After my ex-boyfriend attempted suicide, the first thing someone asked me was how it felt knowing it was my fault.
There were two sides to me my senior year of high school: what I let people see and who I really was. On the outside, I was in four club leadership positions, a straight-A student and recently accepted into my top three colleges. I finally stopped wearing blue eyeshadow. Life was good.
Behind closed doors, I was dating a boy with personal demons far beyond my level of expertise. My boyfriend was bipolar and lived in an abusive home. I didn’t have any dating experience, so when he said he needed my social media passwords because his hard home life gave him trust issues, I thought that was a normal request. I tried to be sympathetic when he said I couldn’t have any guy friends because he was worried they’d get me to cheat on him. When he called my phone 20 times in a row because I went out with my family and didn’t respond to his first text message, I vehemently defended his paranoia to my parents who started to suspect maybe he was too dependent on me.
Things fell apart after he threatened self-harm to keep me from telling anyone he had stopped going to therapy for his mental illness.
I broke up with him. He threatened to hurt himself. I called his bluff.
You get the picture.
I’m not that 18-year-old girl anymore. Four years later, I’ve got an entirely new life. I’m on track to graduating this spring with a boyfriend who treats me with respect and an open dialogue with my parents where I feel comfortable asking for help.
I hadn’t even thought about that boy in years until I was reading the comments under singer Ariana Grande’s Instagram picture of the late rapper Mac Miller.
For anyone that hasn’t been following this story, Grande and Miller had been dating for almost two years when she broke up with him. Shortly following their split, Miller was arrested for drunk driving and hit-and-run after crashing his car, and Grande was rumored to be dating comedian Pete Davidson.
Twitter was abuzz blaming Grande for the accident because she had moved on to another relationship. Grande immediately fired back online writing that was minimizing female self-respect and self-worth by saying someone should stay in a toxic relationship.
“I am not a babysitter or a mother and no woman should feel that they need to be. I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety and prayed for his balance for years (and always will of course) but shaming/blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem,” Grande posted. “Let’s please stop doing that.”
Miller died of an overdose on September 7, and since then Grande’s social media has been flooded with the opinion that she is to blame again.
From one woman with experience in a toxic relationship to another, I’m here to back you up, Ariana.
Blaming Grande for Miller’s death is misogyny
If a woman leaves one relationship and enters another shortly after, she isn’t always trying to “get back” at her ex-partner. Women are expected to go through a grieving period after breaking up, which is rarely the case with men “playing the field” and “getting back out there.”
There is also this dangerous enigma where women are pressured to “fix” their broken boyfriends but shamed for staying in abusive relationships.
When I told people I left my boyfriend because I wasn’t equipped to handle his unmedicated bipolar disorder, they said I was abandoning him. If I was the only one he trusted, I should sacrifice my comfort to help him through his aggressive mood swings and physically violent behavior.
But when I told people the same story except added he had pushed me to the point of a depression so fierce my anxiety attacks kept me from regularly attending school and I lost 20 pounds, they asked me that one furious question I’m sure Grande would have been asked if Miller ever became violent.
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
This is what misogyny is. Equating a woman’s worth to if she can endure an abusive relationship just to provide emotional support for her partner. Holding a woman responsible for a man’s self-destructive behavior. Shunning women for being unable to “fix” the men in their lives.
Telling a woman she is wrong to leave a toxic relationship, yet telling another she is wrong to stay in one.
If Grande felt that she was bearing too much responsibility in her relationship, there is no reason she shouldn’t leave just to spare someone’s feelings. When people blamed her for Miller’s choices to drive under the influence and take drugs, they changed the narrative from a man needing help with his problems to a woman who was wrong for not keeping him sober.
Start holding men accountable for their own actions
It took me several years to let go of the anger I had towards myself and my ex-boyfriend over his suicide attempt. In accepting that it wasn’t my fault he refused to get help for his illness, I also had to forgive myself. I had put so much pressure on myself to keep him healthy that I neglected my own mental health for over a year. I lost friends because I had become bitter and guarded. I was ineligible for scholarships because I stopped doing my homework and failed the SATs. I still feel the effects of my poor decisions, but every time I feel that guilt creeping in I remind myself that I’ve come far.
Shortly after Miller’s death, one Twitter user wrote, “Mac Miller’s death is a tragedy, and the blame directed at Ariana Grande is sick. We blame women for what happens to their exes because we see them as their partners’ caretakers, not their equals. We tell men with troubled exes they ‘dodged a bullet’ or ‘got out while they could.'”
This is what misogyny is. Equating a woman’s worth to if she can endure an abusive relationship just to provide emotional support for her partner. Holding a woman responsible for a man’s self-destructive behavior. Shunning women for being unable to “fix” the men in their lives.
If you’re one of the thousands of people who told Grande that she’s responsible for Miller’s death because she didn’t want to stay in a toxic relationship, I urge to listen to more stories like mine. Women who leave abusive relationships are not the cause of their ex-partners’ poor decisions afterward.
Everyone is accountable for their own choices: even Mac Miller.
If you’re currently in a physically abusive relationship like mine was, or a toxic relationship like Grande’s, talk to someone who can help. If we’ve learned anything from Grande’s story, it’s that misogyny will always discredit your own safety, but you are not responsible for anyone else’s actions.
Your life should be yours to live.