Like Agnes, Agatha, Germaine and Jack…
My ex husband and I were best friends. We had so much fun together. Same sense of humor, great conversations, up until dawn laughing. Cross country road trips were a breeze because we had a blast. I honestly loved his friendship, I honestly honestly loved that.
But him as a husband/partner/in a relationship? Pure torture. Pure emotional abuse.
Two key people in my life, my mother and my ex husband… that’s 46 years of my life… these two people were the same. They dismissed my reality, siphoned my energy to suit them, they were indifferent to me even when I was clearly suffering and only truly accepted me when I was actively trying to make them happy or doing what they wanted. I was punished for asking for closeness, comfort, support or help. Not just told “I can’t help you”, but anger, rage and entitlement with a “how DARE you disturb me!!!!” fire behind it.
I questioned my perception of reality, I questioned if I was a bad person, I thought I was disgusting, ugly, lazy and not worthwhile. It eroded my sense of self daily. I held my head down. I stayed small. If I tried to rebel, to say “hey, this isn’t right! You aren’t treating me well! This isn’t FAIR!” they were indignant, contemptuous or worse, accusatory. All of a sudden my pain, my world is shut down and they start yelling at me for not being grateful enough, not being sexual enough, not loving him like a mom would love him – unconditionally and unrestricted. He didn’t want boundaries, or pushback.. .he wanted freedom to be the biggest asshole he could be. And my mom was the same way. She was the alpha, she should be able to do whatever she wanted and I should get in line, even if it actively hurt me. My decisions, key decisions about my life, were made with the lens of “will this make him/her happy?” not me. I was last in line.
So, loving my husband as a friend was a mindfuck. (Loving my mom as my mom was very similar.)
How can I love this person so deeply on one hand while they are also the reason I’m in pain?
It was so completely disorienting, it was a psychological trap.
Only one of us was expected to act “married”. He got the benefits of my loyalty, nurturing, labor and emotional availability without reciprocating any of it. He wanted a best friend plus a maid plus a therapist plus a sex partner while also reserving the right to be emotionally detached, domestically absent and financially self centered.
Because the friendship was awesome, it really messed with my head. It was a Jekyll and Hyde situation:
- In Friend Mode, I could laugh and joke and be myself. He felt safe and fun.
- In Marriage Mode, where adult partnership, shared responsibility and emotional presence are required – he became rageful, entitled, absent and cold but also entitled to my body. So he did NOT feel safe as this person.
Guess what that is? Gaslighting. Intermittent reinforcement which gives you a classic trauma bond.
- One day: laughter.
- The next: rage when I asked for help or comfort.
- One moment: kindness
- The next: silence or sulking because I wasn’t putting out.
So when I finally stopped over functioning in 2019, when I stopped doing everything in the house, stopped being available, stopped being his manager and his mommy… he collapsed. Not because he missed me, but he missed the function I served. That’s not love. That’s dependency.
This was my inner dialogue for 20 years:
- I am totally unreasonable for having any needs. He can’t handle it, it stresses him out. Never bring up anything to him.
- The friendship is so great. If I can stay in friendship mode while absorbing everything else. We’ll be ok. That means taking on all the chores, responsibilities, making decisions for the house without him, never ask for comfort, never bring up anything mundane… just be the manager of the life and house and treat him as your FRIEND with benefits ONLY.
- I’d ask myself daily “is it really that bad??” We laugh, we enjoy each others’ company… I’m the only one complaining. I’m one of those nagging, awful wives everyone talks about. Just be content with this. Just be happy. Do the labor, do the sex… you’ll be rewarded with a friendship in your 80’s.
- I thought if I did get love, it had to be earned through sex. He was always nicer the next day, softer, more kind. So, if I needed tenderness, if I needed to feel like a woman, I had to put out first. This makes me so fucking sad now.
- I was so burned out. I was so under appreciated. I had so many things on my plate and he had none. And I couldn’t even bring it to him. I hid it well. Even my friends had no idea. I was just happy on the outside and stressed out of my mind on the inside. And this is where society gets SO angry at women for changing. “She was FINE and then she wasn’t. Women are easily influenced by the world and they only want to leave because they think their unhappy because someone told her she was unhappy.” Huge NO to this. We are unhappy because we are GOOD at burying it for decades, DECADES. And then we boil over and we look like the FREAK WITCH that we are branded at the end of the relationship. All of us have whispered and whimpered “I need help, I need to be seen, I need to be loved and appreciated” and we are met with disdain and boom… a short 20 years later we can’t take it anymore. And how are we thanked? By being called crazy, hormonal and unbalanced. Fuck ya’ll.
- I would know in my bones that I was unhappy, lonely, that this was unfair… but then I would tell myself the friendship is worth it. Every fucking morning I would have this conversation with myself.
So, I was a little workhorse, taking care of everything, putting out and faking it and what did I get in return? Barely a roof over my head. Barely.
How this turned into severe CPTSD and trauma? I still don’t quite know. But I do know that it’s real and I feel it. I’m trying to purge the feelings of not being seen as an individual for 46 years now. I’m a deeply sensitive, emotionally rich, expressive creature and I turned myself into a “thing” that centered a man, cleaned, cooked and put out. I turned a toaster into an ice maker. I was doing what I wasn’t MADE to do. And I did it with zero gratitude and reward. I told myself the reward would come later when we were retired and I had that awesome friendship.
But he should have stayed Just a Friend, That’s what I see now.
Love would have celebrated who I was, encouraged it and been available for me. Love would have wanted me to be happy, love would have shared in my joy. Love would be seeing ME, wanting to connect with ME, not just my body, not just some headless part of me. Love would have helped me clean and repair things because we’d be together and we both had pride in our home. Love would have been partnership. Goals made together. Love would have looked SO much different.
This wasn’t love. At all. It never was.
It was never respect, either. And I could have dealt with no love, honestly, but the no respect thing… it finally caught up to me.
