I was patient zero. Looking back at the relationship I thought was love.

 

Patient Zero

I was “patient zero.”

And I mean that in the way that, according to him, I was the first person who treated him better than any of the recent girls he had dated. But sometimes I wonder if I was more than patient zero. Maybe I was the first person to experience a version of him that I didn't yet have the words to understand.

I recently listened to Taylor Swift's song “Patient Zero,” and the more I listened, the more pieces of my own story seemed to appear in the lyrics.

The song talks about someone who comes into your life like fireworks. Someone who seems to have a halo, while there is something darker underneath. It talks about the “toxins” slowly taking hold and about someone who can charm the people around you while the relationship behind closed doors tells a completely different story.

That was my relationship.

From the outside, we gave everyone a show. We looked like the perfect couple. I doted on him, catered to him, and tried to be the best partner I could possibly be. Looking back, I think we had a honeymoon phase, and once that faded, the toxins slowly started to seep in.

We met online and talked for a while. After a miscommunication, we lost our messages for about a week, but eventually we found our way back to each other.

He came into my life like fireworks, just like Taylor sings about.

He was confident. He didn't seem afraid to be himself. Somehow, that confidence was incredibly attractive to me. He seemed caring and thoughtful. The night we met, I was so happy. I honestly thought I had found my person.

I thought, This is it. Eventually, I'm going to marry this man.

At the time, I didn't know how different that future would look.

There is one thing I remember especially clearly from about the middle of our relationship.

One night, other people asked us about our relationship, and he told them about how he had been in a dark place when he met me. He talked about how much I had lit up his life and how much better his life was because of me.

I remember hearing him say those things and feeling incredibly loved.

It reinforced everything I already believed about us.

I wasn't just his girlfriend. I felt like I had changed his life.

And that is part of what makes looking back so complicated.

Because the person he presented to other people was someone who openly talked about how much better his life was because of me.

He could make our relationship sound beautiful.

He could make people believe in us.

And I believed in us, too.

At one point, he gave me a promise ring.

At the time, I viewed it almost like an engagement ring. I remember him even saying one day that he should have made that promise ring an engagement ring.

That meant something to me.

I think that moment also contributed to how I began viewing my role in the relationship. In my mind, I wasn't just dating him anymore. I was preparing to be his wife.

I thought I needed to treat him like my future husband.

And, looking back, it seemed like he began thinking along those same lines too.

That made the control easier for me to accept.

I had already mentally committed to a future that hadn't actually happened yet.

Early in the relationship, he was dealing with what he described as a stalker. I was put in the middle of that situation, and I eventually stepped in. I called the police whenever she showed up and did what I could to stop the harassment.

We dealt with that for a while.

Then came the first red flag.

We were asleep together one night when he started mumbling in his sleep. The mumbling became clearer, and he sounded panicked. I tried to wake him because I was concerned about what he was experiencing.

The next thing I knew, he was on top of me with his hands around my neck.

I had my hands free and started hitting his arms as he was preparing to apply pressure. A moment later, he seemed to wake up, gasped, and apologized.

According to him, his ex had been abusive, and he thought he was attacking her in his dream.

I accepted that explanation.

I didn't think of myself as a victim of anything. I looked at the situation with empathy. I felt sorry for him. I thought something terrible had happened to him in his past, and I wanted to understand.

So I continued the relationship.

Looking back now, I recognize that putting his hands around my neck was physical violence. The fact that he said he was asleep or believed he was dreaming doesn't change what happened to me. At the time, though, I didn't have that understanding.

Then came our first pregnancy scare.

We were both nervous at first, but then everything changed. He accused me of trying to trap him. He told me he had more life to live and couldn't afford a child. He told me that we were going to get an abortion and that I should agree because I didn't want a child right now either, right?

He even brought up what my mother would think.

I wasn't pregnant.

But the experience stayed with me.

Today, I understand that as another example of control—trying to make a major reproductive decision for me and presenting it as though I didn't really have a choice.

Control became one of the central themes of our relationship.

What he said went.

He often talked about how controlled he had been throughout his own life and how now he wanted to be able to do whatever he wanted. I was expected to accept that. A lot of our activities revolved around what he wanted to do.

I had a submissive attitude throughout the relationship. I wanted to be the best “wifey.” We moved in together only a few months after getting to know each other.

I thought being a good partner meant accommodating him.

We also developed a terrible habit of letting problems and resentment build up until they eventually exploded over the smallest things.

Arguments happened in the car, at home, and sometimes in front of other people. We couldn't seem to have a disagreement without it becoming something bigger.

I remember him criticizing my upbringing.

According to him, my childhood hadn't been as difficult as his. Sometimes I was accused of being privileged. Sometimes it felt like I could never say the right thing without it somehow becoming a comparison between my life and his.

One argument involved his mother and the relationship I had with her.

Another involved the amount of time he spent with his cousins and the private time he wanted with them.

And then there was the comment about my body.

I have always been a curvy woman. Years later, I would learn that hypothyroidism was part of the reason I struggled with my weight.

But that isn't even the point.

The comment that stayed with me was:

“You wonder why I don't touch you all the time.”

That sentence has stayed with me for years.

You can do a lot of healing and still have certain words stick to you.

We continued the relationship and maintained the perfect picture.

Everyone envied us.

People wanted a relationship like ours.

They didn't know that behind closed doors, we were a completely different story.

And this is where the “halo” in Taylor Swift's song means so much to me.

The song talks about someone having a “devil on his shoulder under his halo.”

That is how I think about him now.

There was a version of him that people saw.

There was a version of him that I saw.

And there was a version of our relationship that existed behind closed doors.

All three could exist at the same time.

There were genuinely good days. There were times when I thought everything was fine. But there were also days when one of us was upset and neither of us knew how to communicate it. Sometimes he would shut down and leave me to figure out what was wrong.

I remember one of our first trips to Dallas to visit his family.

The trip was going fine until his grandmother went to a party to get some time outside the house. He became extremely worried that something had happened to her. I understood that fear and did everything I could to help him work through it.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that his family blamed me for adding to his stress.

His father especially confronted me about the entire day. He believed I had been miserable and hated the activities we had done, including Six Flags.

But that wasn't true.

I'm a quiet person by nature. I'm not always loud or animated, especially around people I'm still getting to know. I was actually having fun. I enjoy people-watching and taking in the atmosphere of a theme park, even when there aren't many rides I want to go on.

But somehow my quiet personality became evidence that something was wrong with me.

I remember his father getting in my face and confronting me about it.

Looking back, I place less blame on his father than I do on the information he was receiving from his son. After a year and a half together, you would think he would have recognized that I was simply a quiet person.

Soon after that, we headed home.

One disagreement about which interstate exit to take turned into another argument.

I insisted that I knew which exit we needed. He wasn't convinced. He became frustrated and continued driving. I kept insisting that I was right, and eventually he said he would call someone else to help him navigate.

I don't remember everything that was said.

I remember crying.

I remember not wanting to be in the car anymore.

I remember staring out the window and stroking our cat, who was traveling with us.

Eventually, it was confirmed that I had been right about the exit.

He apologized.

And life continued.

We added roommates—his brother and his brother's fiancée. For a while, it was nice having them around, even though they weren't able to help much.

Then there was more stress.

Money became an issue.

He lost his grandmother, the person he loved dearly, and that affected him deeply.

Eventually, the financial stress became part of the reason he wanted to “free” me and cut me loose.

He knew my mother would take care of me. He knew I could go home.

During this time, I confided in a counselor at school.

I told her about some of what was happening.

She asked me a question that stayed with me:

If someone truly loved you, would they do that?

At the time, I didn't know how to answer her.

Now I do.

The night he said we should separate, he seemed almost free. He kept telling me that nothing was going to change.

But everything had already changed.

I cried that night.

When he eventually came to bed, I felt completely detached. I knew things were different.

I moved to the couch because I didn't want to sleep beside him.

He became frustrated and complained that if I wasn't going to sleep with him—or “actually sleep” with him—then he would take the couch, or I could sleep with him one last night.

I remember how frustrated I felt.

More than anything, I remember thinking:

I don't want him to touch me anymore.

There is another part of this story that I didn't talk about for a very long time.

The night he raped me.

I had been curious and watched a short pornographic video. He caught me watching it and told me, “You are mine. You don't need that.”

I was already thinking that I didn't want sex.

But I couldn't say no.

At that point, I believed this man was going to be my future husband. I had convinced myself that I needed to submit to him. I believed that my body belonged to him.

So I didn't say no.

I played along and allowed him to have intercourse with me.

Afterward, my mind was completely jumbled. My feelings were everywhere.

Years later, I learned the term partner rape.

That's when I began to understand what had happened.

Consent isn't automatically given because you're in a relationship. It isn't automatically given because you've had sex before. It isn't automatically given because you believe someone will someday be your husband.

And wanting sex on other occasions does not mean you wanted it that night.

I eventually understood that what happened to me was sexual violence.

There were other things throughout the relationship that I didn't recognize as abuse at the time.

He criticized my upbringing.

He criticized my personality.

If I was too quiet, something was wrong.

When I read, I was expected to be more animated. When I talked about my childhood, I was accused of being privileged because his family had been poorer or had struggled more.

It often felt like I was being compared to standards I had never created.

He made me feel like he could never be good enough, even though I had never asked him to be anyone other than himself.

All I wanted was for him to love me and accept me for who I was.

And that is one of the things that makes looking back so difficult.

I spent so much time trying to prove that I was worthy of love.

On that final night, he painted himself as the one who was losing everything.

He talked about how he had been helping me, how that help had turned into love, and how now he was going to be alone again.

He told me that after me, life wouldn't make sense.

He talked about eventually drinking himself to death and having to settle for whoever he ended up with.

At the time, I carried the weight of those words.

I felt responsible for his future.

I shouldn't have.

About a week after my mother came and got me, I received another text from him.

He asked me to help pay a loan and wanted the cellphone he had bought me back.

Then he asked if maybe I could come back home, before adding that it was probably too late.

I told him yes.

The university had arranged emergency housing for me and was preparing to move me in.

A month later, he texted:

“I hope you're alright.”

I responded:

“What do you think?”

And that was it.

It has been almost twelve years since I left.

I never looked back.

For a long time, I questioned whether what happened to me was really abuse.

I think a lot of survivors do that.

We remember the good moments.

We remember the person we fell in love with.

We remember the apologies.

We remember the times they were kind.

We remember the version of the relationship that everyone else saw.

And sometimes we convince ourselves that because there were good moments, the bad moments couldn't have been abuse.

But abuse doesn't have to look like constant screaming.

It doesn't have to happen every day.

It doesn't erase every good memory.

And it doesn't have to look exactly like someone else's experience.

When I look back now, I see the pattern more clearly.

The hands around my neck.

The attempts to control reproductive decisions.

The constant criticism.

The manipulation.

The pressure and control surrounding sex.

The sexual assault.

The emotional dependence placed on me.

The feeling that I had to submit, accommodate, and become whatever version of a partner he wanted.

These weren't isolated incidents.

They were pieces of a larger pattern of control.

And that is why I can now say that what happened to me was abuse.

Why “Patient Zero” Hits Differently Now

When I first heard Taylor Swift's “Patient Zero,” I connected with the title because of the way he once described me.

But now I hear something much deeper.

The song is about someone who has already experienced a toxic relationship and recognizes the same patterns when another person encounters that same partner. Swift has explained that the idea came from a conversation with friends about an ex's new girlfriend reaching out for guidance, which makes the song's perspective especially interesting: it isn't simply a breakup song. It is about recognizing a pattern after you've already lived through it.

And that is exactly why I connected with it.

“He burst into your life like fireworks.”

That line immediately reminded me of the beginning of our relationship.

He really did feel like fireworks.

Everything was exciting and intense. I thought I had found my person. I thought I was going to marry him.

And the promise ring only reinforced that belief.

When he later said he should have made that promise ring an engagement ring, it became another piece of the future I had already built in my mind.

I wasn't simply dating him anymore.

I was preparing to be his wife.

“The devil on his shoulder under his halo.”

This may be the lyric that hits me the hardest.

Because there was a halo.

He could tell people how much I had changed his life.

He could talk about how he had been in a dark place before me and how I had lit up his life.

He could make people believe our relationship was something beautiful.

And I believed it, too.

But behind that halo were things I couldn't fully understand at the time.

The control.

The criticism.

The manipulation.

The physical violence.

The sexual violence.

The pressure to submit.

The two versions of our relationship could exist at the same time.

“When the toxins take their hold…”

This is how the relationship feels when I look back at it now.

The abuse didn't begin with everything happening at once.

There were moments I explained away.

Moments I forgave.

Moments I misunderstood.

Moments I thought were isolated.

The toxins seeped in slowly.

And because they came slowly, I adapted to them.

What would have shocked me at the beginning of the relationship eventually became something I tried to rationalize.

“He charmed your family and friends.”

This one is complicated for me because he didn't just charm the people around me.

He also gave them a story about us.

He could talk about how much I meant to him.

He could describe himself as someone who had been in a dark place and found happiness because of me.

He could make our relationship sound like something worth admiring.

That is part of why I maintained the perfect picture, too.

I didn't want anyone to see the cracks.

“Someone who had him and walked away.”

This is the part of the song that represents where I am now.

I had him.

I loved him.

I thought I would marry him.

And then I walked away.

It wasn't easy.

It wasn't immediate.

And it didn't mean I was suddenly healed.

Walking away was only the beginning.

The healing came later.

The counseling came later.

The nights of crying came later.

The rebuilding of my self-worth came later.

Learning to recognize what had happened to me came later.

And almost twelve years later, I can finally look back and understand the pattern.

I don't know what would have happened if I had stayed.

Maybe it would have gotten worse.

Maybe it would have looked different.

I'll never know.

What I do know is that I left.

And leaving changed the direction of my life.

The song ends with the idea of having been through the reeling, the healing, the curses and prayers—and being able to see someone else who is now experiencing something similar.

That is what “Patient Zero” means to me now.

Not that I was responsible for anything that happened.

Not that I was the cause.

But that I was the one who lived through that particular pattern first.

I was the one who didn't have the words for it yet.

I was the one who saw the halo before I understood what was underneath it.

And eventually, I became the person who walked away.

For years, I wondered whether I was imagining it.

Whether I was exaggerating.

Whether I should have handled things differently.

Whether maybe it wasn't really abuse because there were good times, too.

Now I understand that those questions don't erase what happened.

I was there.

I know what I experienced.

And I know that I walked away.

The relationship I thought was going to become my future ended.

But my life didn't.

In many ways, that was where my life finally began to become my own.

Almost twelve years later, I can finally say it without questioning myself:

It was abuse.

And leaving was not the end of my life.

It was the beginning of getting it back.