Love. What is love, exactly?

We hear that word all the time, from friends to family, even other people known to us but with no actual relation; blood or otherwise, might have said that word at one point in their lives. But what is it, exactly? What is it supposed to look like? How does it feel?

Before I moved to Forks, Washington, and not by my own choice, I thought love was what I had with my — now ex — boyfriend. We grew up together and known each other our whole lives. He said he loved me, and for a time I believed him. Thinking back, though, neither he nor I knew what real love was.

Do you control the people you say you love? Hurt them; physically, verbally, emotionally when things don't go your way? I thought what we had was love, but now I know different. There's a word for what we had and that word, certainly, wasn't love.

What we had was abusive. Plain and simple.

According to statistics, about one in three high school age students have been involved with or in a relationship with someone who is abusive. There are about forty percent of all teen girls between the ages of 14 to 17 who admit they know someone their age who has been hit, beaten or violently attacked by a boyfriend. What is even more startling is knowing that about seven percent of all murder victims were young women who had been killed by their boyfriends.

Take Amy Carnevale, for example. Amy was fourteen-years-old when she was murdered by her boyfriend in 1991, whom she had been dating on and off for a couple of years. A cheerleader with a promising future, her death could have been avoided if the people around her took the threats and signs seriously. If she had been given the tools and the help that she needed, Amy would still be alive today.

People love to ask why don't the victims just leave. They think it's so, so easy, but it isn't. It just isn't. It's easy to blame the victim, because people think they choose to stay with their abusers. More often than not, the victims that chose to stay didn't really choose at all. They were made to stay out of fear for their own lives or the lives of the ones they love. They lacked the tools and means to leave. And were not only trapped, but alone.

That's the point I'm trying to make here.

I do know had my parents not intervened and made the hard — but necessary — decision to send me to Forks, I never would have gotten distance from my own abuser. I would be like Amy, another victim and statistic of teen dating violence. Right at that moment, they showed me an example of true love.