The first time I got married, I had just turned 17 years old.
We’ll call him DR.
He was almost 19 when we started dating and I was freshly 16, so the age gap wasn’t quite three years. It was close enough to feel normal when you’re young and don’t know any better. But here’s the thing about DR: he didn’t just want me. He wanted girls younger than me, and the youngest I found out about was 12 years old.
I didn’t see them as victims back then. I saw them as competition. We were all so close in age that if we’d lived in the same town, we would’ve gone to the same high school—except for the ones who would’ve still been in middle school. I didn’t understand how wrong it was because I was a child too, trying to make sense of something that should never have been my reality.
DR made me drop out of high school after 10th grade because he didn’t want me around other guys my age. He was isolating me, and I thought it was love.
Then the State of North Dakota charged him with statutory rape, and his sister found a loophole: if he married me, they couldn’t prosecute. So he convinced me to say yes, and I convinced my legal guardian to sign the papers, not understanding that the love bombing had an agenda. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t the love of his life. I was his escape route.
The marriage lasted one year.
After the divorce, he found someone else and had two kids with her. I remarried and had my first daughter. Life moved on the way it does when you’re trying to outrun the trauma of your past.
But his now ex-girlfriend—we’ll call her MA—stayed in contact with me over the years. An act of solidarity between two women who had survived the same man.
Years later, she called me. DR was hitting her. The kids were watching. And he was still showing concerning behaviors with minors. She was in a custody battle, and she asked me to testify.
They asked what my marriage to DR was like, and I told the truth. All of it.
He lost custody of both children. He didn’t fight the ruling. He just packed up and moved to Texas, leaving his kids behind like they meant nothing to him.
I carry two regrets from this story.
The first is that I couldn’t testify in person. I had a newborn and couldn’t travel, so I gave my testimony over the phone. But I wish so badly that I could have said every word while looking him in the eyes.
The second regret is harder to say out loud. I was so broken by the time I escaped him, so traumatized by everything he did to me, that I didn’t push to get him charged for the other girls. I just wanted to survive. I just wanted to get away from the monster who had almost made me take my own life.
And I did. I survived.