Beyond Culture & Beneath Control

I used to think it was cultural.

The control.

The silence.

The punishments I couldn’t name, but always felt.

I told myself that he was raised differently.

I told myself that maybe I just didn’t understand yet.

I told myself that love looks different across oceans.

So I stayed.

I got smaller.

I bent until my own bones didn’t recognize me anymore.

I cried myself to sleep next to a man who slept soundly, untouched, and unmoved.

I packed up my babies and fled to parks just to remember what safety felt like.

I feared the slow thud of his footsteps coming upstairs and the way he could suck the oxygen out of a room without even speaking.

I sat in passenger seats, holding my breath, while he raced recklessly through streets and stop signs but then slowed to a crawl whenever my needs dared to surface.

Fear was a language that aroused him.

Kindness was a language he refused to speak.

And every time my heart whispered,

‘This isn’t love,’ I hushed it.

Because I thought that maybe this was just how love survives across cultures.

It wasn’t until much later until I found words like coercive control,

until I read the stories of women who had lived it that I realized:

It wasn’t cultural.

It was abusive.

Love doesn’t require you to disappear.

You can honor a culture without erasing yourself inside it.

You can love across oceans without drowning in someone else’s tides.

If you are bending so hard you are breaking, that is not love.

If you are silencing your instincts to keep the peace, that is not love.

No culture, no tradition, no love story

asks you to bleed out quietly on the inside.

You are allowed to call it what it is.

You are allowed to walk away.

You are allowed to create a safe home that you can rest freely in.

You are allowed to learn to love yourself so fiercely that no one that carries abusive energy can ever reach you again.