Writing wrongs

People who give their partner the cold shoulder — deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally — damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner’s ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships. (Source).

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships and the hows and whys of what makes people work as a pair. Why sometimes you can go years and years practicing kindness and understanding, and build decades of memories and love out of what was once just an awkward first date. Or why sometimes what starts as infatuation that dumps all this incredible oxytocin into your body to make you feel so alive and connected can sometimes curdle into something more akin to hatred.

I’ve been wanting to write about this topic for a good long while but I’ve been paranoid about doing so, as exposing myself to a certain level of scrutiny online is not terribly appealing to me anymore, for a variety of reasons. (Job, child, basic self-consciousness, and, most recently, since I learned my ex likes to make me read blog posts aloud to a courtroom. That’s a weird, sob-filled experience.)

Alas.

The more I don’t write about my experience, the more I can feel frustration and sadness festering inside me about what happened. What I allowed to happen. Because I never thought I would end up in a relationship I was scared to leave, where the person holding me hostage emotionally clearly hated me but needed me so much he had to intimidate me into staying with him. A relationship where my feelings of pity and my penchant for codependent behaviors would trump common sense and my own personal strength to do the right thing and get out.

The more I don’t write about what happened to me — the outspoken, take-no-shit, humorless career-woman feminist who didn’t need no man nohow — the more I can’t shake the feeling that I am contributing to an atmosphere where it could more easily happen to someone else just innocently bopping along and getting involved in a toxic and emotionally abusive relationship despite her better instincts.

So I will write.

However, I know by doing so, I am putting myself at risk for further retribution. Right now I am fighting for custody of my child — I am proposing an equitable 50/50 split but my ex wants full custody with me seeing my child just 80 or 100 days a year — and I am sure putting this truth out there will enrage him.

But I have to write this.

This spring I ended a five-year relationship that had been toxic for most of its duration but that I stuck with out of fear of being alone and a sense of obligation to try to make things work since we had a child together. The fear came in part from the bullying and emotional abuse rendered by my partner at the time (bolstered by threats to take our child away from me were I to leave, since I was working full time to support the family and he was spending his time at home), and my sense of obligation came from knowing that I had made bad choices to get into the situation I was in, and that it was my responsibility to see them through somehow. I pride myself in my sense of responsibility; I had made my bed and I wanted to lie in it to see if I could make it more comfortable.

It never got more comfortable. If anything, the longer I laid there, the more hostile it became. (Literally; my ex is a sleep-hitter, who would lash out or recoil violently if you touched him at all while he was sleeping.) The more I felt the creeping despair of being in a situation where I was unloved, unappreciated, mocked, ridiculed, and on the hook for a lot more than I originally bargained for. The more I forgot who I was or what I wanted out of life. What I deserved.

It hadn’t always been that way. Early in the relationship, of course, everything felt exciting and fun. This person I’d met seemed interested in me and thought I was witty and charming. We had a great time together. I thought we were hitting on something real and permanent. He was different from other men I’d been with. He had a spotty, scary past and was aggressive and overbearing. But that made him different and interesting, in a lot of ways. And he was working to overcome a lot of his baggage.

I thought.

Just a couple of months after we’d been seeing each other seriously, I caught him communicating with women on Plenty of Fish (where we’d met) as though he were still single. His story was this: He never wanted to actually be with anyone else. He never actually met any of those girls. He used contact with them as a way of stroking his ego, getting attention, running his game. He said he had never been in a relationship before where he wanted to spend all his time with the girl, where she was his best friend. He said he got scared at one point and thought we’d moved too fast, and that maybe he wasn’t ready to be in a serious relationship again. And then he realized that he loved me and never wanted to be with anybody else and that he wanted to make a go of it. And he said he thought I was amazing and that he would never have a bad word about me to say to anyone, ever. That he single-handedly fucked up something great. And that the worst part was knowing that he had hurt me and hurt me for something so pointless. He compared it to playing a dumb game. “I’m such a piece of shit,” he said. “I don’t know why I always fuck up things that I love.”

He’d been running his game on girls on my computer in my house while I was at work. Totally selfish disrespect for me and what I thought we were doing as a couple. I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and I had this towering fear that no one was ever going to love me more than the level of love he was capable of giving me. So I played the odds and took him back when he came crocodile-crying to me. That was my first of many mistakes.

He ran out of student loan money and couldn’t pay his rent anymore, so I asked him to move in with me since he was staying over so much anyway. I thought we were in love. I thought we’d hit an emotional plateau. I thought we’d make a home.

I thought it would be easier to keep an eye on the wolf if he lived with me.

It felt like a natural progression for our relationship, despite my having only known him for a few months. He had emotional and financial baggage but I thought I could love him in spite of it all, love him toward a better existence and help see him through whatever badness was haunting him.

The thing to know about me, see, is that I have a lot of love to give. Always. The issue is I give too freely to those who don’t deserve it or who don’t reciprocate.

I think he liked my pluck. I didn’t talk or act like the other girls. I was bawdy in the best way but kinda classy too. He liked that I was self-sufficient and I’m sure it was a nice bonus that I could provide a certain lifestyle for us. It wasn’t glamorous but it was largely worry free for him. I paid all the bills, including his past debts when they came calling. I was cute and weird and game and that probably was enough for him to get on board and say he loved me. I was so desperate for love after a brutal mid-20s drought that this seemed like a fair exchange to me.

It seems very obvious and sad in synopsis form. I carry a lot of shame about that.

Then I got pregnant. Things got very real very quickly and I began to worry about his commitment to me and to us as a family. Despite being a person in pursuit of a law degree, he seemed very juvenile and unstable. In some very obvious ways, it was ludicrous for me to expect to ask this man to commit to me and a family at this time. I had known him less than a year. I wanted so badly to feel unconditional love from this person that I imagined it in places it didn’t exist. He was still in law school and in a student mindset, in a lot of ways. He was smoking a lot of pot and doing a lot of studying but not much else in terms of acting like a grownup. I remember getting so stressed out that he would take weeks and weeks to change the litter box or mow the yard — two things I had given up while pregnant. There were times when I got so tired of asking and waiting that I just did those things myself, always in a huff because I assumed that if someone really loved me, he’d do these small things without prompting.

My pregnancy was not ideal. Physiologically it went about as well as one could hope for, but psychologically I struggled. He seemed extremely reluctant to find employment or help me save for the birth or our myriad upcoming childrearing needs. He graduated law school and took several months off to recuperate. He said he was tired from law school and wanted a break. That break included spending a lot of time making homemade bongs (mostly out of plastic bottles and pen parts) and smoking weed from dawn ’til dusk. We got into a huge fight in late spring when instead of using his tax refund to help me pay bills, he bought a vaporizer so he could smoke weed without hurting his lungs so much. (His chronic smoking had given him quite the annoying cough in the summer of 2011.) Here’s an excerpt from my private Livejournal (Aug. 2, 2011):

Last night I had enough of his weird shitty distance and I went to bed. I laid there and read for a while and couldn’t stop crying and getting upset about how he is acting so I texted him that I felt like he’s 1,000 miles away and I wanted to know why. I did not get a response. That was unsurprising; he rarely answers my texts anyway and there are occasions when I can call five times and get no answer; he leaves his phone on silent.

So I came out of the bedroom and asked him to please come lie down with me for a while. The baby was kicking and I thought we could lie there and be sweet and he could feel the kicks, and maybe we could talk and I’d feel better. He finally came into the bedroom and took his clothes off and I said, “You don’t have to come to bed! I just want you to lie with me for a little while,” because I didn’t want him to feel like he had to stay in there all night if he wasn’t ready for bed. He said something smart to me — “You asked me to!” — and I tried once again to explain that I wasn’t trying to get him to come to bed. I just wanted him to come lie down and hold me for a little while. He said nothing.

I put his hand on my belly and he laid there silently, pretty much not reacting to the miracle of his child kicking the living shit out of me hard enough for him to feel. I would have liked to see a smile or something, I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy for thinking that would have been a Nice Moment, considering he hadn’t felt him yet. I asked him if everything was OK, that he seemed off. He finally mentioned that he didn’t have any weed. Ahhh. Of course.

Until I met him, I had always mocked the concept of a marijuana addiction. It seemed so ludicrous to me, the concept of being hooked on weed. But my ex had a bona fide marijuana addiction. He’d smoke first thing in the morning, throughout the day, and before bed. Every day. And if he had to go a couple of days without weed, he’d experience actual withdrawal symptoms. He’d be listless and unresponsive, often going for hours and days without speaking to me or looking in my direction if I walked into a room and addressed him. He’d totally lose his appetite and spend time dry heaving while hovering over the toilet*.

When he did finally address me after considerable time spent ignoring me, he would be hateful. He’d spit words at me like venom. I’d retreat to the bedroom and cry, unsure of why this person I thought loved me was being so awful to me for no reason. He even went over to his ex’s house for a few hours a couple of times to smoke with her, just to get his fix. (I assume that’s all they did, but who knows.) I tried to act like I was cool with it but it killed something in me, little by little.

I learned after the first few rounds of this to just avoid him entirely for three or four days if he had run out of weed.

I’d never had any experience with behaviors of people struggling with addiction (or so I thought). I was sort of blindsided, and it hurt me more than I was able to admit at the time. He smoked pot around the clock and had for a long time. He even once told me, as our child grew inside me, that he would have a hard time giving up smoking pot because it had always been there for him. It was the longest and most successful relationship he’d ever had.

I didn’t know what to do.

When I was 30 weeks pregnant, I once again caught him on dating sites, courting women. I don’t know if he cheated on me with any of them but he certainly betrayed me emotionally. That pretty much marked the moment when I knew he never would be capable of loving me in a way that I would be able to trust. He needed that ego stroking too much. He was willing to risk everything just to have random women tell him he was cute. He got to sit at home while I worked 40 hours a week, heavily pregnant, and flirt with random girls online and send photos back and forth. Something about that turned my stomach against him permanently, probably. No matter what I did — paid all his bills, gestated his child, etc. — I would never be good enough for him to love and treat right. He just didn’t think of me that way, I guess.

That hurt.

I gave birth and I coasted briefly on the high of natural childbirth. That gave way to the usual stresses of having a newborn. It wasn’t long before we were fighting over basic things. I had a growing resentment that he was getting stoned all day long (he claimed it was a lot easier to deal with a baby while high). I didn’t feel like we were a team. As my maternity leave came to a close, we had a conversation about what the future held. I told him I’d be happy to work part-time or stay home longer if he wanted to pursue a law career. He told me in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t afford for me to stay home. My earning potential was much larger than his, so he would stay home for a while. He told me I couldn’t afford to let my career take a hit from time spent at home and not in the workforce. I balked a bit but it was not up for discussion, I could tell. So we made plans for me to head back to work in March and he stayed at home with our four-month-old during the eight hours I was on the clock.

It worked OK. I cared for the baby in the morning until his naptime, which was my time to get ready for my evening shift. Things never felt quite right, though, and I started seeing a therapist to address some of my anxiety and anger issues. It became very evident after a couple of sessions that my relationship was the biggest trigger of my anxiety and frustration. My therapist pegged me as a codependent who was trying to control an addict and took on his problems and behaviors as my own. In retrospect, that’s absolutely accurate. I was full of excuses for why he couldn’t function as an adult despite having a child and a law degree. I was angry about how things were going and at one point in late spring, we had a blowup and I tried to kick him out of my house after we’d been arguing over something dumb and he called me a “fucking bitch” loudly while I was holding our baby. I told him if he couldn’t respect me in my own house that he could get out. He slept in his car in the driveway while my mom and I peered out the window and wondered if he’d ever go away. I started feeling bad about my child’s father being homeless, and I let him back in on the condition that he’d stop being so awful to me.

Kind of funny, now that I think about it. It was never in him to be good to me. Never.

He admitted to me this past March that that incident turned him against me permanently and he never was able to love me after that. That he’d been booted out of his home so many times as a child that my doing so to him made him have negative feelings for me that he couldn’t overcome.

(That explains a lot, really.)

In June 2012 I got the opportunity to seek a job lead in Nashville that was a pretty significant promotion. My ex told me to go for it, that he hated Memphis and that Memphis was a dead-end town for his career. That he’d have so many more job leads in Nashville, where we could both pursue careers. So we moved to Nashville. I had hope that it would reinvigorate our relationship and our family life. But I quickly watched the same old patterns emerge. He asked me to ask my friends and co-workers to find a weed hookup for him, and since I refused, he made periodic trips back to Memphis to hook up with his old dealer to get a sack here and there. Or he’d go to his mom’s house and buy weed from her. He even traded divorce paperwork for a sack of weed once, he told me.

He didn’t make friends in Nashville and couldn’t even hang out with my longtime Nashville friends. My home life felt segregated from the rest of my life, and it was stressful.

Increasingly my ex acted in ways that sought to marginalize me and make a team out of him and our son with me as the outsider. In fact, he was treating me with such constant contempt that I started a journal just chronicling all the times he scolded me for doing something in a way he wouldn’t have done it. Times were not great financially and we’d have these sobbing come-to-Jesus conversations about how I couldn’t make all the ends meet without his help and he’d say just give it time, he’d get on his feet as a lawyer eventually. But he’d sleep all day until I went to work around noon or 1 p.m. I took care of the baby in the morning and on the weekends, and he’d lock himself in the spare room and smoke weed and watch football all day. “Do you want to go do something fun together?” I’d ask. No, he’d say. He either had a lot of work to do (he was working part-time for Lionbridge for a split second) or he had football to watch. He took a lot of naps (one of the things he always said his mom did when he was a kid, but he knew she was just getting stoned). So the baby and I would head out on our own and hang with friends or go see the sights.

I felt like a single mom, honestly. I worked a lot but when I was home it was me and the baby, flying together with little help (except when I might receive some criticism of why what I was doing was not the correct thing to do).

I had dozens and dozens of conversations with friends about this arrangement. About why this wasn’t normal and why I deserved better. Everyone knew we weren’t the best match of all time but everyone seemed to be shocked by how tense it actually was in our relationship.

My ex could be a very hateful person. He practiced gaslighting like a pro. It took me a long time to even recognize that’s what he was doing, at which point I felt very, very stupid.

There would be small insults that would nick me like a thousand paper cuts. Some of it was really bizarre. He didn’t like the way I smelled (told me I smelled like an old lady). He didn’t like how I dressed. He couldn’t stand sleeping near me when I snored. He thought my jewelry was tacky. He didn’t like that sometimes I used bleach to clean with. He would get annoyed if I used a dish instead of a paper plate, when we had paper plates. He was grossed out by how cluttered my car was (but would throw his own garbage in the floorboard when he drove it). He didn’t like the style of purses I carried. He thought it was disgusting that I ate microwave popcorn sometimes. He didn’t like the music I listened to. He didn’t like how I cooked, when I even tried to. He didn’t like that I burned scented candles. He didn’t like how I made oatmeal for our son. On and on. Really.

In general he just sort of acted annoyed to be around me. Early in our relationship I would try to draw him out of that behavior and get him to talk about why he seemed upset. It was always a challenge. Eventually I was so exhausted by the prospect of trying to tease out what I had done to inspire this behavior (especially when I realized that it was more often than not just his own random mood swings, often related to his substance intake or lack thereof) that I just started training myself to not need his attention, approval or affection. Eventually once I weaned myself from my boyfriend’s affection, it became a lot easier for me to just stop making those affection bids, which I’d made a lot in the past and had felt rejected countless times.

It is incrementally empowering, to work toward not needing your significant other’s love anymore. It’s kind of depressing to look at it that way, but I had to ensure own emotional self-preservation and that is how I did it.

It took me a long time to realize that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I knew emotional abuse was a thing but I had always relegated it to others’ relationships. Not mine.

After all, I was with a person who told me repeatedly that he didn’t believe emotional abuse was a real thing. How could your emotions be abused? That just probably meant you were a weak pushover. But mostly it just didn’t sound like a real thing, he said.

This is a person who would rarely acknowledge when I walked into a room and said hello to him. He’d stare at the TV or into the distance and grunt, sometimes. I remember one time in winter of 2014/15 when I came home and, unprompted, brought him some food from his favorite burger joint, I handed it to him and he spat, while staring into the distance, “I don’t want it.” I had to take it and put it in the fridge, humiliated. (He must have been weed detoxing.) He later apologized, but the sting of that unnecessary unkindness stuck with me, because it was so over-the-top and so demonstrative of the shitty attitude I’d been enduring for years.

This is a person who only ever touched me as a prelude to sex. I can’t remember a time in the past four years that he kissed or hugged me to show me affection that was not a part of what he considered foreplay. He didn’t even like to make eye contact with me. I knew if he sat down close to me or put his arm around me, he wanted something from me. If I rejected his advances, he’d be hateful about it. So sometimes I wouldn’t reject him; I’d just let him get it over with to keep the peace. Never in my life did I imagine I’d be in an emotional place where I’d let that happen. But I did. Multiple times.

He had convinced me, using a variety of emotional abuse tactics, that I was living exactly the life I deserved. That the total lack of emotional connection, the absence of affectionate touch, being unable to touch him at night in bed, the complete void of kindness, was normal. He told me he thought we should fight more, that not arguing and fighting was a sign of weakness and how we should aim to argue more because it kept a relationship limber.

This is a person who told me recently that he’s better at being a parent than I am. That I don’t deserve to spend a lot of time with my son because I’m not a good mother. That he has a stronger emotional bond with my son than I do. That he’s just naturally a better, more experienced parent. And that he would have left me a long time ago had we not had a child together, because he never really loved me. (This, after begging me to stay and saying he loved me and wanted to work it out with me a couple of weeks before I moved out.)

This is a person who, every time I would try to raise my concerns about our relationship, would flip the script to talk about how much of a piece of shit I was and how no one would put up with me because I’m such a terrible communicator who’s bad at relationships.

He had me convinced that no one else was ever going to want anything to do with me because I was an unreasonable woman, who was disgusting to look at and deal with. (A recent Facebook post he shared talked about how he wanted to puke every time he looked at me. He has since deleted it but I have saved it to always remind me of how true it is that he hates me.)

Seeing him post that was odd. Not because it was so hurtful, but because I agreed with him a little bit. I make myself want to puke, too.

I’ve certainly got my share of issues (a big one would be the fact that I can allow this sort of thing to happen in my life at all), and I can only speculate as to why I was never good enough for my ex but, frankly, I don’t think it matters. We were not a good fit and I allowed my fear of being alone to keep me in a bad situation for far too long, and now I am paying for those bad decisions in ways I never dreamed possible.

I would never undo what our union produced: Of all the horrible bullshit surrounding our relationship, the one enduring truth is that the combination of our DNA made a truly amazing kid. So, maybe we had to go through all this horrible mess as the price of admission for our child’s existence. I’m OK with that. I hope some day our child can appreciate the comedy of errors leading to his existence and know that even though his parents can’t even be in the same room (apparently), they both love him fiercely, above all else.

I have to figure out what to carry forward from all this, when it comes to how I proceed with romantic relationships. The concept in that article I linked above of being kind to your mate and engaging in those ongoing bids for affection: That shit is real and if neglected, you start to wither like an unwatered plant. I know this. I lived it for five years and it changed something essential me, and not for the better. I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself to get emotionally healthy again so that I don’t let all this badness break me inside, because I think I got very close.

My child deserves a happy mom who loves and is loved.

And who loves herself.

I also know that my ex and I have a lot of work to do when it comes to communicating and co-parenting effectively, given the rough split and the history of our relationship. Despite how poorly he treated me, I know it’s important for him and our son to have a solid relationship, and I aim to foster that in every way possible. My fear is that given my ex’s feelings toward me over the years and how his anger at me has exploded in the past few months since I left him, he will struggle with this more than I will.

He told me on the phone right after our first court appearance, after he’d filed an emergency restraining order preventing me from taking my child out of the house, that he’d do whatever it took to bankrupt me so he would get full custody. He said he’d never settle for 50/50. He said, and this is a direct quote because I wrote it down right after we hung up: “You’re going to be paying your lawyer a lot more money, bitch. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

I thought that leaving the relationship would get me out from under his bullying and emotional terrorism, but I realize now that he is going to have plenty of opportunities for the rest of my life to torment me with this kind of horribleness. Just because he can.

That’s who he is, and I didn’t realize it until too late.

*I’ve since told this to other people who are more knowledgeable about symptoms of withdrawal from different drugs, and they all say to me that this sounds like more than marijuana he was withdrawing from, but I don’t know for sure.