Women are warned about danger, about money, about the courts and about the children. Almost nobody warns them about this one, and it is the reason a significant number go back.
You leave, and within a few months you have almost nobody. Not because you did anything, but because of how the social arithmetic works.
Why the people go
Half of them were his. His family, his friends, the couples you knew through him. Those were never going to stay and it still hurts when the messages stop.
Some take a side and it is not yours. Especially where he is well liked, which abusive men frequently are. People who saw nothing conclude nothing happened.
Some want to be neutral. Which in practice means avoiding you, since seeing you is the thing that looks like a position.
Your own family may be difficult. Where they wanted you to stay, contact becomes an argument, and eventually you stop initiating it to avoid the conversation. That pressure does not always end when you go.
You cannot say where you live. Which quietly rules out most ordinary socialising.
You have no money and no time. Everything costs something, and you are working, studying, in court and parenting alone.
Years of isolation happened first. The friendships were mostly gone before you left. That was the point of it, and it means you are not rebuilding a circle so much as building one.
What it actually feels like
Worse in the evenings, and much worse at weekends and public holidays, when everybody else is with family and there is nothing to structure the day.
It also shows up as something people do not expect: missing him. Not the violence — the ordinary company, somebody to tell about your day, a body in the house. Women feel enormous shame about this and it is close to universal.
Missing somebody is not evidence that you were wrong. You can miss a person and be right to have left them, and the two are not in tension.
What makes it worse
- Waiting to feel better before seeing anybody. It runs the wrong way round. The seeing people is what produces the feeling better.
- Only having contact that is about the situation. Lawyers, caseworkers, counsellors. Necessary, and none of it is company.
- Comparing. Everybody else’s marriage looks fine from outside, and quite a few of them are not.
- The phone. Watching other people’s lives at eleven at night makes it worse and it is very hard to stop.
- Answering him because he is there. Loneliness is the single commonest reason contact restarts, and it is worth knowing that in advance rather than discovering it at midnight.
How the second circle gets built
Slowly, from proximity rather than from depth, and it does not look like friendship at the start.
Repeated contact with the same people. This is how adults actually make friends. A market you use weekly, the same seller. The school gate at the same time. A place of worship where you attend the same service. A class. A trade association. Nothing has to be said about your circumstances at all.
Say yes for six months. To everything you are invited to, even when you do not want to go and it costs energy you do not have. Invitations stop when they are declined, and the period when you least want them is exactly when you need to keep them coming.
One old friendship, restored. Usually somebody from before the marriage. It is not too late and it is much less awkward than you expect — most people are pleased to hear from somebody who disappeared, and most of them understood more than you think.
Other women who have been through it. Worth more than almost anything else, because nothing has to be explained. Ask us; this is one of the things we can arrange, and it is one of the more requested.
Something with a fixed time and place. A class, a group, a service, a rota. Structure carries you through the weeks when motivation is absent, which is most of them at first.
Being useful to somebody. Volunteering, helping a neighbour, teaching something. It works when nothing else does, and it is the one people dismiss.
A caution about new relationships
Loneliness makes a new man arriving with attention and certainty extremely appealing, and the first months are exactly when judgement is least reliable.
Nobody is going to tell you not to. What is worth knowing is that the markers you learned to ignore are the ones to watch, and that speed is the main thing to be careful of. What to look at, and at what pace is set out separately.
When it is more than loneliness
If you cannot get out of bed, cannot see any point in it, are drinking most nights, or have thoughts about not being here — that is not loneliness and it does respond to help. Please tell somebody, and it does not have to be a professional first.
Counselling is one of our six programmes and you do not need to be in crisis to ask for it.
What to expect
The first year is the hardest, and the second is markedly better for most people. Not because they made a lot of new friends, but because a few ordinary connections accumulated and the days acquired a shape.
Almost every woman who has come out the other side of this says the same two things. That the loneliness was worse than she was told and shorter than it felt. And that she would still have gone.
Questions people ask
Is it normal to miss him?
Close to universal, and it is not evidence that you were wrong. People miss the ordinary company rather than the violence, and you can miss somebody and be right to have left them.
All our friends took his side. Why?
Because abusive men are frequently well liked, because people who saw nothing conclude nothing happened, and because neutrality in practice means avoiding you. It is about them rather than about the truth of what you said.
How do I make friends at this age?
From repetition rather than from depth. The same market, the same school gate, the same class, the same service. Adults make friends by being in the same place regularly, and nothing has to be explained.
I keep wanting to reply to his messages. Why?
Loneliness is the single commonest reason contact restarts. Knowing that in advance is most of the defence, along with having somebody else to contact at the hour you would otherwise contact him.
When does it get better?
The first year is hardest and the second is markedly better for most people. Not because of a new circle appearing, but because a few ordinary connections accumulate and the days get a shape.
If you need help now
If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, call or send a message to +2348025170267, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.
Before you rely on anything on this page
We publish these articles so that you can understand a subject and work out what to ask for. They are written carefully and in good faith. They are still general information about how things usually work, and not advice about your situation, which we do not know.
- This is not legal advice.
- We are not a law firm. Criminal law in Nigeria is largely a state matter, the VAPP Act applies in a state only if that state adopted it, and statutory, customary and Islamic marriages are governed by different law and different courts. Two people with the same facts can have genuinely different options. Get advice from a lawyer who practises where you live — and if cost is the obstacle, ask us, because arranging that is part of what we do.
- This is not medical advice.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces being examined. Do not delay seeing a doctor, nurse or pharmacist because of something you read here, and do not start, stop or change any treatment on the strength of it. If something is time critical, go and be seen.
- This is not counselling, and it is not financial advice.
- Articles about trauma, sleep, money, debt, renting or starting a business describe what commonly helps. They are not therapy and they are not a recommendation about your own money. Speak to a counsellor, a qualified adviser or your own bank about your circumstances.
- It may be out of date, or wrong for where you are.
- Law changes, services close, numbers stop answering and practice varies by state. We correct what we find, and we cannot promise that every page is current on the day you read it. Where we do not have something confirmed, we say so rather than fill the gap.
- Reading this does not make us your lawyer or your doctor.
- No professional relationship is created by reading an article, and we cannot accept liability for decisions taken on the strength of one. What we can do is help you reach somebody who is qualified to advise you, which is what the legal and health parts of our work exist for.
- We cannot promise an outcome, and we cannot make anybody safe.
- A protection order is a piece of paper backed by an enforcement system that is inconsistent. A plan works until the day it does not. Anybody in this field promising safety is selling something, and the promise itself is dangerous because it stops people planning.
Do not let this notice stop you acting. If you are in immediate danger, call 112. If something is medically urgent, go to a hospital — you do not need a police report to be treated. And if you do not know where to start, that is a normal way to begin: use the contact page and we will take it from there.
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