My wife is more perceptive than I am. She realizes truths about us long before I do. I’ll never forget how much it hurt the first time she said “we should have left each other long ago.” I fought that when she said it.
It took me a while to realize she was right.
There have been times in this marriage when I should have left, and I didn’t. There have been times she should have left and she didn’t.
That’s why I fully admit I have trouble finding the right words to respond to some of the posters here who aren’t married and who seem to be staying against their own needs. If I could sit down with myself at 21 and talk to him, I might well tell him to get out fast. And yet, here I sit, glad I didn’t. I want to tell people not to stay through what I’ve stayed through, because it’s co-dependent and unhealthy and it does real harm. I barely held on, I held on to my own detriment, and I held on because I was sick. But today I’m glad I stayed.
It’s hard to pin down exactly why. Things have settled down for us drastically. Our first few years together, we fought, and fought hard. I’d barely ever even heard a raised voice before meeting her. I’m sure that’s not strictly true, but that’s how my memory stored it.
She wasn’t physically violent toward me, but she would break things and speed off in her car at speeds that scared the hell out of me. She would threaten herself and sometimes me. She had a baby girl (she was pregnant when we met) who saw me as her father (not literally…she’s always known I’m not her biological father but I’ve been in her life since she was a newborn and he ran off long before that). I think, in those early days, I stayed because I was afraid for that baby – her mom was in and out of hospital inpatient programs, and there was no one in her family psychologically healthy and capable of raising a child.
Of course, I was just a college kid myself, but I guess I saw myself as her only hope. I felt trapped but I had to take care of the baby. And I was trying to save my wife. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen in love with a woman I wasn’t trying to save.
The thing is, as my wife got further and further from her childhood, from her incredibly destructive family, and more into an adulthood of her own choosing, she got healthier. And that exposed my own problems. A lot of them.
I had a lot of insecurities I blamed on her that, really, came into my life LONG before she did. I had a lot of childhood things to deal with myself. Things I had put off dealing with because I was so busy trying to save her. It was a form of denial.
So, as she got better, I got depressed. Four years out of college she was stable and healthy and had shed a whole book full of misdiagnoses, and I got clinically depressed. I spent more than a year unemployed, gaining weight, lying about looking for a job because I fully intended to make the lies true in the morning. I was a huge drag on her and on our daughter (my stepdaughter…however you want to say it). I was harmful to them because I was an untreated depressed ass. It took the birth of a second child to pull me out of it. I never sought treatment of any kind until long afterward.
So yes, in the early days, I should have left her. And then, when I was depressed, she should have left me. And both of us were too co-dependent to do that.
That’s part of what we’re left with. Today, we’re both relatively healthy, both in treatment, and in love with each other, in love with the people we are now. We’re raising two amazing kids together, and it’s worth being together. But there were years, many years, when it really wasn’t. And I’ll never get them back. Neither will she. That hurts for both of us.
Sometimes, I see carers on here posting about their boyfriend/girlfriend, or even ex-bf/ex-gf, and honestly, I want to tell them to RUN. It’s not worth it. I went through it and probably lost years, and her case is relatively mild compared to many I read about here. It takes a lot of therapy for the two of us to be able to be normal together, and there are still landmines in both of our memories of each other. I might have been so much happier if I’d left long ago.
But then, I’m glad I didn’t. She’s my home, we’re home to each other, we’re both abused children raising a pair of unabused children and trying to make something right in the world by doing that, and building this family feels like finally satisfying a need I’ve never been able to voice. We’re pretty good to each other, and we each have ways we still wound the other but we’re both in therapy working on them. So we’re getting better to each other. We’re a long way from the healthiest marriage around, but we work our asses off at being right for ourselves and each other now.
I stay with her because, in my heart, I feel like she’s what holds the earth together beneath my feet. At the same time, in my head, I know that isn’t true and I could leave if things got as bad as they once were. I know I need to be prepared to leave and just love what we had, but move on if it gets unsafe again. I think I’m strong enough for that now. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I think most everything could have been easier for me if I hadn’t been so codependent for so many years. But then I love her and it’s safe to be with her now. Most of what I have to work on today is about getting more peaceful and honest with myself, and most of what she has to work on is pretty similar. We’re better off together than apart now, but I think our marriage takes more work than most should because of what we’ve done to each other. I tell our story to therapists and always get a huge sigh and some form of “wow…most people wouldn’t have gotten through all of that together.” Now, we look forward to coming home to each other, getting the kids to bed and spending the night together….but we paid too high a price for it, and I’d never advise anyone else to stay through what I stayed through. Or, really, what she stayed through.
