For over 10 years, I tried to figure out how to make my marriage more bearable. My husband was a know it all, he wouldn’t bathe and he was combative to the point of driving me absolutely insane. He had to be right, even if he was going to zero in on a word I used and say that I used the wrong word so it negated my entire argument. He thought he was SO intellectually superior to me and I just let it go. I let him have it. My childhood had conditioned me to chase connection at the expense of my sanity and my self respect.
He fought to be right, he fought to not participate in the marriage, he fought to be left alone and I allowed it.
A more recent study in female rats finally validates the experience of abused women who stay. We are biologically programmed to smooth things over, to be extra friendly even when we are being harmed. To tend an befriend instead of fight, flight etc. It’s in our DNA. We want to make the relationship work because we were made to do so.
As he and I got older, he was spending ALL the money, he was hoarding, he was getting worse in attitude and the sheer volume of his consumption and neglect. I couldn’t manage it by myself. I was so in over my head and felt like I was losing this battle. He was spending $7-10K a month on his hobbies while lecturing me about using too much printer ink.
The only currency I had was sex. So I stopped giving him that.
Putting down this boundary finally showed me who he was, in vivid technicolor. Instead of that shaking him awake and seeing how much he was hurting me and killing the marriage, he doubled down that I owed him my body, that I should be his mommy and he would take on the role of the defiant child. And it hit me, he didn’t love me, he kept me around to serve him.
And I had made excuses for him for YEARS. I thought he was on the spectrum, I thought he had Asperger’s . But he never got diagnosed. And his intentions were to maintain control via making my life miserable, so that pointed to narcissism and emotional abuse. My only recourse was to leave, but I just couldn’t do it because of my programming.
The hardest part of all of this for me wasn’t necessarily the rage, neglect and abuse… it was that nobody believed me. Nobody could fathom that this lazy, seemingly docile, obese, sweet little programmer would be a monster. He was. It was covert and done behind closed doors… but it was insidious and broke me down. Into a version of myself that I’ll never recognize.
I joined several groups online to commiserate with other women who are married to men who either are on the spectrum or are narcissists. It’s uncanny how similar our stories are. How we all feel the same loss, the same fears, the same frustrations. I’m finding a lot of comfort talking to them because they get it, they understand what this is all like.
Spouses of these men (sometimes women) came up with a term to describe their experience. “Cassandra Syndrome”.
The term draws from the myth of Cassandra, the Greek prophetess cursed to speak the truth, but she was never believed. She foresaw the fall of Troy, the infamous Trojan Horse and the death of her loved ones. Every time she tried to warn people, they dismissed her as mad.
It describes the profound emotional isolation and psychological distress we, the Cassandras of the world, experience when our emotional needs and reality are repeatedly invalidated or misunderstood. You think you are going absolutely insane due to the cognitive dissonance. Your body, heart, mind and instincts are telling you to RUN away from your spouse, but you stay because you don’t believe yourself AND other people don’t believe you.
In this context, it reflects how these spouses often:
- Sense that something is wrong in the relationship – Emotional disconnection, lack of reciprocity, communication breakdown etc. You do NOT feel loved, respected or heard. You feel like a piece of furniture, not a cherished spouse.
- Try to express it, only to be dismissed, gaslit or pathologized as the problem. Your reality is WRONG. For decades. That can make you feel absolutely insane.
- Are not believed or supported by their partner, therapists or even social circles – because the neurodiverse partner may appear high-functioning or unaware of the harm. They are unaware OR they don’t care.
Over time, this leads to chronic loneliness, emotional burnout, erosion of self trust. Like you are screaming into the abyss while people laugh at you. Symptoms can resemble CPTSD, anxiety and depression. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. And unless you’ve experienced it, you cannot understand the PAIN that goes along with it because you spend every waking minute of your life trying to convince yourself that you are okay, that you can manage, that he doesn’t know what he is doing to you and because you love him, you endure and push forward.
Really think about that… I have spent DECADES overriding my instincts that my marriage wasn’t safe. I would let him crawl on top of me while actively saying “it’s okay, he’s your husband, he loves you, LET HIM. This is what you are supposed to do”. I handed myself over to my abuser on a silver platter. I let him in. I let him consume me, occupy me, conquer me and take over. I let it happen. I didn’t protect myself. I didn’t listen to my inner Cassandra, telling me to run away from him.
The conflict, fear and sheer anger I feel over this has killed my spirit. Absolutely. I’m desperately trying to navigate out of this. But nobody sees the weight, the cancer, the chasm inside of me. I was strip mined for my kindness, my energy and to use my body. It’s like a dystopian science fiction horror story. Healing from this has been all consuming and BRUTAL.
I brought this all up to my therapist and she said that she had neurodiverse married clients who cared about their spouse’s experience. That they wanted to do better, wanted to make their spouse feel safe and did the work to do so. My ex did NOT. He wanted to stay how he was, he wanted to be in control, dominant and RIGHT. He didn’t respect me and he expected me to serve him, unconditionally, but he never fully said this out loud. As if he KNEW this wasn’t totally right.
I think I am finally coming to terms that nobody will believe me. My mother and friends are still social media buddies with my ex husband. They don’t understand how much I’m trying to get away from him. I never want to see picture of him, know what he’s doing or have any connections to him. He hurt me so badly over the course of SO many years so I just want it to be a very faded memory. I don’t even want anything from inside our house.
I’m so hurt that I’m not believed. It makes me feel like a bad person, a weak person, a liar and that nobody gives a fuck about me. Unless I’m cheerful, strong, giving and adorable, I’m totally rejected. It makes recovering from all of this so much harder.
I recently found an old diary of mine from 1999. It was begging me not to date my now ex husband. Paragraphs on how my intuition was screaming at me, he’s just a friend, he’s no more than that, to move on, look for a better fit… Fuck. It was humbling to read that 23 year old me had more sense than 40-something year old me.
