The first time my father tried to kill my mother, I was two.

She had opened the blinds without his permission. He strangled her. He told her I’d grow up motherless.

Then we had dinner.

My name is Shnayjaah, and I grew up in a house where nothing happened. That’s what we told ourselves. The spaghetti still got boiled. The mail still got checked. The phone rang, and my mother still answered it with her customer service voice.

I go to an Ivy League university now, where I study human rights, having left an abusive household thanks to a QuestBridge scholarship. I have spent my life trying to understand how a home can be both a prison and a place where you heat up leftovers. For the last two years, working with love is respect has been life-changing. Education surpasses classrooms. It’s about learning the things our parents never got the chance to.

As a kid, I used to think adults had a secret book. A huge manual that taught them everything — how to parallel park, how to file taxes, how not to burn rice.

I thought my mother must have skipped the chapter on ‘What To Do When He Says He Loves You But He Also Strangles You.’

But there is no book. Nobody hands you a pamphlet that says, “This is the exact moment where you leave.” Instead, you are 23, and he tells you that he is saving you, and you believe him.

There’s a phrase I started hearing a lot once I got to university:

It’s not like he hits me.

I heard it everywhere — whispered in dorm rooms, sighed over dining hall trays, typed out in frantic texts at 2 AM. I heard it from my best friends, classmates, and students while training as a peer advocate for my university’s Sexual Violence Response Team.

And I’ll be honest — for a while, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

So when my friends told me their boyfriends “get jealous” sometimes, or that they had to share their location at all times “or else he’d worry,”  I thought, That’s not abuse. It’s annoying, sure. Maybe a little controlling. But it’s not like he hits you.

I heard it so often, I started hearing it in my mother’s voice.

She once told me that she noticed the little things. How “I love you” always came with an “if”. How “I just worry about you” started to sound less like care and more like surveillance. How his affection was something she had to qualify for, like airline miles, or good credit.

She told me she thought, “Well, at least he doesn’t hit me.”

Until he did.

Through my time on the love is respect National Youth Council — from monthly meetings, leading Instagram Lives for 17,000 teens, and flying to Austin to witness The Hotline in action, I realized — maybe I’ve been defining abuse by the wrong metric. Maybe the question isn’t “Does he hit you?” Maybe the question is “Are you afraid?”

Because when I started asking my friends that — when I started asking the students I worked with, there was always a pause. A small, awful pause, like they hadn’t even let themselves consider the answer before.

love is respect taught me abuse doesn’t start with a fist. It starts with a question: Is this normal?

When you’re waiting for a ‘real’ red flag to appear, you don’t notice that the whole house is already burning down.

Abuse at an Ivy League school is funny.

So funny that, if it weren’t ruining your life, you’d almost be impressed.

Here, it’s not just “You can’t wear that.” It’s “I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea about you.”

It’s not just “You’re not allowed to have friends of the opposite sex.” It’s “I mean, do whatever you want — I just think it’s weird.”

It’s not just “You belong to me.” It’s “You should be careful who you cross.”

Let’s be clear — people are physically abused here, too.

They get shoved against dorm room walls, pulled into stairwells, grabbed by the wrist so hard it leaves bruises. It happens at frat parties, in brownstone basements, and in apartments with doormen who pretend not to notice.

But here, violence can also be sophisticated. It’s quiet. It’s something you could, theoretically, deny in an email.

That’s what power looks like at a top school.

A boyfriend who knows your professor. An ex who holds your Capitol Hill internship in their hands. A partner who doesn’t need to yell because they can make people stop talking to you with a single text message.

Teen dating violence doesn’t end when at 18. It just gets better PR. Your classmates will call it ‘a messy breakup.’ ‘Drama.’

And then — you disappear. No more lectures. No more campus job. Maybe you drop out.

Maybe worse.

And everyone just…moves on.

Here, the thing you lose first is your credibility. Then your community. Then your career. And if an Ivy League degree is your main ticket to financial stability, sometimes doing nothing feels like survival.

love is respect is the reason I stopped saying, “It’s not like he hits me.”

It’s why I stopped thinking control only counts if it leaves a black eye. Why students like me — students who should know better — actually started seeing abuse for what it is: not just something that happens in extreme cases, but something that happens quietly, strategically, in broad daylight.

Abuse doesn’t have to be loud to be real. It doesn’t have to be violent to work.

Nearly 1 in 3 college women (29%) say they’ve been in an abusive dating relationship. More than half — 52% — know a friend who has. Most won’t report it. Not because it isn’t happening. But because, as I’ve told you today, they don’t even realize it’s abuse.

So, no. Unfortunately, there’s no secret manual for young adulthood. Parallel parking seems a little impossible. And no one warned me that one day, I’d look at the price of eggs and feel personally offended.

But love is respect taught me what no one else did. love is respect allowed me to help students recognize abuse before it wrote itself into routine. Before it became just another part of the day. This organization ensures that when students say, “I’m afraid,” there’s somewhere to go. That when survivors step forward, they’re believed. love is respect finally calls this what it is: not drama. Not a messy breakup. Not something we can ignore. But abuse.

And abuse — no matter how quiet — deserves a response.

Thank you.

— Shnayjaah

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