About a month ago I walked into my kitchen shell-shocked. My husband looked at me with concern. "What happened?" he asked.
"Three of my online friends have separated from their husbands in the past month - two of them were people I thought had ROCK SOLID marriages. All of them are devastated."
He hugged me but I couldn't get past it. What makes people choose to let it go?
And then I remembered my friend A-. When she told me she was getting divorced, I tried to get her to stay. "It will be so much HARDER as a single parent." I told her.
She didn't care. Her husband didn't want to be married and they fought about the "married" responsibilities he didn't want to bear. She decided that it would be easier to do it herself (since she pretty much was anyway) and not have to fight about it - and not have to take care of him AND a child.
She was completely right and I was completely wrong. A few months later she met a WONDERFUL man who adored her and her child and wanted nothing MORE than to be a husband and father. She is remarried and happy.
And then I got an email from today's guest blogger, Amy, who thanked me for reminding her that there was more to marriage than misery. Her story demonstrates so much strength that I am certain she would have triumphed without any reminders from me but I am honored that she counts me among her friends.
I replied to her email and begged her to write her story for me - so that I could publish it to remind anyone that needed reminding that even FairyTales gone awry can have happy endings.
Warning: Her story contains elements of violence and abuse.
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When Kit emailed me about doing a guest post, I was completely floored! I have my tiny little blog that barely has any posts, and here I am getting asked by a real blogger to guest post. I am humbled to say the least. When I first started reading “Blogging Dangerously,” I was in year five of my marriage. I know that most folks would think that being just five years into a marriage, that there should be bumps in the road. But my bumps in the road were different. When a complete stranger leans over and tells you to “get out of your marriage as fast as you can,” you know that something serious is wrong in your relationship. Now granted, it did take me over a year and a half after the proclamation from the stranger to finally get out of my marriage, but I finally did break free.
You all probably need a little bit of background for the story to make sense. I met my now ex-husband when I was in college. He was in the graduate program and I was in the undergraduate program for accounting. He was fifteen years older than me, but I didn’t let that bother me. Age is just a number, right? I probably should have seen that there was something weird about a 35 year old man wanting to be in a relationship with someone so young, but alas, I was in love and was completely blinded to logic. Our dating relationship was filled with arguments and aggravations, all of which I assumed would get better once we got married. I perhaps had a little bit of a fairy tale idea of marriage, but it wasn’t founded completely in fiction. I grew up around a good deal of couples who were completely and totally in love and doting on each other all of the time (one such couple I stayed with a lot, so I was able to see that it wasn’t a front). I was expecting love and devotion and spending lots of time together once we got married. Also, as a little bit of background on me, I was raised Southern Baptist and was taught from a very young age that sex was to be saved for marriage (now granted, I didn’t quite follow those rules, but I was always, always filled with guilt for having sex). I was super excited about getting married and getting to have sex guilt free! Yay!
Wow, did getting married ever bite me in the butt. The night of our wedding my then husband suggested that since we were both so tired from the day that we should just sleep in separate beds. We had already moved everything into our apartment including both of our beds from being single. I was so exhausted from both the wedding and the drive home, and since we had to get up so early the next day, I didn’t argue. The next morning, he came in and had sex with me. Now, that doesn’t sound like it would be a problem, but really, it was more rape than sex. He just got on top of me, didn’t get me ready or anything, and then when he was tired, stopped and said “there, now you’ve had your first sex of being married.” That happened on Sunday. By Wednesday of our honeymoon, I knew I had made a mistake. But I was trapped. My religious up bringing didn’t allow for divorce. And I was so young. What could I do?
That was just the beginning too. He pretty much flat out refused to have sex with me after the honeymoon. We went to marriage counseling a couple of times, but I quickly called that off as he was verbally abusive to me after the counseling. And he was pretty much abusive to me during the counseling. He told me in the counseling that he would rather masturbate than have sex with me. And when the counselor asked him why he didn’t want to have sex with me, the only thing he would answer was “it just isn’t time”. I never got to the bottom of what that meant. But the fact that my own husband didn’t want to sleep with me really got to me. My self-esteem was in the toilet. My mental health was severely damaged.
And the sex wasn’t the only problem. He liked to make me feel bad about myself. He would tell me that I was a bad wife. He would call me names. His favorites were “stupid bitch” and “fucking whore”. If he got angry with me, which was more frequent than I’d like and for little things like not putting the toilet paper back on the holder, he would get in my face and yell at me. Often while also backing me into a corner. When I would call him out for being abusive he would make comments like “you Alabama people are always saying that their spouses are abusing them. Way to play into the trailer park attitude.” And that wasn’t even his favorite game to play. He loved to play the “you don’t have any friends game”. Now granted, it didn’t feel like a game when he was doing it, but now that I think about it, it was a cruel game. He would get me tickets to concerts/plays/etc. that he knew that I would want to see. He would always buy 2 tickets. And then at the last moment, usually the day before, when I was say something like “oh, are we going to get dinner before the show tomorrow” he would say “well, you didn’t ask me to go with you to the concert/play/etc. so I’m not going to be able to go”. Then when I would ask my friends if they could go, most of the times they couldn’t on such short notice (especially considering a majority of my friends are women with children). When I would get upset that I would have to go alone, he would go with me, but berate me the entire way there saying that I didn’t have any friends, which was why he had to go.
I don’t really know how I held on for so long. I prayed and prayed every Sunday for direction and for guidance. I was to the point that I was praying that I would die. I wasn’t suicidal. I just wanted to not wake up in the morning. I wanted God to just take me during the night. I got to the point where I was having a headache more days than not, when I finally went to the doctor. I told the intake nurse that I wanted to be dead. The doctor prescribed me some medicine that would help my headaches that was also an antidepressant. I am not saying that medicine solves problems, but I do believe that the meds gave me the clarity to see that I didn’t have to stay unhappy, that I didn’t have to be a martyr to my marriage. I could finally see that my marriage was not normal and that I deserved better. Now granted my friends and family had been telling me for years that I deserved better, I just couldn’t see a way out. And finally a door opened that I could walk through. I was terrified and I was nervous, but finally it was like a veil had been lifted. On Valentine’s Day 2010, I told my husband I wanted a divorce.
Our divorce was probably one of the more amicable divorces that have ever taken place. We both had our own sources of income, so there was no alimony problem. We didn’t have children, so there was no custody/child support problem. But folks, I am here to say, that even though a divorce was necessary for me, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It isn’t like breaking up with someone. It is hard to end a marriage after you’ve stood up in front of God and everybody and said “yes, I will be your spouse forever and always, amen”. It takes a lot of pain to undo those bonds. But sometimes it just has to be done.
With all of that behind me, I was able to see that I deserved more from a relationship. And you know what, I found it. While I was going through the divorce, I got back in touch with a friend of mine from high school. We had been in communication on and off for the past couple of years, but mainly just to say hello on Facebook. About a month before I signed the divorce papers, he invited me to a Pampered Chef party at his place. He told me to bring my husband along, but I told him that we were getting a divorce. I went to the party alone. It was fantastic. He and I talked about what I was going through with the divorce. Soon after the party, he invited me over for some Southern comfort food aka fried chicken and biscuits. The next time that I saw him, I had been to my parents house and there was an article about the possibility of an airport in my parents’ home town so I stopped by his place to show him the article. We sat and talked for what seemed like forever, realizing how much we had in common. For the first time, I actually broke down in front of someone. I cried and cried on his shoulder. He became my safe place in pretty much an instance. On the day that I signed the divorce papers, he made me a picnic dinner and took me to sit by the river to eat. It was so different from what I’d been experiencing. But I was scared. I was literally just divorced. I didn’t want to be in a relationship. I didn’t want to jump from a bad marriage into a new relationship. But he quite honestly wore me down and helped me see that I could be loved. He wrote me love letters when he was away at work. He sent me sweet emails. He cooked for me and held my hand and walked with me out of my funk. I was able to stop taking antidepressants. I was able to stop going to therapy. I was able to see that I was worth being treated well. And we are still together, going strong in our relationship. We have had a couple of bumps along the way, but they were easily smoothed over. We both work very hard in this relationship (he had been in a very difficult relationship years earlier) to make each other feel cherished. But it doesn’t feel like work at all. It feels like this is exactly how things are supposed to be. That we were meant to be together from the start. And it just took some struggling through the murky waters of bad relationships to truly recognize and honor our new relationship.
So don’t give up. Don’t devalue yourself just because someone else does. Take hold of your life and claim it’s worth. We all deserve to be loved and cherished. And that is my hope for everyone who reads this. That if you don’t currently have someone who is loving you the way that you should be loved, that you will have that some day. And that you will have it without having to go through pain and heartache.
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