It's been one week after Rihanna’s interview with Diane Sawyer and I am still processing everything she said. Not only do I feel that she is very courageous for speaking out because the vast majority of women who do experience such violence are not empowered to fight back, she also brought up so many things that are often overlooked when analyzing domestic violence. One of the major themes she spoke about was her conflicted feelings for Chris. She spoke of how she and Chris became obsessed with each other and obsessed with being in love- remember they were only 18 years old or so when they first met, and that obsessive blind love became dangerous for them. I remember how exciting and almost scary it can be to love someone so completely for the first time at such a young age. I would think about him all the time, spend hours after school together and most of the weekends together. We would pour our souls out to each other through our conversations and love letters. Being in love for the first time is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. Unfortunately for Rihanna the intoxication of love overshadowed her reasoning. When she grew up, she saw her father hitting and pushing her mother often, and though she always thought to herself she would never fall for a man like her father, she was unable to see the similarities when Chris would shove her around. She loved him, he loved her, and sometimes love gets a little violent, but she had seen it before and learned how to emotionally cope with abuse. So for her, when he hit her, and beat her, and bit her, she wasn’t thinking “I better fight back,” she just wanted it to end. Rihanna was so deeply in love with him that she wasn’t even thinking about self preservation, making sure that she was alright, she was thinking about him, about his career, about how his life was affected by his own brutal actions against her. As an outsider, I think to myself how could she care for him anymore, when his beating demonstrates that he doesn’t care, but Rihanna explains that emotions are not clear. She spoke about it being very annoying, though from the look in her eyes it appeared to be more painful, that she still held feelings for Chris. That’s why she went back, because she still had unresolved feelings for him. He was her best friend, her first love--all of the things that make it very difficult to leave. Also, as her wounds went away she tried to push the incident out of her mind because she didn’t want to think of it- who would? She reunited with Chris (I’m pretty sure I threw something at the TV when I heard that, which of course is not the way to deal with frustration) but she says after spending time with him, she could not stand his presence or trust him anymore. She was embarrassed by the fact that she fell in love with that type of person, so far into love that she went back to an abusive relationship. Ultimately, she realized how her actions were affecting herself and women who looked up to her everywhere and that was the deciding factor to make her leave. She finds the fact that she took him back humiliating, but as we know it takes on average 8-9 times for a woman to leave an abusive relationship. There are many reasons abused people stay in relationships- they don’t have the money to leave, they don’t want to break up a family, they think they deserve it and so forth. The biggest reason may be the emotional strings that we wind ourselves into when we become involved, and find difficult to unwind, even if we logically know that is what is best. If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic violence, there are places to help through this ordeal National Domestic Violence Hotline , or just google search domestic violence. When I was speaking to my first love, now former boyfriend, years after we dated he said “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Rihanna’s story reminds me of that quote, and the reality that while emotions may often overwhelm our judgment, love should never hurt your body, heart or soul. Though it may be painful to leave, ultimately it would be more painful to stay.