By Emily Dupuis - The Sun Staff

WESTERLY - Westerly High School students most want romantic partners who love, trust and respect them. They also wouldn't mind that person to be good looking, honest, funny and caring.

But why would someone want an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend, asked one student looking at the list of options?

Susan Morgan, education outreach advocate for the Domestic Violence Resource Center of South County, said, "Nobody wants to be abused in a relationship, but the reality is people are abused in relationships."

Nobody sets out to make his or her boyfriend or girlfriend feel bad. It comes down to making choices.

"I suggest love is not a feeling," Morgan said. "We can have really, really strong feeling for someone and treat the very badly. Love is a behavior."

Morgan is speaking with high school health classes this week about making good choices, healthy relationships, dating violence, why people abuse and how to help a friend in an abusive relationship -- pertinent topics for teens, she said.

One-third of teenagers have reported experiencing some kind of physical violence from a romantic partner and 45 percent of females reported experiencing dating aggression in their lives, according to figures provided by the resource center.

"Young adults often confuse controlling behavior with romantic behavior," Morgan said.

"For instance, students may think that a boy is showing how much he loves a girl when he calls her all the time and wants to know where she is and what she's doing," she said. "But any kind of behavior that is used to control or manipulate someone to gain power over another, or which makes the person feel bad, is abusive."

To define healthy behavior, students played Dating Bingo, selecting qualities important in a partner. They also listed ways people have treated them that left them feeling good: making them laugh, listening, complimenting, respecting, loving, supporting and challenging.

Morgan said she met her first boyfriend at age 15, immediately drawn to him, and they stayed together for five years. She said he was romantic, funny and loving and even cooked on occasion. But their relationship lacked respect, trust and honesty.

"All of these things are icing on the cake with the exception of love," she said. A relationship cannot be healthy without the latter three qualities.

Veiled threats, manipulations and excessive jealousy throw up a "red flag" of physical actions that typically come three years into a relationship.

After attending their first party together, Morgan said her boyfriend grew jealous she chatted with his best friend - "a red flag" - and that jealousy expanded to include her relationships with any members of the opposite sex.

"I didn't see it as a red flag then. I saw it as he really, really likes me," she said. When she finally left this abusive relationship for the last time, she said that boyfriend left a message in blood on her car windshield: "I'm going to kill myself."

"Jealousy is a normal human emotion. It's what we do with that jealousy that can make it harmful," she said.

The room silenced when Morgan unveiled a "Silent Witness," a life-size red wood cutout of a Rhode Island woman - Jenny Lee Bailey. In 1995, Bailey's boyfriend paid a friend to help kill her after learning she was pregnant. They beat her over the head and cut her throat. She was just 17.

"At its very, very worst, dating violence can lead to death," Morgan said.

And, she reminded the students, it is not limited to acts against women.

"If a man is hit, kicked, stabbed, punched, choked -- the same as a woman -- it's abuse, it's abuse, it's abuse," Morgan said, adding 30 percent of the resource center's clients are men.

The Wakefield center hosts presentations at South County elementary, middle and high schools on topics including bullying and teasing, sexual harassment and dating violence. It also provides court advocates, a drop-in center, support groups, one-on-one counseling, child advocacy and therapy and a safe house for abused women and their children.

For more information, visit http://www.wrcsc.org. The center has a 24-hour helpline at (401) 782-3990 or (866) 782-3990.

edupuis@thewesterlysun.com