I was a successful single mum when I fell hopelessly in love. After six months he moved in... and changed in the most horrific way imaginable. My story should be a warning to every woman: SARAH ANDERSON
It all started 15 years ago at a dinner party. I was single, in my mid-30s, a mother of two children aged six and eight. My marriage had ended two years before, at my instigation, and it had been very difficult and painful.
Now that I look back, I can see that I was worried about being on my own and feeling vulnerable.
At the root of it, I was looking for a good man who would love me and my children. While I was convinced that would happen, deep down I was also desperate for it to come about.
So when my friend Sarah told me she was inviting me to a dinner party, and sitting me next to a man she thought I’d like, I could barely contain my excitement. A single man? One I would get on with? Someone who might take on a single parent with two small children? ‘Pigs might fly,’ I said to her.
When Tim walked in through the front door and gave me a dazzling smile, I was a goner. We spent the evening locked in conversation. He told me that he was a former investment banker but was now trying to run a company making compost loos for festivals.
I liked the idea that he’d decided to change his life ‘to make a difference’ rather than just make money, and when he asked for my number at the end of the evening, I gladly gave it to him.
‘Why is this amazing man single?’ I asked Sarah the next day. She told me he’d been married but his wife was Australian and had decided to go back home with their two sons. It all sounded very sad and complicated, but Sarah vouched for him. ‘I think he’s a good man,’ she assured me.
Tim texted me the next day. In fact, he started texting me a lot – every day. He told me about himself. He asked me all about myself. He seemed open and intelligent – interested and interesting.
He’d say things along the lines of, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we spent the evening together?’. In fact, he started being a bit difficult (picture posed by models)
We went on some dates. He’d turn up on my doorstep with two tickets to Paris. We’d go off to the seaside to eat smoked salmon sandwiches and drink champagne. He bought flowers and chocolates and thoughtful presents for my children, and within two months I was totally smitten. One night while sitting on the dunes during one of our weekend trips (my children were with their father) he told me he loved me.
I felt my heart lift. I thought all my Christmases had come at once. I had never been so happy, and I told him I was utterly in love with him.
He met my family and friends and everyone seemed to like him, though my children were warier than I would have liked. I knew it was going to take a bit of time for them to trust him.
The only downside was that he lived in Scotland and I was in London, so we spent hours – and many hundreds of pounds – making the journey up and down to see each other.
That is until about six months in, when he asked if he could move in with me. I was a bit surprised. It felt very early, and I asked him to let me think about it.
Wouldn’t his work be affected? Oh, he could run his new company from anywhere.
After a bit of thought – and talking to my children, who weren’t particularly keen but at the same time not totally against it – Tim moved in.
And, at first, it was lovely to go to bed and wake up with him every day.
He soon became entrenched in our family life. He started doing school runs and helping out. He did the garden. He mended the fence. He fixed the plumbing. He was a very practical man. I felt very supported and it was wonderful.
And then, within two months of him moving into our home, things started to change.
I’ve always been very sociable – having lots of people round to the house and going out to lots of parties. I also spent a lot of time with my family, but gradually that started to change. Tim didn’t really like me going out – even when he was supposed to be coming with me.
He’d say things along the lines of, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we spent the evening together?’. In fact, he started being a bit difficult. He didn’t really like most of my friends, and if we went to their houses for dinner, he would often kick me under the table after a couple of hours because he wanted to leave. Or he’d just be moody and truculent and not talk to anybody. If people came round, he’d ignore them or stalk around glowering at everybody.
I told myself it was because he just wanted it to be the two of us. And I didn’t want to tell my friends that Tim didn’t like them, so I started making excuses when we received invitations.
He also stopped making as much of an effort with my children. In fact, if I’m being really honest – and I feel very ashamed about this – he would be mean to them. He’d tell them they were lazy, that they weren’t trying hard enough, and that they should do more to help out.
When I questioned him about this, he’d say: ‘I’m doing this for you.’ He was only trying to support me, he’d say, and I’d give in, questioning my own parenting skills.
I would like to say that all of these developments and changes made me decide to end the relationship, but they didn’t. It happened so slowly, little by little.
Each time I found myself able to excuse it, and then the next time it was just a little bit worse. Besides, I was determined to get us back to the first bit – the part where he loved me and it all felt so magical and amazing. I kept telling myself that if I tried a bit harder to understand where he was coming from, it would all be as it once was.
But over time, Tim’s manipulativeness became increasingly overt. If he didn’t get his way, he would often just walk out. If we had a small row about something, the next thing I knew I’d hear his car start up and he’d disappear. I found this excruciating.
I hated it when he left. I’d text him and ask him what was wrong, and get no reply. He would ghost me for days at a time.
Over time, Tim’s manipulativeness became increasingly overt. If he didn’t get his way, he would often just walk out
It was incredibly upsetting and I would turn it around, telling myself I was a bad person and that I’d done something ‘wrong’.
Quite often, I’d drive after him scarily fast, to the extent that I’d risk my own safety, to track him down. If I found him, I would beg him to come home. I look back on it now and it feels so humiliating.
I would occasionally muster up a smidgen of strength and try to talk to him, asking: ‘What’s happened to our relationship?’ But he would just act as though I’d lost my mind. ‘What are you complaining about?’ was his retort. He’d then launch into a long diatribe about me and how terribly I ran my life and how badly behaved my children were, and I’d end up thinking he was right. He said he had to leave so that he didn’t lose his temper and if we all behaved better he wouldn’t have to.
I was emotionally very frightened of him. He was like Jekyll and Hyde – he would turn on a sixpence and lose his temper or leave the house.
Six years in and we were still living together. His business had never got off the ground but I’d managed to carry on working. I was also living two slightly different lives – one with him and another with my children.
We would often eat together without him as he complained he didn’t like the sound of my children eating. We no longer went away together because Tim said if the children came on holiday he wouldn’t join us.
It all began to feel weirdly ‘normal’. Even the fact that I was paying for everything and he didn’t seem to have much of an income felt ordinary.
I was telling myself a lie because part of me was still desperately in love with him and didn’t want to admit that the man I was living with was not the man I had met at that dinner party.
Then, one night, it all came to a head. AI made excuses niece arrived to stay with me – a rare visit during these miserable years – and I spent a lot of time nervously telling her what she could and couldn’t do in the house. And then she said, looking me straight in the eye: ‘What on earth has happened to you? You’ve gone from being a vivacious, carefree person to someone who’s as frightened as a rabbit.’
I don’t know if it was the timing or because I loved this niece so much, but it hit home. Finally.
That night Tim came back and I told him we needed to have a trial separation. I loved him but I could no longer live like this.
He looked at me coldly and told me to go f*** myself. Then he went upstairs, packed his bags and roared off in his car. I went to grab my car keys to follow him as I had done so many times in the past, but my niece took them out of my hand.
‘Let him go,’ she told me. ‘He’ll be back – but you shouldn’t let him back.’
I barely slept for worry and sadness, but the next morning, as I got out of bed, I felt as if a weight had been lifted off me.
I’d like to say that was the end of it but it wasn’t. Tim reappeared two days later and put his bags back in the hallway. I told him he needed to leave. He was furious. He ranted and raged. He became threatening. I told him that if he didn’t leave, I would call the police immediately.
Once again, he left – but the text message bombardment started instead. Endless declarations of unending love, on and on they went – message after message after message. I eventually blocked him but then he got friends to text me. He got members of his own family to ring me. He once turned up at my workplace, and when I looked out of the window he was standing next to my car.
At some point I unblocked him, rang him and told him he was stalking me and that his behaviour was scaring me. I told him we were over and that I was never going to change my mind.
That night, as I lay in bed, I heard his car draw up outside the house. I could feel my heart beating and then I heard a smashing noise. Fortunately, my brother happened to be staying and he ran downstairs and found Tim had smashed the windows of my house. My brother opened the door to talk to him but he sped off in his car.
The next day, the same thing happened again. This time Tim stood in the doorway and refused to move, screaming at the top of his voice that he was going to kill me. He was going to slit my throat. He was going to set fire to my house.
I’d locked myself in the bathroom, but my brother recorded it all and then called the police, who later arrested Tim. I was granted a non-molestation order against Tim and he was told he was not allowed to contact me for six months – and that if he did he would be arrested and charged with harassment, stalking and criminal damage from the smashed windows.
However, Tim’s narcissism made him scarily obsessive, and as soon as the six months were up, I found flowers from him outside my door.
The upshot of all this is that I actually ended up selling my house and moved.
It seems a terrible thing to have to do – that one person’s behaviour can make you so frightened that your whole life is upended. But I didn’t feel I had any other choice.
I had never been scared in that way in my entire life. I had to tell all my family and friends not to let him know where I lived.
It is five years since I last heard from him or saw him. I suppose I have been through a whole set of emotions in that time. Would it horrify you to know that sometimes I’d actually miss him? Or at least the beginning of our relationship when I felt we were so happy.
It sounds insane to say this, but I have to accept the fact that there was part of me that loved him – and I have to not feel ashamed about that either. I went through a lot of therapy, which helped me to understand the parts of myself that fell in love with Tim.
Indeed, I have come to many important realisations about how and why I became embroiled in this relationship.
I know a lot more about coercive control and why I – a strong competent woman – became so involved in something so unhealthy. I choose to see it as an awakening and an opportunity to vow to do things differently from now on.
Have I felt shame? Of course. But I have also realised that I get to choose how I feel about this. I have made amends with my children, my family, my friends. But, most importantly, I have made amends with myself.
Coercive control doesn’t come from nowhere.
I now see my desperation to be loved, my romantic nature and my fractured childhood all left me vulnerable to this kind of bullying, damaged man. On a good day, I tell myself thank goodness it happened because it woke me up. On a bad day, I tell myself that I allowed myself to be hurt and I let those I love dearly be hurt.
It was a horrible, dark time in my life. But what I take from it is the certain knowledge that it will never happen again.
■ NAMES and some details have been changed
