Breathe066
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Other
Posts: 78
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« on: April 01, 2017, 01:57:46 PM » |
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I am middle-aged and have been married for less than a year to someone whom I believed was the love of my life. The first time he left me, while we were engaged, he was in a house-rattling rage. Very drunk. And he was accusing me of infidelity on the basis of something that made absolutely no sense. I was terrified. But I was also in complete shock. I thought it was the alcohol. He drank too much. He had lived with me for about six months at that point and I knew he had a drinking problem. A day later when he texted or called and said he felt terrible about what had happened, he'd just had a lot to drink, and the things I had said had really upset him, that my refusal to even acknowledge what I had done wrong had enraged him, I did the codependent, needy thing that I do: I said I was sorry and "let's forget about it. Try not to drink so much."
Eventually, it became clear that his alcoholism wasn't the only problem, it was just the medication he used for BPD.
After going to counseling and having him reject the counselor, then moving to another counselor, and then another because no one told him what he wanted to hear, I found out that he had been diagnosed with BPD years ago. (Not from him--he becomes absolutely enraged at such a suggestion, which I only made once.) The counselors we went to, even though we each did individual therapy, either never figured out his disorder or never shared it with me, or maybe they did figure it out but his demanding that we change counselors pre-empted any real help. One did say to me "I don't think your relationship is sustainable, in truth. Are you sure you want to continue in this relationship? I fear you may have bitten off more than you can chew." That, to a co-dependent with a savior complex like me, sounds like a challenge, not a warning.
You may wonder why I married him after he'd left me four times in less than a year, left me after accusing me of the most egregious and horrifying things, left me after spreading terrible lies and humiliating personal details about me to his co-workers. It might help to understand that we knew each other in high school. I had a huge crush on him back then. He was devastatingly handsome, coolly remote, dark, moody. My kryptonite. I didn't know him well. He was far too popular and desirable for me to even have the courage to speak to him. But I knew enough about his family to know that they were at least as messed up as mine and maybe even more so.
After he graduated, many years passed before I saw him again. By this time, he'd been through two marriages and an erratic job history. He swept me off my feet. And by swept me off my feet, I mean he romanced me to a degree that I had never before experienced. He was incredibly romantic. I was over the moon. I couldn't believe how much he adored me, how kind and gentle and loving, how sweet and tender and passionate he was. Unlike nearly every man I had ever known, including my ex-husband (who had been physically abusive and an addict, and who I had divorced almost 20 years earlier), he was always accessible. He was always texting and calling. Always posting love songs to me on Facebook, sending me cards, flowers, planning magical weekends. I hated being away from him.
I actually believed that I had found the most emotionally healthy man in the world. Why? Because he said his most recent ex-wife was his best friend and still came over to hang out with him. Only recently have I realized that he was probably keeping her dangling as they went through their separation and divorce in much the same way that he is trying to keep me dangling: by saying we just need time apart and time to heal and maybe after we divorce we can start over. Once he had me, he would mention how close he was to her and then weigh my reaction. I had a little experience with men who try to hold onto past intimate relationships and I thought that's what was going on. I felt great trepidation that maybe I was barging in on "unfinished business." When I told him this and that maybe we needed to cool it until he had reached some sort of closure, after all, they'd only been divorced for eight months, he pointed out that they had been separated for more than a year and that he would have a talk with her and tell her she couldn't come over and lounge with him on the couch while they watched their favorite shows anymore.
They had originally met in an online community--he said she was presenting herself as a man, oddly enough--and they were having emotionally intimate relationships with the same women on the site. That is how they got together behind his first wife's back. I didn't really grasp that when we were courting. And when I did, later, he wrapped it all up in smooth, intelligent words and made it more palatable to me, the woman who was hopelessly in love with him and intent on believing that our relationship was a departure from his earlier relationships. He had married that woman who was pretending to be a man online. She became wife No 2. and like Wife No. 1, she gained a huge amount of weight during their marriage, lost her self-confidence, and looks like a hunted and haunted animal in the photos from their last few years together. His narrative of how she cheated on him and how Wife No 1 cheated on him never made any sense to me. He equated minor circumstantial evidence with deeply disturbing full-blown infidelity. But I wanted to be supportive of him. His tale of woe was gut-wrenching: being betrayed over and over had taken a toll, he said, and he had a hard time trusting. This, to a co-dependent like me, is like nectar to a bee-the siren's call to be the one who makes it all better.
He wanted to move in with me, even if it meant putting considerable geographic distance between himself and his children. He moved in and things got weird fairly quickly. He told me about risky behavior before I came along, about meeting a bunch of crazy women online--in fact his Facebook page was packed with them--and how he would meet them for sex, what he called "mercy f*cks"; he was, he said, doing them a favor, and now he couldn't get rid of them. He told me that some of them were so obsessive about him that if he unfriended them they might lash out at me, or they might post the naked pictures of him that he had sent them, so he didn't want to do that. When he finally did do it, he demanded that I unfriend former boyfriends even if we still had work associates in common and there could be job repercussions (and there were). He told me, after we had unprotected sex, about having unprotected sex with complete strangers in the months before we got together. I felt sick to my stomach, but we'd had unprotected sex so much at that point that worrying seemed absurdly belated.
When one of these crazy women contacted him, offering to fulfill "the dark sexual needs" that I, his girlfriend, "couldn't possibly understand," he showed me the message and asked me to step in and tell her to leave him alone instead of doing it himself.
Then, a few months later when repairmen at the house had to tear out my son’s closet, the two used condoms that spilled from his trash bin became a huge event in our marriage. My husband somehow believed they belonged to a man I rarely saw at work, much less outside of work. He admitted that he had googled everyone I ever mentioned from work. He had driven through my work parking lot to make sure I was there.
Later, he recalled the condom incident and accused me of having an incestuous relationship with my son. He told our therapist that he thought it was weird that my son and I were comfortable darting out of the house's only working bathroom wrapped in bath towels, whilst we knew the other was around. The fact that we had been on our own since my son was a toddler, the fact that having to get dressed in the bathroom everyday would be a big damn hassle, the fact that I grew up in a house where we kids kind of threw on a towel and ran for our rooms, none of this mattered. The new object of his counseling sessions was to make it look like there was something wrong with my relationship with my son. So, I distanced myself from my son. I basically stopped talking to him, just as I had stopped talking to anyone at work and had opted out of every possible networking group, robbing myself of the chance for a promotion, just as I had dropped every friend I ever had, just for him, just to comfort him, just to try and soothe his insecurity.
My poor son moved out.
Even that wasn't enough. The huge, entirely disproportionate blow-ups over nothing continued. When I told him I was nervous about getting married, he had another meltdown. He said I probably didn't want to marry him at all because I had someone on the side. I said I would marry him if he quit drinking. We married. He quit for a month. And our painful adventure continued. If I didn't respond to him in exactly the way he wanted me to respond, he accused me of no longer caring about him and carrying on affairs. He would even script how I "should" respond to him--"Why don't you just acknowledge that you can see how I would think that?" He suspected me of screwing around with everyone, even complete strangers. And when I would refer to this as accusing me without basis he would reply that he "wasn't accusing, just asking if you did. Is there anything wrong with asking? Am I not supposed to ask?"
So he asked day in and day out about everything from a pillow being moved to two cups being in the sink, to why I would choose to take a different route than usual to pick up my son at his ASLAM group. No detail was too small to elicit these "questions"--"Are you arranging to meet that guy later?"--questions that I wasn't supposed to take as accusations, and about which I was not allowed to be defensive, although the subtext of what he was saying was, let's face it, that he believed me to be a whore. I became so incredibly self-monitoring that I wouldn't even make the bed, for fear that he might notice something different and jump to the worst conclusion. I would keep the same glass around for days. I would refuse to answer any phone call if I didn't immediately recognize the number as someone who didn't threaten him. I hurried through everything so that I could keep the schedule he expected of me. Being stopped by an old acquaintance at the grocery store and engaged in a chat could hold me up by 5 minutes and he would note, when I got home, how long it had taken me and I would spend the rest of the night and the next day, minimum, fending off his attacks and accusations, which were, he said "Just questions. I've never heard you mention this person. Why would you suddenly want to chat with her? Is that really where you were?"
He left less than a month ago and says that expediting the divorce is imperative so that he can "rebuild" his life, and that we should both be in counseling (but he's not). Frankly, after being dragged to counselors every week so he could sit there, lie, then walk out and talk about how uneducated or stupid the counselor was only to eventually demand a new counselor, I have counseling fatigue.
My son and I are rebuilding our relationship, little by little. The big hug he gave me when we met for lunch was like sunshine after a long, cold winter. I am so ashamed of how I allowed myself to be manipulated and bullied. Reaching out to old friends is awkward. I feel like a fool and a failure.
I need friends. I need the support of people who know what I have been through. I was glad to find this this site.
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