Today, my thoughts wander to whether I hate men. I love them, but I think maybe I hate them. Right now, I do not like any of them. I do not like my husband. I do not like my ex husbands. I do not like men who are kind or men who are mean or men who are in between. I just do not like them. But I love them. I don't know how to work that out in my head. I feel relationships feel good until they are real and then, they make me crazy. There is not a more eloquent descriptive word for it. I feel crazy. I feel like it is always a constant struggle and eventually everything in the relationship just hurts. It is part of my pattern. I feel like I have no business being in any relationship at all. When this marriage started to hurt me more than make me happy, I just wanted to give up. To run away. To hide from all relationships. Love is such a complicated and hard thing. People bring their pasts with them. They bring their futures with them. They bring the baggage of all of their journeys and another suitcase full of expectations. I do too. I do not know why I think that any relationship should be perfect. I know there will be hurt and anger and uncomfortable silence. I know that there will be times when things are bad and times when things are good. But I feel like I have had too much of the bad times and not enough of the good times. I don't know if that is just my thinking or if it is reality.
I have a very hard time forgetting the hurts, but I am not sure if this is justified or not justified. The hurts can be so enormous. So cruel and lasting. To be called a bitch can be forgotten. To be told you are the worst women in the world and be attacked on every possible level is very much harder to forget. Forgive, sure. I can forgive. But forget. To believe that the words said are not true. To believe that the lies or the abuses will not happen again. To believe that it will pass and not return. That is the hard part. That is the part that makes me feel that I have no business being in a relationship. That's the part that makes me want to wrap my heart in armor and let the chill of the metal turn me cold toward romantic love.
I have been through almost anything a woman can. I could sit in at least 10 different support groups and have something to contribute. In my adult life, I have been beaten, controlled, raped, verbally abused on a level that is beyond comprehension. I have been emotionally abused (a term I do not use lightly and am fully aware of the real definition of), imprisoned in my own home, stalked, manipulated, stolen from, used, lied to, isolated, shamed, beaten some more, emotionally abused some more, cheated on over and over again, stalked some more. I have had to disappear. I have had to fight with all I have. I have had to gather strength that I did not know was possible just to stand up and move forward. I have had to leave. All from men. Men. And I know this is why I hate them.
I have been loved, but I'm not sure I have been loved in a way that others have been. I have not felt respected or protected or secure or cared for. I have been loved. I know this for sure. I am still loved. I know this for sure as well, but I do not understand the kind of love that I have experienced. It is a love that does not make sense to me. It is not the love I have in my suitcase of expectation. A love that does not make me fear for myself or my children. I have not had that love. I have had it for a while, and then it is ripped from me in a moment sometimes and slowly over time other times. Love. The hardest word in history to define. What is it? And why have I wanted it so much?
I have loved. I have also hurt men. I never went into any relationship with the intent of hurting anyone. I honestly believe I never initiated any hurt. I went in with positive intentions. With feelings of hope. There has been only one relationship that I willingly endeavored without real affection and feelings of at least some form of love. That was a very long time ago and I paid dearly for it. When I was young, I was not knowledgeable or mature or unselfish enough to do it perfectly, but I did love and I did have positive intentions. What I learned of love from my life before my first real relationship was about commitment no matter what. It was about overcoming obstacles together. It was also about much conflict and hurt. And I did not want that part of it. I did not want the conflict and hurt. But it was part of love. I learned that and I knew that. But then, things happened. Things I did not expect. Things that did not make sense to me. Things that were beyond my scope of what love was supposed to be. Things beyond even my understanding of what people were supposed to be. Things that people do not warn you can happen.
My first marriage was basically an escape from my parent's home. It was not that my parent's home was so bad, it was that I was a teenager and I wanted to be an adult. I wanted out of their home and to have freedom. I took the opportunity when it came. I think it's possible that I thought I loved that person. But now, it is difficult to imagine any kind of love feeling. It turns my stomach to imagine that I would have ever felt any love for him. It was a magnificent mistake, but I cannot regret it because it gave me a beautiful son that has been a source of light to me since he came to the world. It gave me him. So it was necessary and irregrettable. But the things that happened inside of it changed me forever. The specifics are for another day, but that relationship damaged me for a very long time. I came out of it a completely broken person who had no idea who I even was anymore. I came out of it exactly as he intended me to be; void of myself. Broken. Weak. Lost. But I came out of it for my son. I distinctly remember the day I gained the strength and perspective to walk away. My son had been born and I was looking into his tiny face and I had an overwhelming urge to protect him from his father. To protect that sweet innocent boy from this man doing to him what he had done to me. Before then, I am not sure I was fully aware that his father had done anything so terrible to me. I knew I was very unhappy. I knew I felt crazy and people were noticing that I was losing myself. I knew I did not wish to even be in the same room with him. I knew I did not like myself any more and that I was having panic attacks and was afraid very often. Not afraid for my physical self, he was far too cunning to ever hit me. But afraid for what bizarre, hellish punishment would befall me if I took any step in any direction. What twisted words would be said to me or to others or what mistake I would make today. Afraid to breathe. Afraid to speak. Of all of my relationships in my life, this one was, by far, the most damaging. There was never a bruise left on my body. Never a blatant thing I could put my finger on and say "This is what is wrong." I understand it now, but only because I have studied psychology and have explored the mind of a sociopath. I was married to one. Someone without a conscience. Sometime who has, still to this day, spent a significant amount of his time attempting to fully destroy other human beings in ways that normal people cannot believe or comprehend. And I will never be the same for having experienced being the victim of that. I could have, perhaps, healed from it had I not had a son with this man and will continually have to have contact and protect my son from the effects of it. I have been forever tied to a sociopath and he will always wield some power over me because of that. At least now, I know what I am dealing with and I know how to carefully tread on explaining and helping my son understand as he goes through life.
I went straight from that marriage to another one. I was only 20 years old. When I left marriage 1, I was a broken, fragile, very lost and confused thing. A shell of person. Nothing of myself. But I slowly began to find myself again. I slowly gained some confidence and strength and beauty again. I began to find me. Clumsily, usually drunkenly, but steadily. And I started sleeping with this boy. I did not care much for his personality. I did not like him all that much on any deep level. I certainly did not love him. Never. Not at any time. But my morality did not want me to sleep with many men; I didn't wish to be a "whore." And my fragility wanted me to feel attractive and worthy of affection and attention. So, I started sleeping with this boy. He was ok. I did not hate him (yet). I enjoyed spending time with him. I think I only enjoyed spending time with him because he showered me with attention and affection and made me feel like I was the only girl in the world. Made me feel loved. It didn't matter to me that I did not love him back. It didn't matter to me that I did not even really like him. It mattered that he made me feel better about myself. It mattered that he made me feel lovable. But then, I got pregnant. <Expletives> And in the lovely tradition of the south and misguided morality, it was certain that we would have to be married. No child out of wedlock! He must "do the right thing" and I must just go with it. I will say that I tried desperately to back out of the marriage. I even suggested that we pretend that we got married and not actually get married while we were on our way to the "alter" in Las Vegas. He demanded we get married. He physically took my hand and drug me out the door of the hotel in my silly wedding dress with a 5 months pregnant belly stuffed in. And we got married. I would say that this was necessary and irregrettable because I gained not one but two beautiful sons that have been a source of light for me, but I would be kind of wrong. I did not need to be married to him for these sons to come. The first son was accidental and the second was conceived abusively. Husband 2. What to say. He did not break my spirit. If anything, he made me stronger. He was not smart or cunning or manipulative enough to do what my first husband had done. He lacked the skills to emotionally harm someone enough to break them. But his fist was strong. He beat me. He did not beat me once. He beat me multiple times. I was fragile enough to allow it to happen. To rest in it while I gained strength. To contemplate over and over again while he isolated me and controlled me and alienated me from anyone and everyone and did what all men who use their fists do.
But over the course of that relationship, while my bruises would come and go from the beating, my emotional wounds were beginning to come to the surface from Husband 1. Yes, being beaten was an injustice. Yes, I had rage. But I will say 1000 times with conviction and never back down from it: I will take a punch over emotional beatings any day. The bruises heal, the evidence is easy for others to see, the scars remind you that you have been mistreated. It is straightforward. It is easy to know it is wrong. It's easy to explain to yourself. It's easy to explain to others. It's uncomplicated. It's clear that it isn't your fault and nothing you could do would cause you to deserve it. At least, it was to me. It is not to everyone. Maybe it was because I was the ex-wife of a sociopath. A wife-beater seemed like the difference between Calculus and basic addition and subtraction. The wife-beater was the latter. Simple, straight forward. Again, the details and day to day emotions and rages of that time are for another day. But in general, I was a battered wife who cried and hid and felt the trauma, guilt, shame but was quietly healing at the same time. This is when I found Buddhism. This is the time I learned to forgive. This is the time I learned how to let go of anger and rage. And I found it out of necessity. I found it out of desperation. The way, I think, many people find God. I am still perfecting that practice. At that time I was a newborn deer just trying to learn how to walk in forgiveness. But I did not forget.The intense anger that bubbled below the surface in me and often seeped out of my skin like sweat started to change during that time. My black eye was just an abusive jerk who I allowed to hit me. My black heart was starting to heal. I could handle being beaten. It was just bruises. I knew I'd leave eventually. I knew it would not last forever. But then, he made the mistake of putting a tiny bruise on my son. He spanked him with such force that he bruised him. That night was a Reckoning. That was the end. To this day, I will hate him for that and that alone. That is unforgivable.
When I left that relationship, I was stalked for a year. Somewhere in the leaving and stalking, my youngest son was conceived. A violent circumstance that can be inferred, but I do not wish to publish in clear words. Eventually, I fled and moved in with a man many hours away. I assumed anonymity. The man and I were very good friends. We were close. I loved him in that way. He loved me in that way as well. We considered getting married. He even game me a ring. We gave love a try. We walked the walk and talked the talk. But, in the end, we became roommates and lived in separate bedrooms and knew that we were very good friends, maybe the best. Probably still would be if his wife would let him speak to me. I do not have a laundry list of things this man did to damage me. He didn't. He gave me more friendship and security and time to heal than anyone in my life has or had. But, he was also married at the time I moved in with him. I was the "other woman" and I did not know it. Not for months. I found out accidentally. He left his family home to get an apartment with me. The only real negative thing I can say about that relationship was the he lied to me many times. But I was so incapable of trust on any level at that point that it was not that significant to me. I stopped trying to be his "fiance" because it was friendship. I stopped being his roommate because I fell in love with someone I'd already loved and Husband 2 had moved on to his second victim so I was free to return from anonymity. I was old news.
My third marriage was nothing short of true love. I married my high school sweetheart on a random Wednesday, half drunk, high on Xanax and inhibition and about 45 minutes after the proposal. We bought simple wedding bands with crosses on them at a pawn shop on the way. Nothing mattered. He was/is an alcoholic, an addict, half crazy, full of passion and unpredictability and I loved him. I have never, after him, had to try to figure out what love is. That was love. I do not think many get to experience the kind of love we had. That love will endure until we die. We will never stop feeling it. I am not ashamed to say that it will never end. Anyone who has ever been in a room with us together knows it is true. We will feel love for each other until we are gone and then some. We were high school sweethearts. He was my first love as a child and he was my first love as an adult. Our marriage was a complete mess. He was struggling with alcoholism and sobriety. I became, if I wasn't already, the very definition of codependent. We were more than a mess. We were constantly in some battle or another that gets told at every AA/NA/Al-anon meeting in the world. But, it didn't really matter. When we locked eyes, we were in love and electricity filled the room. A tragedy occurred a year into our marriage and his best friend and a man who I loved almost as much as I loved him died. It was both a defining moment in our love and in our demise. The entirety of the day to day of our messy struggle is, like all of them, a story for another day. But it didn't matter. Love endures all things. I know what that means now. But, I am not married to him anymore. I had to leave him. It was the hardest decision I will probably ever have to make in my life. After almost 5 years together, I discovered (because he overdosed) that he had been significantly drug addicted and had been lying, stealing, manipulating and living an entire double life. I could have endured that. I really could have. I could have moved past it and tried to regain some kind of trust. I could have gotten past the shock and the slap in the face and the complete blind side of it all. I could have. I could possibly even recognized inside of the marriage my own codependence (as it was, I discovered it afterward) and healed from it. But, he did not overdose once. He overdosed several times. He went to detox and returned to using. He committed to sobriety and used immediately afterward. He started sleeping with a silly old scratch to try to make it into more of a wound that would leave a scar. He beat us to death. But I still loved him. I was paralyzed by that. But, I looked at my sons and knew that I could not let them either know or endure the man that they had come to love as their father had become not just a recovering alcoholic, they knew that, but a true junkie. The kind that sends children into adulthood with scars and patterns of behavior that destroys their happiness. I couldn't do that to them. I could have endured. But, I did not have a choice. I believe that as firmly as I believe that the sky is blue and trees are green. I did not have a choice.
After I left, he went to a very bad place. I had to flee again. He, in his drug-fueled insanity, had made threats to me and told plans to his family and took action to say he was going to commit a murder-suicide and that was that. I do not know that he was capable of going through with it. I do know that the man who he was when I ended our marriage was not him. It was someone else in his skin. It wasn't the man I loved. It was this other guy, a guy I'd named Tom a long time ago. He was Tom Squared. And I had to flee and hide again.
I started talking with a friend I'd known since we were children. A facebook connection at just the right time, I guess. I started talking to him and kept talking to him and we missed a random meeting or two and somehow realized that we had feelings. We planned a meeting. And we met and there was a massive chemistry. I was, quite frankly, deliriously happy with him even in the midst of the polar opposite disabling pain of having to divorce someone I will always love. He worked in other countries and was gone half the time. One month home. One month gone.
When he was home, I was living an amazing life. He was amazing. We laughed so hard together and got along so well. We wanted the same things. We loved the same things. He was spontaneous yet stable. He was responsible yet irresponsible in all the right ways. He was like a breath of fresh air. He was uncomplicated and easy but so fun and full of life. We seemed so perfectly matched that it felt like home. We fell in love. I don't know exactly how to explain falling in love with him while I still loved someone else. I guess it is like having two children. You don't believe you are capable of ever loving something as deeply as you love your first child, but then you look into your second child's face and you realize that your capacity for love far exceeds what you believe it can be. The love I felt for Husband 3 was not the same as the love I felt for Mr. New. It felt healthier. It felt good. It felt rational. It felt like something from a storybook. I felt like I was saved from the messy mess of my third marriage and complicated divorce by this knight in shining armor that was all things good. It wasn't the same passionate, electric love. It was a comfortable, light, happy, carefree love. A love that feels like home. Honestly, he was all things good. Even when we disagreed, it was good. It was uncomplicated. It was so easy and wonderful and I'd never been happier. I felt like I'd been given a gift to compensate me for the years of pain I had endured. I thought he was my reward. I thought that the healing and learning and pain I had taken to discover so much about myself in the in-between of him and husband 3 had given me the ability to recognize what a healthy relationship could be. I felt free and light and so very happy.
When he was away, I mourned and learned and felt and dealt with the pain of divorce 3 and letting go of the electric love. I was living a double life as well, I suppose. But the time alone when I could reflect and heal and be confused and all the necessary things was precious to me. After a year with Mr. New, we moved in together. A few months later, he proposed. The problems started when we decided to move in together. Things started to get less easy and his demons started to come out. I think I had properly prepared myself for the minor (to me.. remember, I've been married 3 times already at this point..so it WAS minor) commitment of moving in together. I'm not sure he had. We maintained an outside appearance to most of the world that things were still blissful, but things started to happen. He would have outbursts of pure verbal cruelty. He started trying to control me. He started telling me what to wear and how to fix my hair and criticizing my body and my actions and my everything mercilessly. He started censoring my words and telling me what to do in completely inappropriate, sometimes shocking, ways. It was like some strange culmination of husband 1's cruelty and husband 2's control. But it would come quickly and go quickly. I would be left shocked and confused and have no idea what had happened. Sometimes it'd be provoked by something real, sometimes it was unprovoked by anything. It got worse. It continued, randomly, but regularly, for years. I would try to talk about it with him. He would fight with all of his might against talking, feeling, knowing.
I had not married him in those years. I chose, by my own choosing, a very long engagement. It is not that I did not want to marry him. I did. Even with the Jekyll and Hyde insanity, I really did want to marry him. It was that I did not want to be married to anyone ever again. I was terrified of it. I knew that that permeated our relationship. I had rebounded so much from my previous state of codependence that I was now just pouring my emotions out as they came. When I felt it, I let it out. I am tempering that more now, but not in those years. That did not help. He had never been married. He had never really even been in a serious, long committed adult relationship. I think his deep demons that he was not even aware of came straight to the surface when he was facing living together, giving up his home and starting one with me, getting married, sharing his life. He would stuff those feelings away and then explode. I do not know. I am still in this marriage. I do not have the power of hindsight yet.
I did marry him despite all of this. About a year and a half ago. What seemed to others to be a perfect couple in a perfect wedding on a perfect beach wasn't really that. We have this way of maintaining appearances. It's not really my style, but it is his and I have really tried to respect that outside our own circle of friends who are aware of the demons and how they manifest so bizarrely. And, sometimes, our life is still a fairy tale. Sometimes, I am still a princess and he is still Prince Charming. But, our storybook wedding has a few ripped out pages. We fought our entire honeymoon and had the worst fight thus far of our life during that time. I think both of us were finally letting the fears and baggage and suitcases open up and come out on that trip and we took it directly out on each other. I told him the night before the wedding that I did not think I could do it. He, rightfully, became angry. We fought. But we got married the next day. We fought on our wedding night. We fought the days after. Between perfect beach moments and wonderful dives, excellent meals, unadulterated fun, and amazing people, we fought hard. We fought dirty and mean. We even fought physically once. It was both the best and worst experience we had had together. There was a moment on my honeymoon that I wanted to die. Honestly wanted to die. It felt literally as though there was just no point any more in attempting to do this thing they call love. And I wanted to give up on all of it. And there was a moment on my honeymoon that I believed I was the happiest and luckiest person in the world. Bipolar love. Roller coaster. It still is. Right now, sitting here, I have bruises. I'm beaten up. The relationship is currently paralyzed. I have decisions to make. And it seems that no one really knows that except a very few. Appearances and all that. Living the perfect storybook life. It is not true. This is not a fairy tale. I am not a princess. He is not a prince.
But there's something about him that is different. I do not know if it is because I have so much insight from my own experiences and recoveries or if it is because somewhere in all those years I managed to study and work in counseling and psychology. I do not know if it is because we are much more deeply connected than even we may admit. But I see this thing inside of him. I see this person in him that is not capable of the things he says and does. I see the shame in him after a cruelty. I see the innocence in him. I see his own shock that he is capable of doing and saying such things. I see the confusion in his eyes about what he has done. I see that he did not know those demons lived inside of him. I see it very clearly. If I did not see that, I would not be sitting here. I would not have married him. He would not be husband 4. I would not be so confused. I would have gone away a long time ago. But I see this better person who is battling things that have nothing to do with me. I feel immense compassion. Immense love. Immense feelings of wanting to take him in my arms and comfort him for what he has done to me. It sounds insane, but it is very real. But I also feel a seething rage. A need for revenge. At times. At times, I feel a very scary indifference. The indifference bothers me the most. Nothing seems to make any sense. Bipolar love. Roller coaster. Up and down and round and round. Our relationship is paralyzed. I don't know where to go from here. I hate this. I hate being here again. And the last incident with Mr. Hyde has put me into a state of complete and total ability to make any move. I'm just Frozen.
I feel it important to note here that I am not, was not, have never been blameless in any of my relationships. I will say that I think I was fairly blameless in the first marriage. I do not believe any action or non action I took in that marriage would have changed anything. He was a special case. But my others, I had a part. I played a role. I had responsibility. I was not perfect and never would claim to be. I did not deserve the manipulation or abuses or beatings or words, etc, but I was not blameless. I played my part. I did things wrong. I was/am a bad spouse as well. I am the subject of their stories too and they will list my transgressions as well. But it's my party and I'll cry if I want to.
And I don't know if I hate men. Or if I love them. I felt crazy for a while, but now I just I just feel tired. Men have taken too much and I'm tired of gaining strength over and over again. Every time I let go, something makes it all reattach itself. Maybe the ocean will finally take it away.
