When logic is no match for love
There were red flags.
That’s an understatement. There were so many red flags our house must have resembled the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
It’s not that I never recognized the negatives as negative — the lying, the drinking, the humiliation, the threats, the cutting remarks, the checking my phone, the insane accusations, the gaslighting, the yelling the yelling the yelling the yelling.
I know that these things are inherently bad. My parents were nice to me; I’m not one of those women who’s gravitated toward bad man and after bad man, trapped inside some Greek tragedy of repeating…
Internet Time Machine
What if I told you I just fled an abusive marriage — and I’m afraid
This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
I am afraid of you. I’m afraid you’ll rape me, or hurt me, or play with my mind. I’m sorry to be so blunt, and I’m even sorrier because you’ve done nothing to elicit such fear, but there’s just no clearer way to say it: I’m afraid of you.
I used to trust my ability to judge whether a man was safe. But I have been wrong, and now I know I am capable of making a grave miscalculation. I don’t know how…
A cautionary tale for cheaters
- I had an affair with your husband, to whom I am now married, and I am so, so sorry. If there is one decision in my life I could undo, it would be this. Because of what it did to you, because of what it’s done to me, and because it was just plain wrong.
- I won’t take full responsibility for the breakdown of your marriage. The myth of the homewrecker is just that — a myth. No one can wreck someone’s home against his will. You two wrecked your home on your own, before I ever came on the…
Despite everything, I still loved my abuser
All stories about abuse are hard. For me, this one is the hardest. It’s the hardest because it’s the truest, and because it complicates our impulse to separate the good guys from the bad guys. My husband was one of each.
When his dark side was in control, he was abusive; there is no disputing this. He would scream at me, threaten me, call me names; he monitored my phone and laptop; he isolated me; he lied, he stole, and he drank until his face twisted into a sneer and his normally soft-spoken voice curdled into a vicious snarl.
That’s…
After my divorce, I was no longer protected from the advances of married men
It’s happened three times now, with three different married men, in the three months since I’ve been divorced. It seems like too much of a coincidence to be coincidental.
It looks like this: A man I’ve worked with for years suddenly begins communicating with me exponentially more frequently than he did before I got divorced. A corporate VP so far north of me on the org chart that we’ve never met reaches out to schedule coffee and to “discuss my work and how it could contribute to future projects,” except when I get there we don’t really talk about any…
The false dichotomy of good guys and bad guys
He liked it rough, he said, and he liked to be the aggressor.
This surprised me, because he seemed so gentle, so soft-spoken. And it scared me, because I was less than six months out of an abusive marriage and still afraid of men in general. He may as well have told me he liked to screw goats or had a rap sheet featuring pedophilia. Rough sex was a nonstarter with me.
It was okay, though, because it took the pressure off. …
Life is hard right now, but I’m trying to amplify the positive moments whenever they pop up
I found the cabinet at a garage sale. It was hideous: rough wood painted a fading puke green color. There were partially rotten patches in the wood, but I decided they didn’t affect its structural integrity. I needed it to store clothing because my apartment is so tiny; there’s not even a closet.
I lugged the cabinet up to my fourth-floor unit with the help of one of my neighbors, a good-looking financial planner who shamelessly hits on me even as he parades a new Tinder date through the apartment building lobby nearly every single night. I knew he would…
On seeing my abuser when I least expected it
I wasn’t sure I would ever see you again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. By the time I left, I was so afraid of you that I didn’t even think about anything but getting away from you. It never occurred to me to prepare for what happened this morning.
When abusive relationships end—or when someone flees one, as I did—the focus is on the escape. The shape of these endings is not the same as the endings of other, of “normal,” relationships. It’s not a transition, one door closing so another can open or the turning of a page…
Each day after leaving brings emotions that are anything but simple
Day One
We leave in the night. It isn’t how I planned it, but none of this is how I planned it. Nobody plans to end up in an abusive marriage; we just ignore the signs that foreshadow its inevitability.
The girls are curled up like squirrels on the sleeping nests I’ve made them on the floor of our new apartment. I couldn’t have any furniture moved ahead of time because I couldn’t risk telling him we were leaving until after we did. Even the dog seems unfazed. …
When we talk about what women and children need in order to escape abusive husbands and fathers, the word we use is “resources.”
And resources — whether they take the form of food, clothing, shelter, counseling, or support groups — are undeniably important.
But what we really mean when we talk about resources — the one resource that actually counts, because it can get all the other resources — is money.
I think we need to be honest about this.
I also think we need to be honest about the fact that it’s unrealistic to hope that non-profit organizations —…
