around myself.

When I learned that this type of abuse had a name, it was like all my memories were bathed in a garish light. I could no longer ignore it, but it was also too harsh to look at directly. This was “assault.” This was “intimate partner sexual violence.” I felt guilty for lacking the vocabulary. If I’d known what to call it, would I have protected myself? And which side of him would take the blame? Could I have spoken these words aloud, grabbed them from the air, and forced them into his mouth. Leaving him and his addict to nick himself raw on the pointed edges. If I would have said them aloud sooner, would I have saved myself months of trauma? I desperately wanted to conclude that I hadn’t wasted time with him or permanently altered my life’s trajectory.

When I finally decided to leave him, I knew it meant letting go of our possible happy ending, no matter how unlikely it had become. It meant leaving behind my ring, adopting the label “ex-fiancé,” accepting the time that was gone, being single at an age I’d never expected, and admitting I had spent years being unhappy and mistreated. I had no idea if I’d find a partner or how much more time it would take, but I knew I would be happier alone than with him. It still took three attempts to leave for good, even with that clarity.

I am thirty-four years old now, and I have given myself permission to stop calculating. I have grieved the loss of a plan that felt like the only way to be sure the final sum of my life would come up positive. It doesn’t matter anymore how much time I lost or what I have left because I am giving it all back to myself. Years spent triangulating around his abuse, energy lost trying to take care of him, and the effort to make space for his addiction like a third person in the relationship, all of that is mine again. I am not a wife, but I am more authentically, loudly, and comfortably myself than I’ve been. Ultimately it wasn’t about time or labels. It was about naming the truth, and that takes as long as it takes.