I was 17 when my 25-year-old university lecturer started pursuing me. Seven years into our marriage, I finally saw the glaring red flags

When Faye Evans, now 59, met her future husband on her first day at university, their meet-cute played out like a scene from a movie.

She was standing in line in the registration area, carrying a pile of paper, when suddenly they slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

‘A man stepped forward and knelt to help me gather them up,’ she tells Daily Mail. ‘He asked where I was heading, and I told him I was registering for my first semester of psychology. To my surprise, he offered to guide me through the process. He said he worked at the university and knew exactly where to go.’

As she walked away, he caught up with her, smiled and said, ‘Welcome. I hope you enjoy your career. I’ll see you around.’

In Lima, the capital of Peru, where Faye – who moved to Australia in 2000 – was born, it is typical for students to start university at 17 years old. In fact, Faye had only turned 17 a few weeks earlier.

Her future husband was eight years older, at 25. He was also a junior lecturer on her psychology course – a detail she didn’t realise until she walked into one of her first lectures and he was standing there.

‘Relationships between staff and students weren’t allowed, and he was much older than I was,’ she says – but this didn’t stop him pursuing her.

‘At the end of class, he would call me over and he’d say, “Hey, would you like to have a challenge?”‘ she recalls. ‘The next session, he would an extra reading for me. He asked me if I could help around in the classroom; if I could take more of a leadership position with my peers.’

When she mentioned she was looking for a certain book on philosophy that was always on loan in the library, he told her he’d lend her a copy.

‘From the university, there was a bit of a walk to my bus stop,’ she says. ‘He knew the way I was going, and he appeared at the bus stop holding the book. He said he had to chase me there to give it to me.’

He even rode the bus back with her to her grandmother’s home, where she was living.

Now a mother of four and a qualified psychologist, Faye says the red flags were glaringly obvious in hindsight. At the time, she thought ‘this is a bit weird, but maybe he’s just being nice.’

She’d never had a boyfriend before and, as an only child from a broken home, she found his interest in her ‘flattering’.

Over the next year, their relationship went from student-teacher to a ‘sort of friendship’ – and then more. On her 18th birthday, a year later, he arrived at her party and asked if she’d be his girlfriend.

‘I didn’t realise, when we met, he was in a relationship and on the verge of marrying another former student,’ she says. She only discovered this after he proposed to her a few months later, and she accepted.

‘Looking back now, I see how much I didn’t understand,’ she says.

‘During our engagement, there were many signs I was blind to – whether from naivety or simply a desire for stability. He was jealous and possessive. A simple glance from a stranger could escalate into an argument. He started to tell me how to dress. He took over planning my classes and how I structured my day. He approved of only a couple of my girlfriends.’

There was one comment that always stuck with her: ‘He said he was helping me tone down my fire, and that I would thank him one day.’

Despite this dynamic, in Faye’s final year of university, they got married – and this is when, she says, their relationship really unravelled.

She entered a ‘quiet war’ with her new mother-in-law.

‘The idea of him leaving the family home to build a life with someone else was her worst nightmare,’ she recalls. ‘When he told her he planned to marry, she wept and declared she might as well die. She also banned him from taking any of his things from her house – he could only take one suit.’

Her husband’s relationship with his mum had practical implications.

‘During our first year of marriage, he would wake before 5am each morning to go to her house for breakfast so she wouldn’t feel his absence,’ she says.

‘After work, he would stop by again for dinner before coming home. Most nights, he didn’t return until 9 or 10 pm, tired and irritable and emotionally unavailable.’

After the birth of their son, now 36, Faye says he began to comment on her weight.

‘His comments cut deep, and I began starving myself, desperate to stay thin and acceptable,’ she says.

Her dreams of becoming a psychologist took a back seat, but she poured her desire to help people into building a kindergarten centre with a friend, whilst her husband became increasingly secretive and distant.

‘The worst thing is having this secret hope,’ she recalls. ‘Anyone in this kind of relationship knows it: you think, at some point, you’re going to be chosen by them.’

It would take seven years of marriage and the birth of a second child, this time a daughter, for something to shift within her. Rumours of an affair resurfaced.

‘When my second child was born in 1995, something inside me changed,’ she says. ‘Perhaps because this time, my baby was a girl, and I knew I had to stop the story somewhere. I didn’t want my daughter to grow up watching a mother who had dimmed her light to survive.’

As part of a long and painful process of rebuilding her life, Faye and her two children emigrated to Australia. Faye’s father had lived in Australia since her parents separated when she was a child.

‘I told everyone I was just going to visit my father for a few months,’ she says. ‘But, as soon as we left, I felt this sense of freedom. When we landed in Buenos Aires for our stopover, I felt like I could breathe.’

Fast forward two decades, and Faye has remarried – an Australian man, nine years her junior – and they have two daughters together. She says the age gap doesn’t impact them ‘this way around’, now that she’s the older one.

‘He comes from parents who are supportive and taught him how to treat women well,’ she says. ‘When we met, I told him I had a lot of baggage, but he said he didn’t care – he just wanted to get to know me.’

Her two oldest children still have contact with their father, but she has not been back to Peru since 2000 and has no plans to return.

Now based in Melbourne, Faye uses her experience to help the women who come to her for psychological care.

‘A lot of women come to me at a point in the life where they feel invisible. They have been carrying a lot, they feel dissatisfied with their life, and they blame themselves.’

For Faye and her clients, compassion is key.

‘You have to be loving and forgive your younger self – even if you don’t agree with the choice you made.’

With four children, between the ages of 20 and 36, watching them navigate their younger years has been eye-opening.

‘I thought I’d have to protect my daughters,’ she says. ‘But they’ve been brought up in a culture where they’re assertive. They can speak up and watch out for themselves. The older [daughter] is getting married in February. The younger two have had a relationship, and when they didn’t work out, they just said goodbye.’

Soul Simplicity: A Neuro-Spiritual Path to Living with Intention by Faye Evans is available now, published by Hardie Grant Custom