It Wasn't All Bad
A reflection on one of the most confusing parts of an abusive relationship. The good times, financial comfort, and happy memories can coexist with control, dependence, and feeling unsafe — and they don’t erase what happened behind closed doors.
One of the hardest parts of recognising abuse is accepting that there were good times too. The laughter, holidays, financial comfort, and happy memories don't cancel out the moments that made you feel unsafe.
One of the things I struggled with most after leaving was this phrase: But it wasn't all bad.
There were good days. Really good days. There were holidays, days out, laughter, and experiences I will probably remember for the rest of my life. Some moments were genuinely happy.
I had a beautiful home. A nice car. Food on the table. Money around me. From the outside, I probably looked incredibly lucky.
And I knew I was lucky. That's important for me to say.
I came from very little, and suddenly I was living a life where I had things I had never had before. I appreciated them. I looked after what we had. I was probably more inclined to save something, recycle it, repair it, or find a cheaper option, whereas he was much more likely to say, “Just buy another one.”
We were very different in that respect.
So when I was repeatedly told: “You don't realise how lucky you are.”
Or made to feel that I was ungrateful for everything I had, it got inside my head.
Because I did realise and I was grateful. Very grateful.
What I understand now is that gratitude for the material things I had, became tangled up with whether I was allowed to ask for anything emotionally.
And perhaps that was part of what made everything else so difficult to understand.
Because how could my relationship be abusive when my life looked like that?
How could I say I was unhappy, when there were times we were smiling?
How could I say I felt trapped when we had just come back from a lovely holiday?
How could I ask for more when, apparently, I already had so much?
Eventually, you start asking yourself the same questions.
Am I ungrateful?
Am I asking for too much?
Should I just appreciate what I have?
Maybe it really isn't that bad.
And that is where the confusion lives.
I WASN’T ASKING FOR MORE
When I was asking for more from my relationship, I wasn't asking for a bigger house.
I wasn't asking for another holiday.
I wasn't asking for a more expensive car.
I wasn't asking for more money.
I was asking for connection.
I was asking for affection.
I was asking to be spoken to kindly.
I was asking for respect.
I was asking for accountability when something had hurt me.
I was asking to feel supported and celebrated.
I was asking for the basic emotional things I believed should exist within a loving relationship.
And somehow those conversations so often came back to what had already been provided for me materialistically.
Look at everything I've done for you.
Look at everything you've got.
Isn't that enough?
And the answer, although I struggled to admit it then, was no, it wasn't enough.
Not because I was ungrateful, but because material provision cannot replace emotional connection.
You cannot buy your way out of treating somebody with respect.
A beautiful home cannot hold you when you're hurting.
Money cannot speak kindly to you.
A holiday cannot take accountability for something that happened the week before.
A nice car cannot make you feel emotionally safe.
And affection, kindness, respect, accountability, and human decency are not extravagant demands.
They are not things somebody should have to earn by being sufficiently grateful for everything else.
They are priceless precisely because they cannot be bought.
GRATITUDE SEEMED TO GO ONE WAY
There's another part of being called ungrateful that I recognise now.
Gratitude seemed to work differently depending on which direction it was travelling.
I was expected to recognise everything that was provided. The home. The money. The holidays. The lifestyle.
And I did.
But when it came to the things I gave, I rarely remember feeling that same appreciation coming back.
Birthdays were a good example.
I didn't have access to large amounts of my own money, so I couldn't simply go out and spend hundreds on extravagant presents. I did what I could with what I had.
Often, that meant finding something thoughtful or meaningful. Something I'd carefully chosen because, to me, the thought behind a gift mattered.
And yet so often I came away feeling as though whatever I had chosen wasn't quite good enough.
A present I'd put thought into might receive little more than a “thanks.”
Something I'd spent time organising or making could feel dismissed.
And gradually, another message settled in: Nothing I did was quite enough.
Nothing I bought was good enough.
Nothing I organised was good enough.
Nothing I gave seemed to carry the same value as what was provided for me.
There seemed to be a financial expectation that I simply could not reach.
There is a painful irony in recognising that now.
I was being told that I was ungrateful, while simultaneously feeling that so much of what I contributed was taken for granted.
Of course our financial contributions weren't equal.
How could they have been?
He had the income and the financial freedom. I didn't.
So I gave in the ways available to me — through thought, effort, care, time and attention.
Those things have value too.
Price and value are not the same thing.
A gift doesn't become meaningful because it costs hundreds of pounds.
A beautiful day isn't created solely by whoever pays for it.
And a person's contribution to a relationship cannot be measured simply by the number on their payslip.
What I wanted wasn't extravagance in return.
I wanted to feel appreciated.
I wanted a genuine thank you.
I wanted the thought I'd put into something to matter.
I wanted my effort to be seen.
I wanted to know that what I brought to the relationship had value too.
I wasn't asking for money.
I was asking for reciprocity.
TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE
Healing has taught me that I don't have to rewrite my entire relationship to understand what happened to me.
I don't have to pretend every day was terrible, because it wasn't.
And I don't have to turn every happy memory into something sinister.
Some of them were genuinely happy.
Two things can be true at the same time.
I can have laughed with someone who also hurt me.
I can have loved someone who made me feel unsafe.
I can have enjoyed beautiful holidays while experiencing things within the relationship that caused me pain.
I can have lived in a beautiful house while slowly disappearing inside it.
I can have been grateful for what I had and still deserved to be treated with respect.
And I can recognise the privilege within parts of the life I lived without allowing that privilege to invalidate what happened behind closed doors.
One truth does not erase the other.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons these relationships can be so difficult to leave — and so difficult to understand afterwards.
If somebody treated you terribly every single moment of every single day, perhaps the reality would be easier to see.
But that's often not how it happens.
There are highs and lows.
There is hurt followed by kindness.
Conflict followed by closeness.
Pain followed by another wonderful day.
And somewhere inside that cycle, hope survives.
You remember the person they can be.
You remember the laughter.
You remember the holidays.
You remember the version of the relationship that felt good.
And you keep hoping you can somehow get back there.
I WAS PROVIDED FOR — BUT I WASN’T FINANCIALLY SECURE
This is perhaps one of the biggest things I have come to understand.
For a long time, I described myself as having financial security within the relationship.
But actually, I didn't.
I was provided for.
There's a difference.
While we were together, there was the beautiful home. There was money for food, cars, holidays, and all the things that made our life look financially secure.
But that security wasn't mine.
He could have walked away from our relationship at any point and still had a six-figure salary, his business, his savings, his pension and his earning capacity.
I couldn't.
My own working life had been affected by the way our relationship and family life had developed. Although I had worked and had my own business at different points, by the end I didn't have a sustainable income that could simply replace the life I was leaving.
I was financially dependent on him.
And when I look at it like that, I realise something profound: He had financial security. I had access to his financial security for as long as the relationship existed.
Those are not the same thing.
There was very little being built that would protect me independently in the future.
There weren't savings accumulating in my name.
There wasn't a pension being built for me.
There wasn't a business creating long-term financial security for me.
There wasn't money being put aside so that I had my own financial foundation.
But there was for him.
What I did have in my name were financial liabilities, including tax and car finance.
And yet there was a phrase I heard repeatedly: “I'm building this for us.”
For us.
I believed that.
I believed that while he was working, saving, investing, and building his business, we were building our future together.
And perhaps, in his mind, he believed that too. I can't know what he thought our future would look like or whether he ever contemplated that we might separate.
But I can look at what actually existed.
His salary.
His savings.
His pension.
His business.
His financial security.
And then there was me.
Where was my long-term security in the “us”?
Because an us is supposed to contain two people.
Providing for somebody today is not necessarily the same as ensuring they have financial security tomorrow.
The provision was there in the here and now. I benefited from it, and I was grateful for it.
But there was no equivalent foundation underneath me.
If the relationship continued, I had access to security because I remained attached to his.
If the relationship ended, that attachment disappeared.
And ultimately, it did.
There was an “us” while I stayed. But there wasn't much provision for a “me” if I left.
That is the contradiction I couldn't put into words for a long time.
From the outside, I appeared financially secure.
Inside the relationship, I was financially dependent.
And underneath it all, I was financially vulnerable.
“OURS” AND “HIS”
There's another layer to this that I didn't fully understand until much later.
The language could change.
When we talked about the future, it was ours.
Our life.
Our future.
I'm building this for us.
But when money, ownership, or power came into the conversation, I could be reminded very quickly that it was his.
His money.
His house.
Because he paid the mortgage, it could be made very clear to me that the home I was living in was his.
And that's an incredibly confusing place to live.
Because we had built a life together.
It wasn't simply something that had been handed to me.
I had contributed to our home, our family, and our life in ways that weren't necessarily measured by a salary, a bank balance, or whose name appeared on a document.
Yet what could be described as “ours” when talking about everything we were building together could become “his” when my place within it was challenged.
So what exactly belonged to me?
That question became frighteningly important when the relationship ended.
Because he could exist financially outside of us.
I couldn't.
And perhaps that's the simplest way I can explain what financial dependence looked like for me.
There was money all around me.
But very little of it gave me independent security.
THE PRICE OF THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE
From the outside, my life looked lovely.
Perhaps even privileged.
And materially, in many ways, it was.
I don't need to deny that in order to tell the rest of the truth.
But people outside the relationship couldn't see the price being paid inside it.
They couldn't see the moments of humiliation.
The degradation.
The financial dependence and control.
The difficulty around seeing friends or having a life of my own.
The lack of emotional connection.
The feeling of constantly trying to explain why something had hurt me.
The gradual erosion of myself.
The walking on eggshells and second-guessing myself.
And that's something I think we misunderstand when we imagine what abuse is supposed to look like.
It doesn't necessarily live in poverty.
It doesn't necessarily happen in chaotic homes.
It doesn't disappear because somebody buys you things.
And it doesn't become acceptable because somebody provides financially.
A beautiful house doesn't make humiliation hurt less.
A holiday doesn't cancel control.
Money around you doesn't give you autonomy.
A nice car doesn't make you emotionally safe.
And providing materially for someone does not buy the right to mistreat them.
Perhaps that was the trap I found myself in.
Every time I tried to talk about what I needed emotionally, the conversation could somehow return to everything I already had materially.
But the two things aren't interchangeable.
I wasn't asking for more stuff.
I was asking for more relationship.
“MAYBE IT WASN’T THAT BAD”
Even now, after everything I've learned, there have still been moments when I've caught myself thinking:
Maybe it wasn't that bad.
And then I take one experience.
Just one.
I remove the beautiful house from around it.
I remove the holiday we'd just been on.
I remove the car from the driveway.
I remove the money.
I remove the photograph where everybody is smiling.
And I look only at what happened.
At the words.
At the behaviour.
At how I felt.
At what happened when I disagreed.
At what happened when I tried to assert myself.
And suddenly it looks very different.
People have read my writing and said: “I can't believe you went through all of that.”
And there's something strange about hearing those words when part of you can still occasionally wonder whether you're making too much of it.
But perhaps that's because I lived the whole picture.
I didn't experience the painful moments in isolation.
They were woven between birthdays, Christmases, holidays, family days, laughter, meals out and ordinary evenings on the sofa.
The good memories softened the edges of the bad ones.
And for a long time, I think they helped me explain them away.
THE GOOD DOESN’T CANCEL THE BAD
I don't need to hate every memory to validate what happened to me.
I don't need to say every moment was abusive.
I don't need to pretend I never loved him.
I don't need to erase the laughter.
I don't need to destroy the photographs.
I don't need to turn every holiday into a lie.
Some of it was good.
Some of it was wonderful.
And some of it was abusive.
Both can exist in the same story.
That's perhaps the piece I wish I'd understood sooner.
Because the question isn't: Was I happy sometimes?
Of course I was.
The question isn't: Did we have good times?
We absolutely did.
The question isn't even: Did he sometimes do lovely things for me?
Yes, sometimes he did.
The questions I needed to ask were different.
Did I feel safe?
Could I be myself?
Could I say no?
Could I disagree without fearing the consequences?
Could I have friendships, independence, and a life outside the relationship without being made to feel bad for it?
Was I respected?
Did I have genuine autonomy?
Did I have financial security of my own, or was my security dependent upon remaining in the relationship?
Could I ask for affection, kindness, and connection without being made to feel ungrateful for everything else I had?
Those answers tell a very different story.
So no, it wasn't all bad. There were some amazing times. There were things I was incredibly grateful for. There was a lifestyle I appreciated. There were experiences I will always remember fondly. And I can acknowledge all of that now without using it as evidence against my own experience.
Because gratitude does not require silence.
Being provided for is not the same as being financially secure.
Having more than somebody else does not mean you should accept less than basic human decency.
A good day does not erase an abusive one.
A beautiful home does not make an unsafe relationship safe.
And being provided for does not mean you owe somebody your autonomy, your voice, or your self-worth in return.
Perhaps most importantly: You do not have to prove that every moment was terrible before you are allowed to acknowledge the moments that were.
That was one of the lies love hides for me.
Believing that because there was good, the bad somehow counted less.
Believing that because I had so much, I wasn't entitled to ask for the things money couldn't buy.
Respect.
Connection.
Kindness.
Safety.
Reciprocity.
It didn't make me ungrateful to want those things, and it should never have been too much for me to ask.
Love Molly x