When it all began, my husband and I were deeply in love. We enjoyed spending time together talking, joking, laughing, dreaming, and being romantic. Our story of how we met, dated, and eventually married was precious and unique. I always thought nothing could take away what we had. I was wrong.
We married and worked hard to get through college and begin our family. Within a few years, we were able to buy a starter home. We made new friends and stayed close to our families. We raised our children with the Christian values we were raised with and wanted our children to be close to their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Within five years of marriage, we had a few children and life was very busy. The economy tanked and my husband was left unemployed. He searched locally for new employment but found nothing. He eventually extended his search and found a good-paying position out of state that required relocation. I was very resistant to uprooting my family and leaving my mother and siblings. I had never lived outside of the county I was raised in, so moving out of state was a big move for me.
I eventually agreed to our move. My husband headed out a few months before we did to start his new job, find a new home, and evaluate school systems for our children. I flew out as the opportunity presented itself. We eventually reunited as a family in a new state, city, and community.
I struggled with the adjustment to our new world and life. I began to find fault in my husband. I started to put conditions on our intimacy and sex. If I wasn’t happy, we weren’t going to be intimate or have sex.
My life was harder now because we had moved away from my family and it was my husband’s fault. My husband tried to explain that we didn’t have other options and needed employment to avoid financial hardship and bankruptcy. It didn’t matter, it was his fault and he needed to fix it so we could move back to be closer to my family.
For the next ten years, I controlled my husband and held over his head the fact that I wasn’t happy. No matter how hard he claimed to work or how much he made, I made sure he knew that I wasn’t happy.
Sure, I made friends and assimilated into the community but I wasn’t back home close to my family and our children weren’t getting the opportunity to grow up with their cousins like I did. Never mind the fact that my siblings had started to move for their careers and scattered across the states. It was my husband’s fault. He was supposed to ensure I wouldn’t have to live a life away from my family.
I had my husband wrapped around my finger. He worked with a sense of desperation to be promoted, and get salary raises, and when he came home he would take care of our children so I could rest from being with them. I didn’t want to work but I also got to the point where when they were home I was on the phone with my mother or siblings trying to stay abreast of all that was happening without me being there with them.
Having my husband wrapped around my finger was satisfying for a while. I controlled him and punished him for failing to provide me with ‘stability’ and not ‘fighting’ for me so I could have the life I had dreamed of.
However, after years of this, parts of my husband changed and then disappeared. His wit and humor all but disappeared. He stopped sports. He stopped dreaming of being an entrepreneur. He stopped sharing his life with me. He stopped dreaming with me. He was measured in what he would talk about with me or what he said.
I didn’t realize it then but I had ‘beat the life out of him’ by punishing him for failing me and our children. I put unrealistic conditions on him and my love for him. I guilted him for wanting to be romantic or intimate. When he had something to celebrate with me, I disregarded it because it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.
Finally one day, after our second move for my husband’s career, I decided I was done with the sacrifice, so I started an affair with a divorced neighbor. While I didn’t flaunt it, my husband sensed my affections were elsewhere. When he found out, he went to the neighbor and confronted him.
The neighborhood had caught wind of my affair so it was time to move. At that point, my affair partner backed off from our affair, and from that point on, my husband was determined to relocate us back home to where we were raised. It took several months but he did find a job and then we moved back.
We were finally home. Our children could be close to their cousins. I could be close to my mother and siblings. However, many of my siblings and their families had moved across the states so my dreams were dashed to pieces at this point.
The problem was, I was so angry with my husband. I thought our marriage could go back to how it was before our moves but it never got back on track fully.
The habits I had formed and how I treated my husband never went away. I still held intimacy over his head and he never seemed to trust me again. He was still selective about what he would talk about or share with me for fear that I would use it against him, criticize him, or bring it up in an argument.
My discontentment with him increased. I began to despise him more because he seemed like a shell of the man he once was. He seemed so flawed and weak. I went from adoring him to despising him. I had lost so many years of my life in a marriage where I was forced to live away from my family and without the stability I needed.
In the end, I ended our marriage through a final ‘revenge affair’ with a man who would give me what I wanted, ‘stability’ and control over my life. A man who if I am being honest years later, used me as much as I used him to get out of a marriage gone bad. A few years after our divorce, my revenge affair and actions seem somewhat childish and have been very hard on our children.
I now know that the ‘beginning of the ending’ of our marriage started with my manipulative and spiteful behavior. My current therapist suggests that I not take this learned manipulative and conditional love behavior into my new marriage but that is so much harder said than done.
I still struggle with it today — and when things are hard, I tend to revert to this detrimental behavior. I even use it with my children. Bad habits are hard to break even when you see how harmful they are.