Amy Schumer Sums Up the Horrifying Truth About Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships

Many could have guessed that Amy Schumer's new memoir The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo would be funny, which by all accounts it certainly is. But it turns out that Schumer also tackles some deep stuff in the book's 336 pages.

For example, she tells the story of an abusive ex-boyfriend who shoved her, slammed her head into a car and even pulled a butcher knife on her one time. "And that's when I was sure he was going to kill me," she wrote. 

As with many domestic abuse stories, even as it "proceeded to get worse and worse," she tried to make it work.

"I thought no one would ever love me as much as he did," she wrote. "I believed he was just as passionate about me as I was about him, and that if I did a better job of not making him mad, we'd be fine. I really felt he loved me. And I really loved him."

"I think somewhere in the course of our relationship, I started to confuse his anger and aggression for passion and love," Schumer wrote.

"I actually started to think that real love was supposed to look like that. The more you yelled at each other, the more you loved each other. The more physical and demeaning it got, the more you were really getting through to each other. And the more I was willing to stand by him, the more he'd understand I truly loved him and that we should be together forever."

These kinds of abusive relationships are sadly all too common. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that more than 4.7 million women experience physical violence from their intimate partners each year.

Luckily for Schumer, she was able to escape the unhealthy situation and eventually found her furniture-making prince charming years later in Ben Hanisch — whom she also writes about in the book.