My first relationship, was ending, I knew intuitively without any words spoken. I fell in love, real love, for the first time just before I turned twenty-one. I was a student nurse at a major Brisbane hospital, and was supposed to be finishing my three year registered nurse course in four months time.

My partner was an athlete, who had a very bad experience at the Olympic Games two years before I met him. I was swimming a kilometre a day when we met, and thought I'd met someone who was as health conscious as I was. In the beginning I was happy, I fell in love fairly quickly, though not as quickly as he did.

He was living with his girlfriend of six years at the time we met however I didn't know this straight away. He took me out a couple of times, and also out for dinner for my Birthday. When he did tell me about his partner, even though we'd not been intimate, I felt totally betrayed, I slapped him, got in my car and drove home. He followed me, and told me how he wanted to break up with her, that they'd not been intimate for eleven months, and started crying.

You have to remember I'd only just turned twenty-one, if I was older I would have said, you go and break up with your partner, then give me a call, if I'm free, we can start again, but I was a very immature twenty one, and I thought I could help him through his break up.

Now that all would have been fine if 1. His partner had of gone quietly.                                                       2. His friends weren't determined to convince him to stay with his partner and started playing mind games with me.                               3. His Mother wasn't the manager of a shop in the city and had hired his partner, and was determined to do whatever she could to stress me out so much that I would leave quietly.                                 4. My partner was assertive enough to stand up to any one of them.