I guess sometimes, we just fall in love with the
wrong people! It happens! We all have flaws and I know I have them too!
When you marry you expect that you are going to go through hurdles that life
throws at you, that you are going to face them together and that you are going
to have to work at it, but overall, there should be more ups than downs. What I didn’t realize was that this person
didn’t just have flaws (as we all do) but he had so many more issues going on
than most ‘normal’ people. I don’t know
how this blind sided me but it did.
Thankfully now in my walk in life, I have much more discernment about
people – thankfully!!! In reality, I
think I just ‘bit of more than I could chew’ as the saying goes, when I chose
to love this person and later, chose to marry him. Looking back, there were warning signs if I
am truly honest with myself, but somehow at the time I didn’t ‘see’ them. Turns out, not only did he have more issues
than most people, but he also had one personality – or front – for the outside
world, friends and family and one for me & my girls at home (and sometimes
his family)! His family used to joke
about his temper but when we were just living together I used to wonder what
they were talking about, as I hadn’t seen it (turns out they were right). To cut the story short, I ended up being with
someone who was controlling, manipulative, verbally abusive and threatening,
and at the end of the day, I couldn’t be the only one trying to make it work,
eventually, it just didn’t and he called it ‘quits’. I guess the positive in all this was that I
had tried for so long that it really was over, I no longer had love for this
man nor him for me, so that meant for me, it wasn’t ‘devastating’. I mean, that must be really awful. I can’t
imagine what it could be like to have your marriage be over and to still be in
love with that person. It’s funny, I was
so used to making excuses for him and his behaviour that I was shocked when
someone (not naming names here) told me ‘that’s abuse you know’ I was shocked.
‘Oh no, I said, he just…’ and she was like… ‘hunny, no, that really is
abuse’. I had another person say they
had watched my soul being sucked away.
Really sad when you think about it.
How did I get from being a confident, outgoing, happy person to someone
so depressed and afraid of their partner??
Not only that but I came to realize how much he lied about me to his
friends and family, & not just about me, but too me. Well that was the tip
of the iceberg really, because a lot of his stories unraveled after I was out
of the house and had the freedom to talk to people. Let’s face it, without trust (on top of
everything else) what do you have? I’m
pretty sure he never had an affair, but he did (and still does) talk a lot of
nonsense. I felt like so much of my life had become a
lie! How could I have fallen for this person?
But don’t get me wrong, even if there you no longer love the other
person, divorce still hurts in the sense that when you are already broken from
abuse, you can feel like a failure on top of it all. Perhaps now you will have a better
understanding how women like myself, turn to food and also are weary of
trusting people. I mean, I tell people
how it is or what I think, how hard is it to expect some honesty in return? Eventually, you’re lies catch up with you! Oh my gosh – it must be an exhausting way to
live, trying to keep your stories straight!
To top it all off, my husband was overweight
himself (he was when I met him, but that never bothered me), but he became more
over weight and actively discouraged me from loosing weight and
constantly told how much he preferred bigger women (its true, not all men are
attracted to slim women), but I realize now that it was really his way of
dealing with his own insecurities.
Well this is how I got to ‘that’ dark place in
life. Which had a spiraling effect on my
weight gain (which I also have to take responsibility for, for myself, afterall, I could've handled things differently).
You know, we can point fingers at each other all
we like, him and I, to lay blame, but at the end of the day, I have to take
responsibility for my part in the relationship.
I have my own flaws but on top of that, on some level, I chose to ignore
the warning signs, I chose to love him, I chose to marry him and I chose to
live with him for as long as I did.
People have asked me questions like ‘why did you listen to him?’ ‘why
did you believe him when said you were useless and this and that’ ‘why on did
you have another child to him after the first one?’, to name a few questions. I know looking back, that it didn’t make
sense – why would he say he wasn’t attracted to small people when I was small
when he met me?, why did I believe him that I was useless, when I had a
successful career, that included promotions, where management asked my opinion
on matters and so forth and had other successes in life? I know, right? Crazy! but when negative things are
constantly being told to you when you are with a controlling person, I don’t know,
they seem to start slowly, then before you know it, you are under their spell
and eventually you become too afraid and too worn down to stand up to it. (It’s easy to judge if you haven’t been with
someone like that Yourself).
No comments:
Post a Comment