It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was on the go-kart track and bumped into a guy at the finish line. We looked at each other and I had the feeling he wasn't just looking into my eyes, but straight into my soul. We laughed our heads off because we could barely get the karts away from each other. It couldn't have been more cheesy in a Hollywood movie. To make a long story short: We swapped phone numbers, met up - it was great. He listened to me and told me harrowing stories about his sad childhood. His mother was hardly ever there for him, his father had beaten him when he came over at all. His stepfather was a chauvinist. He never wanted to be like that, Holger said. The man was an absolutely horrifying example. I oscillated somewhere between deep sympathy and enthusiasm about his confidence. He had taken me by storm. He moved in with me within a very short space of time. He ironed, cleaned windows, brought me presents. After two months, he asked me to marry him. He said I was the woman of his life.

In the months that followed, I ignored a lot of things, I know that today. If I had been in my right mind, I should have been suspicious that I wasn't even allowed to look at other men. Then he feared for our great love, as he imploringly explained to me. He himself was flirting like hell with the waitress in the restaurant. When I approached him about it, he said it was total nonsense, that I was seeing it completely wrong. I should also have been suspicious that he was ripping me off like a Christmas goose. I was allowed to pay for everything, even though we both earned the same amount, he as an insurance salesman, me as a media consultant. He just didn't have any money with him in the restaurant and he was never embarrassed. And I should have noticed that he was driving my friends away, one by one. Sometimes they didn't like Holger and stayed away. Some of them were so bad-mouthed that I actually became insecure. Was he perhaps right? Were they no good for me? After a year, we got married. He swore eternal love for me. It was totally romantic. But on our wedding night, he made a huge scene. He thought I had been talking to his best friend for far too long. How embarrassing I would be to do that at my own wedding. Was that true? Was that stupid of me?

And it went on. When I was doing further training in psychology and came home in the evening, he greeted me by saying: 'Leave me alone with your psycho bullshit'. And stared at the TV, his only hobby. In the presence of the few people we still knew, he ran his mouth over mine: 'Oh, are you being clever again?' He also kept twisting my words around in my mouth. I doubted myself more and more, while he just seemed to enjoy seeing my insecurity. I read no compassion in his eyes, nothing. Instead of rebelling, I stayed and spoke less and less. Me, who was usually not a mouthful. I hardly recognized myself anymore. But I just couldn't let him go. After all, I was the love of his life and had promised him I would stay. That was my train of thought at the time. It actually took a strong trigger for me to finally leave. I found out that Holger was cheating on me. I confronted him angrily. He just said: 'You're crazy again. That moved something inside me. At that moment, I realized that he didn't feel the slightest bit guilty. Nothing embarrassed him. And he couldn't understand my feelings at all. He had never loved me, because he is incapable of that. I left and he looked on impassively. Just a year later, he was married again. He just knows how to do it ..."