James' World 2

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When I was 17 in the late 1980s, I fell in love with a boy from work. He was 19 and from another country and when our work time was over, he had to fly home. What followed were many love letters (international phone calls were far too expensive then), every one of which I saw as fiercely romantic.

One day about six months into the relationship, a letter was waiting for me at home. My long-distance boyfriend often addressed letters with silly names or in-jokes. This time, he addressed the letter to “Mrs. [his last name].” My mother got very serious. She told me that this was possessive and too serious for our age, and that I had to write him a letter to break up with him immediately. I did, but I was still in love. Secretly, I kept writing the letters. I thought being “Mrs.” was romantic, and my mom was overreacting.

At age 21, after five years of separation by an ocean, I started an in-person relationship with him. It was deep and real love—or so I thought. By 24, I was being so emotionally abused and physically threatened, I barely knew my own name. This is how it happens. I was frozen and couldn’t seem to reconcile the dichotomy of my own life. I was deeply in love but was very confused by these behaviors because he would tell me how much he loved me while he was doing them. I was smart and educated. I knew about domestic violence, and I knew what he was doing was wrong, but no one had told me how to actually handle it—the frozenness, the confusion, and the gaslighting. Mostly, what I’d learned from a society that blames women for staying is that, if I stayed or still loved him, the abuse was my own fault.

Intimate partner violence is the number one cause of serious injury or death of women ages 18 to 24 in America, according to a 2018 statement released by the American College of Surgeons, and homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S. If it’s shocking to you to hear that, then it’s time to pay attention. This trend also applies to adolescent girls, who are being murdered by their intimate partners in increasingly dangerous numbers. A study from 2019 looked at homicide rates for teens and 7% were murdered by their partner, whether current or former.

Adolescence is a critical developmental time when young people are more vulnerable to societal pressures. A rise in misogyny (such as the recent explosion of “your body, my choice” as a slogan boys and men say), a marked increase in forced and violent sex for girls, and a culture that views rape prevention as a girls’ issue versus a boys’ issue is setting the stage for the already-large teen mental health epidemic to worsen.

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a type of intimate partner violence (IPV) that includes behaviors such as “physical violence, sexual violence and coercion, psychological aggression, and stalking” and is associated with an increased risk for further intimate partner violence, depression and anxiety, mental and physical illness, substance use, and suicidal ideation. In 2025, at least 1 in 3 girls in the U.S. have experienced teen dating violence according to the organization Love Is Respect, and it’s affecting them at dangerously high levels.

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