(Originally published on Tumblr on August 26, 2021, link here: https://at.tumblr.com/xzx-xzx/660576151664738304/9dwbjgdip8pr — I am reposting here because Tumblr now has a login wall preventing anyone without an account from reading posts in their entirety.)
I met him during a vacation in another country. I was overseas to attend a friend’s 40th birthday party and stayed a full month, as I had a break in work. He and I had exchanged a few Twitter DMs, but I wasn’t entirely sure if they were flirty — I didn’t know until I asked the male friend I was staying with, after showing him the message suggesting plans, “Is this guy asking me on a date?” He replied, “Absolutely!”
We fell in love (or so I thought at the time) at warp speed; he was instantly warm and charming, vulnerable and tender, offering commitment and compromise, expressing he’d be willing to do anything for me to move across an ocean and share a life with him. He wrote me pages and pages of eloquent love letters, said he’d never felt this way before, declaring his devotion in flowery language and precise penmanship. He sent me bouquets and cards and gifts. It was as much of a cliche as you’re assuming, cinematic and overwhelming, and imbued with even more magic due to the fact that, post-40, most of us have been conditioned by society to give up on love entirely.
We were initially happy, as the first eight months of our relationship were long-distance; I now believe that was because he was able to hide who he truly is during our brief visits back and forth from our home countries.
After so many of his declarations of love, his being in constant contact (which I thought at the time was a sign of his dedication, even if I did feel overwhelmed), I decided I wanted to be with him, to be a team that shared everything, to make a new start with this person, so I gave up my career and many of my belongings and the familiarity of my family and friends and moved abroad. But very soon after moving in with him, it was obvious that what he described as his “mental illness” was far worse than he initially claimed. When we met, he did tell me he suffered from clinical depression (and took an antidepressant pill daily for maintenance), but I have many friends with similar diagnoses and never witnessed such violent and alarming behaviour.
If he was upset by something, he would drop to the floor, rock back and forth, scream incoherently or shout insults at me, flail his arms, and would hit himself in the head or bang his head on the nearest object (one time he picked up large rocks from the car park we were in and smashed them against his head) — he would call these tantrums “panic attacks.” They were frequent and intense and he would shout at me for either “causing” them or not doing enough to soothe them. His behaviour was so erratic and extreme and I would always be blamed. I was given an ever-changing list of things that “triggered” him, and it would include such simple things as schedule changes or household tasks. I was told that because of his “condition” that his brain could not handle change of any kind, no matter how slight; so if I said dinner would be at 7pm, but had to change it later to 7:30pm, he would have a meltdown and the entire night would be ruined because he “needed a fixed schedule.” He would scream at me and often self-harm, again saying it was my fault, as the change I made in the schedule initiated this. If we had plans to meet say, two people for lunch, and one of those people brought an extra person, he would also fly off the handle, saying things like, “That wasn’t what was planned,” and we’d either have to leave or if I was able to persuade him to stay, he’d sulk and be overtly rude and curt to everyone to sabotage it.
If he was already occupied with something else (most of the time this would just consist of reading what was on his phone/laptop) and I asked a simple question such as, “Could you empty the bins later?” he would go into a rage, shouting that I should “know better” that his brain cannot handle more than one task at a time, and later would claim that me even asking him to do a simple chore while he is concentrating on something else is tantamount to “psychological abuse.” I started a journal in order to help me keep track of strategies I was given, by him, to help him with his “condition.” (I also started the journal for my own sanity because his “strategies” would change so often. He’d dictate a specific set of rituals to perform in order to help him when he had a “breakdown,” and I was told to not only know to spring into action as soon as his breakdown started, but it wasn’t long until I was also reprimanded for not being able to anticipate a breakdown and start these rituals sooner in order to prevent it. And on top of all that, every couple of weeks he’d shout at me that my attempts to soothe him were incorrect and that I was not helping in the precise way he’d told me to, that I wasn’t performing the tasks in the exact order he’d specified, so I decided I needed to keep a journal for reference. I still have it.) I was told to never talk about chores or even everyday tasks such as asking if a bill had been paid because the “stress” of me simply bringing it up would cause him to erupt and scream and potentially self-harm. Bills that were in his name would go past due because I’d be too scared to ask him to pay them. He would also go weeks without washing and when I’d gently try to find the kindest words I could to ask him to shower, I was told (directly from my journal, these are his words) “[him] not hearing about it will alleviate the stress [he] associates with these tasks and therefore [he] will gain the strength of mind to do it on his own volition.” It’s hard not to read that now as anything but “never speak to me in any way other than these very specific terms I have dictated to you.” He was able to keep a job, able to care for his children from previous relationships, able to do other things that involved managing his time and dividing his attention — but somehow that wasn’t the case whenever we were alone. I never once saw him have a “breakdown” in front of his children and never heard about him having one at work, which is when I began to realise that he seemed to be able to control what he had claimed to me was out of his control.
I’m sure most would ask, “Well, why didn’t you just leave?” I actually did try to bring it up a few times, and even framed it in a way that put the blame on me: “I don’t seem to make you very happy… perhaps we’d be better off apart?” Any time I tried to calmly offer splitting up as an option, he’d cry and wail and tell me I was “the love of his life” and his “soulmate” and that if I’d only work a little harder to “understand” him, our lives would be bliss. After the third or fourth time of my peacefully suggesting we break up, his response had ramped up so dramatically to such an unbearable rage that I started to think that staying with him would just be easier than facing the unknowable wrath that would undoubtedly follow me after I walked out the door. In addition to that, please keep in mind that the process of moving from one country to another is very expensive and time-consuming, involving paperwork and visas, and I’d spent months (and most of my savings — he did not contribute a penny) going through that. I was now living in a city in which I knew no one, in a country where I couldn’t drive; my family was an ocean away and my resources were dwindling. (And a year after my arrival in this new country, Covid hit and worldwide lockdowns kept me and everyone else from travelling.) Plus, there is some shame, some self-blame: How could I have been such a bad judge of character? How could I have missed some of those early red flags? Was I so starved for love that I overlooked the warning signs?
My life started to feel like a test I would never pass because each day brought new rules, new “triggers” I was supposed to memorise, new things to add to the list of what I am not supposed to say or do. Things that would be considered simple small talk with anyone else would cause him to collapse and writhe on the floor and scream and self-harm and often threaten suicide. I was very often accused of “not putting his mental health first” because I could not keep track of what was “okay” and “not okay” to say and do. If I ever spoke with any emotion or passion in my voice, he’d scold me for not being “gentle” and would accuse me of sounding “threatening.” He would also have wild mood swings, lavishing me with love and gifts one day and relentlessly berating me the next. Arguments would last for hours, with winding and shifting logic I found impossible to follow; they almost became a sort of word salad, and I learned to just “confess” or “admit” to whatever it was he’d said I’d done wrong (most of which I didn’t even fully understand), as that was the only way to end it and get some peace. A lot of the time I would just stare at the floor and wait for it to end, and he started to tell me my silence and lack of eye contact in the face of his shouting was “abuse.” I’d even sometimes go over my own actions and question them, trying to figure out when exactly I’d said or done something that was considered “bad,” almost believing the version of events that was being fed to me even though I knew they didn’t actually happen. I consider myself a reasonable, level-headed person with a healthy degree of mental fortitude, but if someone says something to you as plain as day, then you repeat it right back to them, and then they immediately respond with, “I never said that,” and this happens hundreds of times, you start to lose it a little bit. It felt as if my own brain was unravelling and I was beginning to question my own relationship with reality.
He was extremely jealous and possessive, and any time a male name would come up on my phone either via a text or call, he would interrogate me about why and how I knew them. I would have to show him text conversations I had between male friends so he could judge whether or not the conversation was sufficiently platonic. He had a rule that I was to check in with him via text every hour, no matter what I was doing — meeting with a friend, seeing a movie, working, out for a walk — it didn’t matter, I had to check in every hour or he would blow up at me. I forgot to do this once when I was having lunch with a (female) friend and left my phone in my purse, and upon looking at my phone after the meal, there were at least a dozen accusatory texts from him and just as many missed phone calls. Once I got home from that lunch, after yet another of his complete meltdowns during which I had to defend myself for not adhering to his strict guidelines, I was able to negotiate with him and get his “rule” extended to an every 90-minute check-in, which I still found suffocating. (His phrasing was almost always that he had “let” me go out or “allowed” me to see friends, with the implication — and sometimes stated outright — that I should have been grateful.) I ended up turning off my phone sounds and disabling text notifications because I didn’t want to deal with his inevitable blow-ups when someone contacted me; the rare times I did answer the phone, I’d sneak upstairs and talk to my friends while crouched inside the bedroom closet. For the better part of two years, I was late communicating with people and even lost touch with a few friends because it just wasn’t worth having to withstand yet more fights. But again, he presented these rules to me as what he “needed to maintain his mental health,” telling me that his strict check-in requirement was because his brain “needed to know I was safe.” I realized later on, after so many times of him accusing me of cheating, that it was a form of control, nothing more and nothing less, to know exactly where I was and who I was with at every hour of every day.
My loyalty was always tested and my commitment to the relationship was always questioned. If I complained about the weather, he’d go on and on about how I was going to leave. If I went back to where I’m from to visit friends or family, no matter how brief the trip, he’d insist I wasn’t coming back, and the phone calls and text check-ins ramped up to such a degree that I might as well have not even left at all, as I had almost no time and was given almost no space to visit with the people I’d travelled to see. It wasn’t enough that I’d uprooted my entire life to be with him in his country, I was still asked to make sacrifices and to prove my devotion daily in ways that eroded my independence. I had to assure him and reassure him and re-reassure him constantly that I wasn’t leaving him, even if I was just walking out the door to go to the corner shop.
He hardly ever wanted to participate in any social events; I’ve since learned that colleagues would ask him if we’d like to join them for dinners or out at bars, and he would decline without ever telling me. I now think this is because he wanted to keep me isolated and prevent me from making friends in my new city. Whenever we would visit or be visited by my friends, nearly every time he would manufacture a tantrum, claiming that my friends were being “weird” to him (once when we were visiting my oldest and closest friend, a woman I have known since high school, he tried to convince me she was “plotting to murder” him, which I didn’t even have words for) and we would either have to leave early or he would go into another room and I would have to tend to him the rest of the night, abandoning my friends and any plans we had made. It took me over a year to realise this was a form of control, as it’s hard to question someone’s actions when they’re crying and shouting and physically crumbling in front of you, but it eventually became clear that these instances never happened when he was at work or around his children or even around his (very few) friends: only mine, and only when we were doing things I had planned.
The first year after moving overseas, pre-Covid, I had a lucky streak of several friends vacationing in nearby cities, and I would go meet them for lunches or dinners — any time it was a male friend, he would watch me get dressed and questioned what I wore. He would say things like, “Why do you look so nice to meet up with this friend?” or “Why are you wearing a skirt to meet with a man?” He would Google them and pore through photos of them and grill me on whether or not I thought they were “handsome.” I went to visit one of my closest friends who is like a brother to me, and after returning home, he extremely drunkenly watched me undress and demanded to “check my underwear” to see if anything untoward had happened. It was humiliating.
His insistence that he suffered from a mental illness dominated our entire relationship; it seemed to be his whole identity and everything, every action, every word, everything was arranged to cater to it. I wasn’t allowed any space, any emotions, any wants or needs, anything that interfered with his daily requirements and parameters he set up in the interest of his “illness.” If I expressed any needs of my own, I was “selfish.” If I wanted to make any plans for us, I was “controlling.” If I didn’t alter my behaviour and walk on eggshells around him, I “didn’t care enough about him to help him.” I wanted to disappear. It often felt like I couldn’t remember the last time I felt joy. I tried to erase my own personality, my gregariousness, as my zest for life became a liability in my own home. I stayed quiet. I tried to make myself smaller. I slept more to make time pass, to make long days end earlier, to perhaps wake up to a day where he’d gone back to being the man I’d originally met, the man who was still trying to woo me with charm and kindness, who was gentle with me before he knew he had me, before I’d given up everything to be with him and he knew I was stuck in a new country with nowhere else to go. The qualities he once praised about me became the qualities he’d attack, the ones he wanted to extinguish within me, the light inside he wanted to put out. In some ways he’s succeeded, although I hope only temporarily.
His drinking was also a problem, not only due to the effect alcohol had on his behaviour, but because I do not drink at all myself and found it difficult to communicate with a frequently intoxicated person. He would get drunk most nights, having a minimum of eight cans of beer at a time. This would intensify his mood swings and suspicions and sometimes make his tantrums even worse. I had to call the police during a particularly frightening night where he had a meltdown, punching himself in the head repeatedly and bashing his head against the concrete kitchen wall so much I was afraid he would give himself a concussion. He threatened suicide and I had to first wrestle a large knife out of his hands and then bottles of pills, all the while him shouting it was “my fault” he was harming himself. He is bigger than I am and restraining him physically wasn’t always possible. (He also started calling my attempts to stop him from hurting himself “physical abuse,” so I stopped intervening.) The mental health team came to the house to talk him down for several hours, and he was belligerent with them, dismissing their advice and saying no amount of pills or therapy would work for him, that “he already knew” nothing would help. He harmed himself in front of me dozens of times, and it was always made clear that it was “my fault” that it was happening. There was no way to predict what he would take the wrong way or what harmless joke he would twist; I began to live in near-constant fear of upsetting him.
He got so drunk one night that he passed out, and I sat and read news articles on my laptop. When he woke up a couple hours later, he frantically accused me of cheating on him — he said I was talking to men on the internet and demanded to see my laptop and what I’d been doing. He chased me around the apartment with wide eyes, shouting to see my computer, until I was able to escape and shut the bedroom door long enough for him to give up and pass out again.
He broke the bedroom closet door by bashing his head into it so many times; he came upstairs to where I was already half-asleep in bed and tried to initiate sex, but I explained I was simply too tired. He began to shout that I “didn’t love him anymore” and “wasn’t attracted to him anymore” and when I tried to explain this wasn’t the case and I was simply tired, he started to bash his head against the door so many times that the wood split and cracked and the door broke. I had to jump out of bed and try my best to talk him down and prevent him from hurting himself further and was thankfully successful after a couple hours.
His interpretations of things also varied wildly, and even as something as harmless as buying him a gift would be used against me. Everything was always the worst-case scenario in his eyes and everyone always had bad intentions. (I would watch him have completely average interactions with people — wait staff, cashiers, etc — but afterwards he’d turn around and seethe, “Can you believe the way they talked to me?!” or “I can’t believe how they disrespected me!” It was very confusing.) I bought him a pair of trousers once and he loved them; he put them on and seemed so excited and loved the way they fit. I was pleased to see him happy, so I bought him a few more pairs of the same trousers, all in different colours. I thought this would delight him, but upon receiving them, he accused me of trying to “control” him and trying to “dictate the clothes [he] wore.” (He even said something similar when I brought him a goofy souvenir T-shirt from a tourist trap I visited: “You’re trying to control me by dressing me a certain way.” In order to get him to calm down, I had to ask for forgiveness and assure him it was only meant as a joke and he didn’t have to wear it if he didn’t want to.) I was dumbfounded, as I thought I was simply buying my partner a thoughtful gift. But this was the trap that was set up for me so often: me doing something I thought was kind, only to be twisted by him and used against me. I would cook dinner and when I would offer him a second helping, he would say things like, “I know you’re doing that because you think I’m fat.” Things that I never said and had no basis in reality. His behaviour was so erratic and unpredictable that I was intimidated by him and just began trying to say or do as little as possible.
During arguments, he would grab the nearest sheet of paper, write down whatever it was I’d said or done wrong in the moment, put the date at the top, and make me sign it. He made me keep them in a safe place — I still have some of them — and said things like, “This way you can’t say in a week or a month that you didn’t know we’d discussed this issue because I have it in writing.” He’d bring them up in later arguments whenever I committed the latest infraction and would say, “Remember you signed that paper saying you wouldn’t say/do that again.” He probably did this a dozen or more times.
He relished calling me a liar and seemed to manufacture situations for which he could make this claim. A real example: I came home once exasperated and said, “There were a million people at the store today!” He demanded accuracy and asked why I was “lying” to him, and after several rounds of, “Were there actually one million people at the store?” I said, “… of course not,” to which he replied, “Then why did you lie to me?” He made me apologise and say out loud, “I am a liar.” Of course, I thought this was absurd at first, but because he was able to couch it in a “need” for “accuracy” for his “mental health” (even though every time I was still made to say aloud that I was a “liar” and accompany the confession with an apology), I started to acquiesce. After several times of this happening (me using a goofy but obvious and common exaggeration, e.g. “It was a thousand degrees outside today”) and the same punishment being applied, I learned to alter my speech patterns to avoid being shamed.
You do start to tell yourself that you just need to work harder, you’re not being a considerate enough partner, that you’re the “normal” one so you should make more sacrifices to help the “ill” one, so I read books and messageboards and websites designed to help partners of people with depression and suicidal thoughts, but no advice I gleaned from them ever worked. I never had the right answer to solve his problems and would often run upstairs and go to bed as early as 7pm to avoid his screams and unhinged behaviour. Everything was on my shoulders because I “didn’t care enough about him” to “learn how to manage his mental illness,” but the truth is, it felt like that was all I did: attempt to learn how to help him. It felt like I was trying to be his nurse or caretaker, not his partner. No matter what I did or what approach I took, it was wrong and he would shout at me. I was constantly dodging emotional landmines.
He’d often try to convince me that what was happening was not happening, even as it was happening. He’d corner me and shout at me that I was the one abusing him, I had done everything wrong, that I was the source of all of our relationship problems and if I’d only change, we’d be happy. I needed to do more work, I needed to stop making it all about me, I had to communicate with him better. “You need to be kinder and gentler with me,” he’d scream, missing the irony as his spittle landed on my face.
I found out he lied to me about so many things, about his past, about previous relationships and how they ended (he ghosted his previous girlfriend — a woman who endured many of his same behaviours — as they were due to move in together and I had absolutely no idea; he and I were married mere months after this), just so much he told me has since been revealed to be false. I now know what projection is, because all of the times (and there were many) he accused me of cheating were likely just that: He had cheated on every previous partner and while I can’t know for certain, odds are he cheated on (or at least tried to cheat on) me as well.
Covid lockdown exacerbated everything, of course, and while I previously had breaks in the day to myself while he was at work, we were now locked in the same house for an entire year. I used to dread hearing him wake up in the morning. He began drinking even more and more often, which made everything worse. His tantrums became more frantic and more frequent, with me scrambling to soothe him or avoid him completely, and I would start most days thinking to myself, “Try not to talk today, as you can’t upset him if you don’t say anything.” If I stayed quiet, there was no danger in saying the “wrong” thing. I also slept a lot in an attempt to escape, as it was my only option. He was able to convince me that I was selfish and that I wasn’t working hard enough to compromise and sacrifice for the sake of our relationship, which is something I’m susceptible to; I’m an only child who has lived alone for most of my adult life, and I do worry that has perhaps made me more insular and self-centered than most. I’m conscious of it and work on it, so if someone is telling me day in and day out that I am indeed those things, it’s not hard for me to believe it. I gave up so much of myself, my interests, my feelings, my needs, my wants, my desires, my social life… so much of me in the interest of proving to this person that I cared about that I am not “selfish,” to prove I was actively working to make our relationship “better” by doing everything he’d told me, following all of his rules. I was so exhausted.
If it ever seemed like I was going to leave, he would often shout things like, “I have an illness. If I had cancer, you wouldn’t walk out on me!” It’s hard for a rational, empathetic person to argue with that scenario because of course I wouldn’t! But there are specific treatments for cancer, and presumably the person suffering from it would seek help from doctors — he didn’t. Also, there are no known illnesses where the treatment or the cure includes shouting at a person and controlling their every move through fear and coercion. I was regularly subjected to having to watch him self-harm, his chosen method either being punching himself in the head/face repeatedly or headbutting walls or furniture, and while I tried to physically intervene the first few times, I learned there was nothing I could do. Watching it happen was simply my “punishment” for whatever he decided I’d done “wrong” that day to “trigger” him.
About two and a half years in, we had one of our worst, most interminable fights, and I couldn’t even tell you now what it was about, because in the last year they all blurred into a vague “you disrespected me” or “you don’t take my mental illness into account” rant, again with no real tangible focus, just a general “you said a wrong thing” tirade. (Once when we were on a walk, I casually asked him when he thought he’d start driving lessons — we had discussed it calmly weeks before — and he had such an intense, immediate breakdown because I was “trying to give him a deadline” that he collapsed on the walking trail and screamed at me so loudly that a woman across the field came out of her house and asked if we needed help and if everything was okay.) He had been shouting at me for hours, and my usual “just agree and say sorry” tactic hadn’t been working. There were quite a few times that my not shouting back made him even angrier and made him escalate things, as he would accuse me of “manipulation” since I wasn’t matching his level of upset. I’m not really a shouter by nature and don’t get angry easily, but also, I’d be so confused by his accusations that I would simply attempt to figure out what he was saying and try to figure out the nonexistent logic of his diatribe. If someone is screaming in your face that the sky is green, it’s hard to not be confused and reply with, “Wait, what? But it’s blue?” in an attempt to find some shared reality to anchor the conversation. This always made it worse, as since I wasn’t matching his intensity, he would call me a “sociopath with no emotions.” I was sat at my desk and he was standing in front of the door, where he had been yelling at me for hours, and in the frustration of not being able to make him stop and not being able to leave the room, I reached for the nearest thing, which happened to be an empty tote bag, and I threw it at him. It was the one time I’d lost my temper and I immediately felt ashamed that I’d stooped to his level. He stared at me in disbelief and then finally left the room, and I was grateful for the peace. I even apologised later and told him I’d regretted doing it, and it was never mentioned again… until months later when I told him I was leaving him, and he phoned the police and accused me of physical assault. Because of this one incident, his narrative now positioned me as the abuser.
A few months after that was sort of the apex, as the tantrums seemed to be daily, and the shouting hardly stopped. This was his busiest time at work and I was ominously warned that he was at his highest stress level. One day I asked about a simple chore (moving a paint can from the hallway and up into the attic) and he screamed in disbelief that I would dare bother him while he worked, and he got up and followed me around the house shouting until I relented and told him he was right; he is also fixated on his idea of “justice,” so if I ever crossed him in his eyes, I had to apologise a certain amount of times until he “believed” that I was sincere. Sometimes I had to apologise for not apologising enough! It started to feel like most days the only words I said were, “I’m sorry.” I was eventually in tears, exhausted and frightened by all the shouting, and he accused me of trying to manipulate him with my “fake crying.”
One afternoon in the final weeks before I left him, he calmly asked me to come upstairs and join him in the spare room, as he needed to talk. I sat down and he gave me a lecture in the most condescending paternal tone, calling me the most awful names imaginable in the eeriest, calmest, most direct way. He told me I was a terrible person, the “worst, most selfish person” he’d ever met, and that no one really liked or loved me, including my family and friends, among many other insults. (When I interjected once to ask how it was possible that many of my closest friends had been in my life for decades, he shot back, “That’s only because they don’t know the real you like I do.”) He was so calm and measured; it was surreal. After nearly ten minutes of talking down to me in this way, detailing why I was “lucky” he “stuck around” as I stared straight ahead (I had learned by now that leaving or trying to stop the conversation would cause more trouble, so I knew to just patiently sit and wait until it was over), I asked why he would even want to stay in a relationship with the person he’d just described. “Because I know I can help you change,” he said.
As a last resort and in an earnest attempt to work on our relationship, I signed us up for couples counselling, which we did for a month: four sessions. He became increasingly upset by the therapist’s gentle suggestions that perhaps he was the one overreacting, and shouted at the therapist during our final session. He told the therapist that I was clearly the abuser and that I had been “psychologically abusing” him for the whole of our relationship — that my not tending to his meltdowns “properly” with the methods he had meticulously dictated to me was the equivalent of “mental abuse.” (He’d even figured out that he’d had “approximately 300 panic attacks” during the course of our relationship, therefore I had “abused him 300 times.”) I think that was the moment I knew the relationship was irretrievable; if he’s not willing to listen to a therapist, who will he listen to? That day was one of the most difficult I’d endured, and I was again afraid I was losing sight of reality; I was again questioning myself and whether I had brought this on by not being a “better” partner who helped him more. I eventually got him to stop shouting and I went to bed (we had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for months at this point), only to have him rouse me a little while later to give me an unhinged lecture about my behaviour. I secretly recorded his rant on my phone, during which he said I was lucky he was “allowing” me to travel and I was made to thank him for his “largesse.” I sent it to a very close friend I had been talking to; I texted her and said, “Would you please listen to this and tell me if this is a normal argument between a couple? I’m afraid I don’t know what is normal anymore.” She texted back, “THIS IS NOT NORMAL! GET OUT OF THAT HOUSE!” and it finally opened my eyes to the way I’d been living.
I booked a plane ticket mere days after global travel restrictions were lifted, to get some rest with my family back home and put some distance between us. I just needed to get away from the person who had been screaming at me every day and get my head straight and think about what to do next. (And I was too afraid to break up with him in person, as I had no idea how he would react or how bad it could get.) A few days after arriving, I called him with hopes of discussing a calm and civil breakup over the phone, but when I tried to tell him of my future plans to return and start the ball rolling on a divorce, he screamed that I wasn’t allowed to come back and if I tried to return he would call the police on me and/or change the locks. It escalated to a place I could have never anticipated, with mounting legal fees and paperwork, when all I wanted was my life back. All I wanted was to live without the constant burden of worrying how my every word or action would set someone off, to exist without being shouted at, to be able to make mistakes that every human makes without it having to be written down and brought up at every opportunity, to be used to shame me and keep me apologising forever for being a person, a flawed person who sometimes failed but was always punished for even trying. “You have never tried to understand me,” were some of his last words to me. But it was all I did, all I spent those years doing. And I’m so tired.
The months since I’ve left him have been some of the hardest of my life. I feel like a ghost of my previous self. I have no confidence, no self-belief, no drive, none of the things I had before I met this person. It almost feels like part of the reason he chose me was that he perhaps thought these qualities I had, ones he desired to have himself, could be siphoned off of me, and when he realized that wouldn’t work, he had to stomp them out; if he couldn’t have them, I couldn’t either. I had to hate myself as much and he hated himself; that was his mission. Getting through each day is a struggle. I feel afraid to reach out to people, afraid they won’t believe me, afraid that they will judge me for “letting” this happen, for not standing up to him sooner. I judge myself for letting it get to this point, for “allowing” myself to be treated this way, even though the rational part of my brain understands the power of manipulation and that anyone can succumb to it. I’m afraid I won’t trust anyone again or that I’ll reject someone who is truly ill and really does need help and care because I will be afraid that they are using it as a weapon. I’m afraid of how “normal” I let this become and how each time I tell a different friend about the specifics, their shocked and horrified reactions remind me of how outrageous it really was and how I thought that was the treatment I deserved, that I had accepted it as “love.” That I thought because this person occasionally bought me flowers and made me dinner that I should overlook the rest because that was the only version of “love” I’d ever be able to have, a “love” that would only “work” when I gave up everything about myself in service to it, that as long as I didn’t speak or joke or laugh or feel or want or need, I’d be “loved.” During times he could see that I was frustrated and ready to give up, he’d often dramatically wail, “No one will ever love you like I love you!” Now I pray that is the case.
A defiant part of me wants to pretend there isn’t permanent damage done, that I can shake this off and not allow this person to cast a long shadow over my life… but I can’t. I’m not okay. I’m not fine. I still can’t talk about this with friends without bursting into tears. I don’t feel confident enough to do things that used to come easy for me. I am too shaky to leave the house most days. Although I have learned that it isn’t my fault and I didn’t do anything “wrong” to bring this on; he’s done the same things to previous partners and will likely continue the pattern with future ones. Mental illness — any mental illness — isn’t an excuse to do whatever you want with zero consequences; you are responsible for your own behaviour. Having any sort of condition doesn’t give you the right to abuse or mistreat another person under the guise of “needing help,” and it does a disservice to those who are genuinely suffering without using it as an excuse to control the people around them. And while I’m not a doctor and not qualified to diagnose anyone, it’s hard to believe now that most parts of his “illness” were ever real; with hindsight, it just seems like willful and prolonged abuse and manipulation.
I had to — and still have to — fight his distortions and remind myself of the truth, of reality as it actually happened and not the narrative he attempted to force upon me. Many times, I wanted peace so badly that I was ready to give up, to just collapse, to just accept what was happening as inevitable, that I was too impulsive and jumped into the relationship too quickly and there were repercussions for being so hasty, but that just isn’t true. I don’t deserve this. No one deserves this.
(I followed the above post with this one, originally published on December 27, 2022, link here: https://at.tumblr.com/xzx-xzx/aftermath/jxl1s1zj7z0e )
I wrote the [previous] post a while ago, a few months after I was able to get away. I wrote it all down and published it for two main reasons: to get it all out of my head for my own sanity, and to hopefully help anyone who came across it and recognised similarities in their own relationship to realise that perhaps they, too, should get away.
Now that it’s been a while since I left, I want to add a third reason. Please, if you have ever read such an account or knew someone in a similar situation and thought (or even said to them), “Why don’t/didn’t you just leave?” have a long think about how unhelpful that is. “Just leaving,” I can say from experience, took weeks (if not months) of planning. “Just leaving” isn’t just walking out the door in a situation where you are married to or living with a person who wants to control you. It can require covert phone calls and texts to friends, secret purchases of plane tickets or renting cars, things that require patience and careful maneuvering. Also, what comes after the “just leaving” can sometimes be worse! Since I left, I have been subjected to every kind of legal stunt, revenge via lawyers for no reason other than to get back at me and drain my savings.
The next time you want to text or say or comment “Just leave,” please stop and perhaps rephrase it: “How can I help you leave?”
