Hi Reddit, I have been trying to figure out what to do about a situation. I fear it may get out of hand soon, and I’m honestly lost on what to do as I’ve never really had to deal with this kind of situation before. And this is a long one, so please bear with me.
TW: SH, toxic relationship, manipulation, abuse.
I (15f) have a close friend (15f) who I will call A. A has a boyfriend (15m), who I will call T. They have been dating for over a year now, and immediately broke up with their partners at the time to get with each other (they used to say their relationship was siblinglike before getting together). From the start me and my other friend, who I will call S (15f) perceived their relationship to be toxic from both ends, but it appeared that A, was the main one who exuded this behavior. Both A and T were and still are incredibly insecure, both asking each other to not befriend people of the opposite gender. They often had arguments about these things. We knew it was none of our business but we worried for her and attempted to meddle with their relationship, but stopped after a while, and our friendship slowly dwindled away around a year ago. This was because of them always needing to be around eachother, and as T previously had a crush on S, it caused some tensions in the fg.
Around the middle-end of August last year, A started speaking to us again. We spent around another 3 months being her friend before she cut us off again, leaving all our group chats with little to no explanations why. She came up with an excuse stating that she found out we had been talking bad about her behind her back and she didn’t want to be friends with people like that. Despite the fact we hadn’t, we decided not to bother arguing as we could tell she wasn’t going to change her mind. This resulted in us not being friends with her until around June this year, when a mutual friend brought us back together, shedding light on the situation.
This is where we discovered that T had been telling A to cut us off, feeding her false information that we were bad friends who had been talking bad about her behind her back. This is also where said mutual friend had found out A and T’s relationship wasn’t anything as it seemed from the outside. T had been not only emotionally abusive to A, but also had incidents of being physical with her, such as strangling her after losing to her in a game (a ROBLOX game may I add…). They ‘broke up’ for a couple of days in late may, due to T being insecure over an incredibly petty incident revolving around a joke A had made to another (male) friend. But like many of their previous arguments, T apologised to A, and she once again accepted his apology blindly. Me and A became closer friends, and bonded over shared interests again, but there was always an underlying tension within our conversations, as she later revealed to me that T would look through her phone often. This was the start of the decline of their relationship, where they started fighting almost every day.
A became closer to me, and began to open up and share her experiences with T, and through screenshots I was able to understand the situation more deeply. A has always been a rather mentally ill and vulnerable person so when I saw the messages I couldn’t help but realise he was emotionally manipulating her, and using her SH tendencies as blackmail, threatening to tell her mother about them if she didn’t forgive him or apologise. A recent incident which I believe to be the last straw was when A was having a panic attack in a shopping mall stall. T was upset about her having her profile picture on an app, matching with me as Italy (hetalia). It sounds rather petty, but if you knew these people you’d understand how serious these things are to them. He changed his profile to a girl from a show I don’t know the name of, who is a fanservice character just to spite her. A, not being happy with this, asked him to change it but he started saying things like ‘this isn’t my fault’ and ‘you kind of asked for it’. And when they actually started to argue, he started threatening her saying things like ‘if you cut yourself there will be punishments such as me telling your parents’ he followed this up by saying ‘Even if you stop me from telling your mother in person, I have her phone number now 😜’ (he actually put that emoji) And even after this he still said sorry and she once again accepted it.
I’ve tried speaking to her, and a few times I HAVE gotten through to A. I remind her of how free she felt during the period where they weren’t together, or the copious amounts of times he had made her break down and want to relapse (SH). But he says sorry, and then they continue to be together. It’s a vicious cycle, and I’m genuinely starting to get worried that one day he will do something awful to her, or she’ll do something to herself.
Any advice is appreciated, thank you for reading.
TLDR; My friends boyfriend has been toxic and on some occasions abusive and she wont leave him and im getting worried and dont know how to help her