Love Hurts

Relationships can be difficult and sometimes things go wrong

and you can get hurt, emotionally and physically.

All relationships are different

and even the best relationships can't be perfect,

but it is important to identify

if the relationship is unhealthy or abusive.

We've spoken to some young people

who've had some of these experiences.

For their own safety, their names have been changed

and their words are spoken by actors.

First relationships can be really hard

and it was particularly hard in Lily's case.

We all feel like we need to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend

but do we really think about what that means?

If you have to do something that you really don't want to do in order to keep a relationship,

this isn't a good way to have a relationship.

I'm Lily and I'm 17.

I live with my mum and I've just had, like, the worst relationship.

I was so much more interested in him than he was in me.

I was like a little puppy dog,

I used to follow him everywhere.

He was so much older than me.

He'd had girlfriends before and he was my first boyfriend.

He was just really popular

and people were more interested in me,

people I barely even spoke to. I had never had that before.

I know about girls who like go on parties and lose it

in the bathroom, on their first time with some randomer.

Like, just cos they're drunk.

Like, I was quite proud of myself for waiting so long.

I was like, "I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it,"

and then some slut comes along and sleeps with your boyfriend.

Because I didn't want to lose him...

cos he obviously went off and had it with some other girl...

because she would do it,

so I thought, I'll do it and I'll be able to keep him.

I knew he was seeing this other girl.

She kept texting Josh, so I kind of like, texted her like,

"Look, I know what happened between you two

"but you need to back off."

Then she texted me, like, "You lost your virginity with a boy who was having sex with me."

And I was, like, I was so mad. Like, "Why would you tell her that?

"Why would you go and tell some random girl about me?"

Like, I still hate myself for doing it.

I wish I'd waited, I guess.

I'd be, like, doing my make-up and stuff and he'd be watching me.

And he'd be like, "Who are you going out with? Where are you going?

"I don't like her. Don't like him. What time will you be back? Text me.

"Text me back straight away. Come round and see me tomorrow."

Just quite intense.

He was so possessive, too possessive.

Well, at first it felt like it had ended quite nicely. Erm...

Quite normally, they'd been getting on each other's nerves,

they'd been arguing. "Shall we split up? Yes, no, yes, no?"

I was trying to avoid him so when my friend rang

and invited me to a party I was like, "Will Josh be there?"

and they were like, "No, no." So we went and like I walked in

and he was like sat on sofa. I was like, "Oh, no."

I went to the bathroom to touch up make-up.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

And like I could hear him outside with this girl.

So I just opened the door and I was like, "Are you really going to talk about me when I'm like in here.

"Like are you really going to do that? Cos I can hear you.

"And that's not on."

I just kept hitting him. Cos I was so mad and he just threw me across the bathroom.

I just didn't think he would do that.

I didn't really think he was that kind of guy.

What I did was wrong. But I'm sure it didn't hurt.

What he did, did.

It seemed like it was a weekly thing. There was something else for Lily to get upset about.

Everybody is in everybody else's business.

And it's horrible. It's my personal business and I don't want everybody to know.

It might be another girl on Facebook.

So then I'd go on and I'd check it, all the time...

you know, when she was at college or at school or whatever,

just to make sure that nobody, nobody put anything else on there.

'I don't know what I'd do without my mum. I tell her everything.

'Having chats with her, about how I was feeling and like she kind of really helped me.

'It was really nice.'

It's just talking things over, because they make sense once you talk things over, don't they.

THEY LAUGH

'She's the reason I'm so much better.'

Trust is really important in a relationship,

because some of the things you do in a relationship are private.

Unfortunately, Lily had sex with her boyfriend before there was enough trust there

and, boy, did she learn that lesson hard.

If you're going to be sexual with someone

make sure that there's enough trust there

so that something like this doesn't happen.

The single most important thing to get you through a rocky relationship is support around you

and someone you can talk to.

Lily was really lucky because she lived with her mother and her mother was able to listen to her.

Not everybody can talk to their mother or father about these sorts of things

but there is somebody out there, whether it's an aunt or an uncle

or a teacher or a helpline,

get the support and talk to somebody about it.

It's important to know what you're entitled to in a relationship.

At the very least you're entitled to respect.

To not be emotionally, physically or sexually abused.

This is really important.

Here's a story of a woman who fell in love with a guy

under really typical circumstances.

That is, they were out for a night out,

he bought her drinks and she thought he was the greatest thing in the world.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way and it took him having to go prison

for her to realise she finally needed to get out.

To me, he did look like Prince Charming,

like, I know I was a little bit drunk

I had the beer goggles on a little bit.

We were just chatting and stuff. He was really friendly.

He was paying me compliments being really nice,

I'd never had those sort of compliments before.

He was buying me drinks, I'd never really been bought a drink before.

Well, I was quite depressed, I wasn't really caring about much

I wasn't really bothered about anything,

I just wasn't in a very good place, and so because I thought that nobody could or would love me like that,

when I met him, I think I rushed into it a bit.

For the first few months the compliments were still there,

he was still being really nice to me. You know, paid me loads of attention.

But then three or four months in, he wasn't the way he'd been that first night

and I realised that his personality wasn't like that.

As time went on he was doing more weed,

he started doing more cocaine. It just, you know, it wasn't good.

Cos I got into doing cocaine as well, there was times when that was the only time that we'd actually get on.

We'd been out in Croydon.

I was really drunk, you know, he was really drunk,

and we'd gone out for his sister's birthday,

and were in the middle of a street in Croydon and I think he said something to me, and I said something back

that was really rude, you know, I probably shouldn't have, but I did.

And we got into a bit of an argument, and I just remember him looking at me and slapping me,

just raising his hand and slapping me right round the face.

-I told him to go

-BLEEP

-himself and that no man ever hits me and stuff

and then a couple of minutes later

we were walking home kissing and cuddling.

I was five months pregnant and we'd been arguing and I can't remember what it was about

but he grabbed me by the throat like here,

I don't know what that bits called, but he grabbed me on the throat.

He looked at me like he wanted to kill me and he threw me down on the ground

and I was five months pregnant when that happened, and I just remember

thinking, "What am I doing?" but I didn't get out.

I think it was like routine really and habit...

-I'd tell him to

-BLEEP

-off and he'd tell me I was a slut and stuff

and then we'd just... we'd get back together.

If he hadn't got arrested... I think I would still be with him to be honest, yeah.

It was the middle of the night and he rang me because you get a phone call, don't you, from the police station

and he was, you know, "Oh, baby, I love you.

"I'm at the police station I'm really upset. Come and get me."

I paused for a minute and sort of pulled myself together,

cos I could feel myself getting emotional

and I just said "No, sorry. Bye."

'Looking back on it now, I feel really good that I did that.

'Cos that was it then, it was like a line under it and it was over,

'for me, he was in prison and I didn't care.

'I didn't want to see him. Cos I knew if I'd gone to see him...'

he would have sucked me in again.

With that whole, you know, "I'll come back, I'll change, I'll do this, I'll do that."

And I knew it wasn't going to happen. And I was harsh then and I just "That's it. No. Bye."

Do you believe in love?

Erm, well I love my kids and I love my mum...

Yeah, yeah I suppose I do believe in love.

But I don't think I believe in love at first sight any more.

We all know that lots and lots of relationships start on a drunken night,

however, it's really important to think about the role that alcohol and drugs take in your relationship.

For example, do you only have a good time when you're high or when you're drunk?

Do you only get along when you're high or drunk and do you find it tough when you're both sober?

If you can't have a good enough relationship when you're both sober

then you need to do some serious thinking about how good that relationship is.

One of the things that allows you to ignore the real stuff that's going on in a relationship

is the way you feel about yourself.

If you're feeling depressed, like you're no good,

like no body loves you, and these are a lot of feelings people have when they've been abused at home

or had bad relationships with parents, you expect the same sort of thing in a relationship

and then when it starts to happen, you feel like it's what you deserve.

Well, it's not what you deserve so it's really important to change

that idea of yourself in your head and find relationships

that respond to the good parts of yourself.

One of the most important things in a relationship is trust

and trust is not something that happens overnight.

Trust is something that develops over time,

people do mess up but then they recover from having messed up

and you learn to trust that even if they mess up, they'll come back to you.

So really allow trust to develop. When it doesn't develop, that's when some pretty bad stuff can happen.

'We met in the last year of school.

'Going out nearly two years, like, on and off.'

I suppose you could say it's been a bit of a rocky relationship, really.

A couple of things have gone wrong.

I was taking drugs, I was smoking weed,

I was drunk and I would literally used to end up beating someone up.

I just needed someone to take it out on, if you know what I mean

and I ended up taking it out on her.

I always used to be like, "Who you with?

"What you doing? Where are ya?" I wanted to know everything.

I did get a bit jealous at a point, yeah.

It feels horrible. It's like the person you're jealous of,

you want to hurt that person, do you know what I mean?

Some geezer was texting her.

And he wanted her wanted to go and meet him.

And, er, obviously, my girlfriend's a pretty girl.

So I understand other boys fancying her, do you know what I mean.

But, I wanted to go up there with her as if she was going to meet him

and then I just wanted to come round the corner and just batter this guy, because I was jealous.

We did used to argue a lot but it was mainly about just stupid things.

Like, she always go out with her mates, and I just used to say to her, "Why aren't I invited?

"Why can't I come?" She'd say something like,

"You're always out with your mates playing football. "

And we'd end up having a full-blown massive argument about it shouting and screaming at each other...

Just stupid, no reason really.

I have lost my temper a few times.

At my uncle's 40th birthday,

we was all having a few drinks, we was all quite merry and, er,

this couple of older women, maybe 35-year-olds,

they were saying to me, "Oh, look how good looking he is," about me and all that.

I said, "Are you hearing what they're saying like, they think I'm good looking."

Literally, like having a laugh.

-And she just like took it to heart and she told me to

-BLEEP

-off as well, and slapped me in the face.

And, like, I sort of grabbed her, like that she sort of went like that to get off me

and ended up banging her head against a wall.

I'd rather be punched in the face than slapped.

I think a slap stings a lot more for a start

and it's just humiliating in front of everyone

when your girlfriend slaps you in the face, it's horrible.

We broke up like maybe five or six times.

One time I actually had sex with another girl, which we broke up about.

But I told her about it, I did tell her about it, and we broke up and we got back together a week later.

SIREN WAILS

I was always drinking, smoking, taking drugs.

I was always smoking weed. And I used to fight quite a lot as well.

I just weren't a very nice boy at all, really.

I've made her life a hell of a lot more stressful,

everything from taking drugs to drinking and, like, fighting and getting arrested.

I had a court case hanging over my head.

Like, I honestly thought I was going to prison.

I just said to her, like, maybe we should break up.

I didn't want to keep hurting her.

So about a month before the court case, we broke up as well.

I think being on tag like helped me a lot.

Obviously, I didn't have the opportunity to be going out with my mates, getting pissed out me head

and fighting and stuff like that, because I had to be in at a certain time.

And the programme they put me on just helped me a lot.

I felt like I was the only person who was being like that

I felt, like, I was a really horrible, nasty person.

I just like, I don't know, I felt shit about myself.

And this programme, helped me realise that I'm not the only person in my position.

There are loads of other people out there like me.

'We're just trying not to worry about things were worrying about,

'like jealousy and other people and things like that.

'I think all in all we realised we love each other,

'we love each other a lot. And we've got things back on track.'

If a relationship is founded upon jealously,

this relationship is not working.

Either trust needs to be built up so that each of you

can lead an independent life without being spied on

or it might be a relationship that you just need to get out of.

There are lots of people like Shaun who go off and they take drugs and get in to fights,

and while they think that this is a really good time,

often it's an expression of something that's really not going right in somebody's life.

The trick here is not to go off the rails so much that somebody catches you

and forces you into a programme like that,

but to realise that your behaviour and the way that you're feeling isn't working for you

and call for help yourself, get it sorted

and then you can really have a relationship that does work for you.

We all have difficulties and problems.

Some people think going into a relationship is going to fix these problems

and the trouble is, it doesn't.

Sometimes the relationships can make it worse.

Rose and her boyfriend were pretty depressed when they went into the relationship.

Both of their troubles kind of piled up, making the relationship pretty bad.

We were both quite volatile.

We both had a type of depression, probably,

both of us.

We would just pretty much argue all the time,

literally over everything where we were both so volatile.

A lot of the time he would text me and if I didn't reply, he'd call me

and call me and call me and he'd say it was because he wanted to know if I was all right.

Or just see how I was.

There was always some reason I had to go home early.

I wouldn't want to have to go.

I think I just kind of gave up, you know, in the end

I wouldn't go out because it was easier, you know, without a scene.

I didn't know if when I saw him he was going to be pleased to see me,

or was he going to be furious, was he going to be something in between.

Yeah, it was really on edge.

I would self-harm and, erm, he would self-harm as well, but in a different way.

He would cut himself, and he would punch walls or he would hit himself, you know, hit his face.

It wasn't that I was afraid of what he would do to me, or how that would be.

It was what he would do to himself, because he was so depressed and he was suicidal.

I just worried literally that I wouldn't be there if something was going to happen.

I would cut myself, but I would do other stuff as well.

Like, I would punch myself in the face or you know hit my head against the wall.

It was the only, kind of, coping mechanism that I had.

It was a really big thing the whole way through the relationship

that I didn't enjoy sex, and I want to have sex because I wasn't enjoying it.

And I was made to kind of feel that it was my problem.

I'd be really tense and sometimes he couldn't even get inside me.

And then he'd say, "You're so tense," I'd be like, "Yeah, I know it's because it hurts."

Then he'd kind of just...carry on,

even when I said "no", sometimes.

The lowest point was just being worried about him all the time.

If I was to go out or to leave

I would be just worrying, when's he going to call,

when's he going to call. Then I'm going to have to go home

and then I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that he wants to hurt himself or he's thinking

about killing himself and doesn't want to live any more.

My friends were saying things to me about him

and at the time I just wouldn't believe it, but those people care about you, those people know.

He decided to go to America for the summer

and that just gave me the time to get away and separate myself from that situation.

It was it was obviously the end of the relationship, it was just a really good thing.

I had time to just,

enjoy doing the things I wanted to do.

And having no-one judge me or criticise me, which was brilliant.

It's really important that your body is your own, and actually your body has a way of telling you things.

When Rose was with her boyfriend, she couldn't let him in,

she couldn't enjoy sex with him, she didn't want sex with him.

This is way her body was telling her that the relationship wasn't right.

It's also important to remember that since your body is your own, you get to say no whenever you want to.

You can be raped in a relationship.

If you say no to your partner they should stop.

If you say no and they carry on, this is rape.

I think that Rose wanted to leave her relationship a long time before she actually did.

When her boyfriend went away it gave her the opportunity

to get out of the relationship and not go back.

The important thing to remember here is,

when you feel like you need to go and you're sure you need to go, go.

Don't wait for something else to get in the way.

When we hear about abusive relationships

we almost always hear about the man being the abuser and the woman being abused.

While this does happen a lot of the time, it's important to remember

that abuse happens in all sorts of relationships.

Straight and gay and among both men and women.

Chris is young and gay and in this case he was only out to one person - his friend.

And that meant that there were already a lot of secrets around

and when there are a lot of secrets around you don't have a lot of safety

because people don't know what's going on with you.

I would say I was just some kid who was broke down, to be honest.

I was quite miserable.

At that point I was only out to my friend Sarah, nobody else knew.

So I did feel quite isolated from not being able to tell anyone.

I started chatting on this chat site.

You go on went on this chat site, I went on made up a fake nickname, as you do.

I pretended I was 19 and actually I wasn't, I was 15.

And I just started chatting away to these people

because I wasn't out to my friends and family, it was such an escape route like, I felt so comfortable

that I could talk to these people.

I started chatting to this one guy...

I didn't really know what he wanted to be honest, but I thought

you know I'll take a chance and I'll meet him, so that's what I did.

I was really nervous I was, like, "Oh, my God! "Oh, my god, why am I doing this?" I was really scared.

Then when I met him I just thought wow, actually he's a lot cuter than his picture.

I met him around four or five times.

I actually turned round to him and said "Oh, you know, can we go back to yours?"

I said to my mum, I'm going away for the weekend.

I'm just going to Sarah's and I'll be back Monday before school.

The first weekend was really good.

It's just amazing, even thinking about it now.

He was so, like nice and gentle with everything.

It was like a really positive first experience, to be honest.

That's when it all went down hill, you see.

One particular night, I was like, "I'm going now. I'm going to meet Sarah,"

he was like "What do you mean you're going? You're taking the piss, aren't you?"

And I was like, "No, I need to go." And he was like "Well, you can't go I've locked the door."

I don't know, he's got such a split personality, where after all this happened he was like "Oh, I'm sorry,

"I'm sorry," and blah blah blah and started being lovey-dovey again.

I never really knew where I stood.

Because nobody knew where I was, nobody knew I was with this guy, it was all undercover.

I was always really worried if anything happened, if I made him angry, like, what would I do?

Where would I go?

I was did feel quite alone in all of this.

One time, he actually, like, forced himself upon me.

I couldn't like get away, it was quite physical.

I don't know, I guess I would say it was rape, purely for the fact that,

I was crying my eyes out all the way through and I couldn't, I just couldn't do anything about it.

And that night I cried myself to sleep.

He just did what he did and rolled over and went to sleep

and he didn't even say anything to me.

I was young still young at the time.

I thought it's not legal and I didn't want him to get into trouble

so I just kept quiet about it really.

The kind of abuse became more physical...

I was, like, punched and kicked and hit and stuff.

And then once I went to school with a black eye and people were like, "How did you get that?"

and I was like, "Oh, I just fell over outside". I had to make up loads of lies.

I went to meet a youth worker, you see, I told her the story like it was a friend, as you do.

And she turned round to me and she said "Chris, this isn't about a friend is it? It's about you."

And I said, "Yeah, it's about me" and at that point I broke down.

Talking to someone really helped.

She said to me that I needed to end it.

I said, "I'm really scared." But she said, "You have to end it."

So that's what happened.

'It's coming up to my 21st birthday,

'I'm a much more confident person now.

'I'm more out-going than I what was before and I'm stronger because of what's happened

'and because of the people that I've met.

'I've got so much more self-esteem now to push myself forward.'

Before I was this shy, like young guy...

whereas now I just feel I can be more open and be more myself.

A lot of the time we can trust our instincts that tell us

whether we're going the right direction or the wrong direction.

With Chris this was difficult because it was his first gay relationship and

the boyfriend was so much older than what he was, and was experienced.

So Chris thought, this guy has all the answers, he knows how to do a relationship.

That meant that Chris didn't trust his own feelings that things weren't going well

until things got really, really bad.

Sometimes you realise how terrible secrets are only when the secret's over.

In Chris's case, this meant coming out.

And he came out in the safest way he could

by talking to the youth worker.

Once the secret was out, and once he could feel secure about his sexuality

and had a support network, he didn't have to have relationships under secrecy any more

and there was a great deal of freedom and happiness that could follow.