Preface: Before anyone reads my long account of my honest reflections on my marriage, please understand up front that though I believe my experiences will ultimately prove helpful to others, if you don’t believe you could view John or me with compassion once you know the issues in our marriage that were left unresolved when he suddenly passed into unconsciousness and then death, please don’t read on. If you do decide to read on, please feel free to comment (privately if preferred by email – marinagreenwood[at]hotmail[dot]com – or Facebook private message). I would like to know how what I have shared has affected others.
My Truth: I Was Emotionally Abused
My husband of 33 years died more than 3 years ago. I am still processing my grief. Most people assume that my grief is due to the loss of my husband, but it’s not. I do not grieve the loss of my husband, but rather I grieve that I am thankful that my years with him are over.
Most people who knew him and who knew us as a couple have a false impression of our marriage. He cultivated a public persona of being a loving husband who had a good marriage. In public he talked about how much he loved me and he called me his “sweet thang.” He liked to show public displays of affection. Every time he did that, I experienced a stab of pain from knowing that I was being subjected to participating in a false public persona that was not the reality I experienced in the privacy of our own home.
I was emotionally abused. Allowing myself to face and then process that fact has so far taken all of the past three years. I have had to give myself permission over and over to let myself continue to feel whatever feelings surface, because new feelings and new realizations and conclusions continue to seep up from where they were stuffed down for all those years. I know that everyone who is acquainted with me in my church congregation and through my work, if they saw the times when my tears still well up after all this time, would feel that I ought to be further along, be more recovered, and have moved on with my life more by now. I have had that reaction myself, which is why I have to consciously give myself permission to continue to face whatever must be faced in this process of sorting through my past truth, my present reality, and my future perspective. My reason for writing this has been to get as much as possible out of my mind and into words for the sake of being able to put an end to this process of sorting through my past that has taken longer than I expected it to. I’ve tried to pay attention to any thoughts or feelings that have surfaced and to be as thorough as possible so I can truly feel able to put my past behind with lessons learned and wisdom gained.
Being open with people who knew my husband arouses a lot of trepidation. But as long as I continue to protect his image, I feel that his domination over my life continues. My perspective is that if he could speak now, he would want the truth to be told. He used to appear to be humble by admitting he was a sinner when he taught or spoke publicly at church as a teacher, minister, or elder, but he was never willing to go beyond generalities and actually look at himself honestly. He knows fully now, as we all will when we stand before God. I think it’s because I am confident that he has seen himself clearly at last and has been completely perfected and fully forgiven by God that I don’t feel the temptation to protect his image any longer. If I could ask him if he would want me to tell the truth publicly, I think he would agree first of all that he did inflict pain, that he is genuinely sorry for the ways that his weaknesses and sins affected his family, and that if telling the truth can help me as well as others then it would be a good thing to do. He has no self-protective pride any longer, only humility and gratitude to God for his mercy. This perspective helps me to be able to forgive him, too. I can understand what probably influenced him to be the way he was without allowing that to excuse him any longer, and it helps me to know that he no longer excuses it, either.
I knew he had a lot of reasons for the way he was, and I prayed for patience and tried to remain hopeful that he would overcome more and more the “baggage” of the dysfunctions of his childhood. He was very much a wanted baby, he was sickly as an infant, and he came along after his parents had achieved the career and financial success they had worked hard for. He was reared more by his family’s maids than his mom or dad, and he was basically indulged, not given any responsibilities, and was bailed out of any trouble he got into so he never really learned to face and overcome hard things in life. His sense or normal was to have what he wanted by others giving to him, and he had no reluctance to ask for what he wanted. He never had reason to examine himself and didn’t experience consequences of his actions or inaction. The sad irony of someone who is indulged as he was is that it instills a deep insecurity. He didn’t have the chance when he was growing up to experience the confidence that comes from facing hard things both in his own character and in life. And if that doesn’t happen when one is young, it becomes much harder to do as an adult.
When we married and began working in campus ministry, he had no accountability to anyone for how many hours he worked or how he was doing as a husband or father. He was basically handed a ready-made ministry with a strong core group of students who did the real work of finding others who were seeking God, so he didn’t have to – and therefore didn’t – put in much more time than the scheduled events that everyone else was attending in addition to their school work. I realized even in our first year of marriage that he was content to do as little as possible and collect his salary. He didn’t earn enough for us to live on, so I went to work, first part-time and then full-time, while continuing to attend all the campus ministry events and ministering to the young women as I had before. After a few years he wanted to buy a printing business with the aim of transitioning out of ministry, which he did by asking for and getting the financial backing of others and with no monetary investment by us. After he finalized the deal, he asked me to join him for the training from the former owners “just so you’ll know how to do it,” and that was the beginning of him again working as few hours as possible while I worked more than full-time and took care of our first daughter and the house and continued the ministry work part-time until he resigned. That became the pattern during our whole married life, and I believed I needed to keep a good attitude and be willing to give whatever was needed. I did feel the balance of labor was unfair but our communication had already become difficult and I just didn’t have hope of any change being possible, so I worked and worked and tried not to give in to resentment. I could see that he was oblivious to being such a taker, and the consequences of the way he was reared started to become clear to me.
Another experience that influenced him was when for several years we were part of a church that became more and more controlling and cultish. Self-examination and openness with others and accountability was expected of members, but one cultic aspect of the group was that leaders demanded more of regular members than they practiced themselves, so he got into the habit of looking for sins and weaknesses in others while never really having to be open with or accountable to anyone. He was always good at deflecting any attempts to get him to look at himself, and the pattern in the group’s hierarchy was that leaders, which we were, talked about those under them to those over them, without focusing on their own issues first. After we left that group when it had clearly crossed the line to unbiblical practices, he was even more opposed to the concept of accountability or openness with anyone about his own sins and struggles, and he seemed to reject the need for self-examination even more. He felt traumatized by whatever attempts had been made to get him to submit to accountability to others while in the group, and remained reactive against the word or the concept for the rest of his life.
When we sold the printing business and he went back into ministry, again he worked as few hours as possible and really only attended the same church activities that everyone else did, spending most of his time at home reading books, watching TV, and doing yard work. He reacted against the leaders there expecting more proactive work on his part, and I can’t help but wonder if that is why after 20 months he jumped at the chance to move us into his mom’s house (his dad had died) supposedly for the reason that she needed us to take care of her. There were legitimate concerns about her welfare and it turned out that a neighbor who had ingratiated himself to her turned out to be a con artist (he conned most of her money from her, even after we moved in with her). But once again he showed no ambition to work or to provide income and was happy to let her provide for him and us while he continued to read books and watch TV and do yard work. Eventually he stumbled on the possibility of selling health insurance, and sought customers through putting up signs as others had done and then waiting for the phone to ring. Even then he didn’t want to do the work of answering the phone and talking to inquirers, and he asked me to do that, to do what he rationalized as preliminary screening. I did as he asked, until it became obvious to me that it would be more effective for him to talk to callers first because that was when they were most open to what he had to say rather than in a call-back, so I asked him to let me stop. I also suggested that he come up with a work plan, to work full-time instead of the maybe twenty hours he was doing, and then work his plan, and surely his income from it would grow, since it wasn’t producing much as he was doing it. That was my first time of broaching the subject of his work, or lack of it, and he blew up at me for saying anything. The biblical concept of reaping in proportion to what you sow seemed obvious to me, but not to him. We talked repeatedly about the need to plan his work and work his plan and to find someone who could help him stick to it, but though he came to agree in theory, he never did actually do it. His lack of provision financially was his most glaring weakness, but it spilled over into every other area.
Throughout our marriage I hoped he would eventually be willing to grow and change and rise to meet his responsibilities as a husband and father. I felt confused because I didn’t understand why he didn’t seem to be aware of or bothered by things that seemed so obvious to me and eventually to our daughters, even after many attempts to communicate honestly but respectfully how we were affected by them. I knew the reasons why he struggled as he did, but because he was a Christian and because he was quick to see things that others needed to change, his reasons are not excuses, and now I am able to stop feeling the pressure to confuse the two. The question of what was within his control and what wasn’t kept me from feeling free to conclude confidently that he was failing to meet his responsibility to provide for us. I saw the challenges of the work, the things that were out of his control like changes in companies and fickleness of customers and changes in what was legal to do to find customers, but I also believed that if he would prayerfully work harder and not give in to the difficulties, God would bless his efforts and provide for his family through him. It was his lack of effort, lack of discipline, lack of willingness to get help, and ultimately lack of concern for how his family was affected that was so hurtful for so many years. He never got past resenting having to take on that career, and it did expose his weaknesses. But instead of using it as an opportunity to learn and grow – as a “discipline of God” to help him grow – he felt justified in not pushing through the difficulties to find ways to succeed, as other insurance agents were doing.
My purpose in making this public is to speak my truth, to expose and put an end to the cycle of hiding, covering up for, and, yes, excusing the hurtful treatment I suffered from my husband over many years. I have realized that until I’m able to quit feeling obligated to protect his reputation and can freely speak the full truth of my experience, I won’t be able to put my past behind and keep my focus on the present and the future. I’ve carried the burden of trying to protect him while hiding my own wounds for too long, and recognizing that pattern has been one of the confirmations that what I experienced was abuse. I have felt pressure to keep silent since he died, from the logic that it’s not fair to speak ill of him when he’s not here to defend himself. But I’m at last able to ask the questions I didn’t dare ask when he was alive: What about me? What about defending myself or at least standing up for myself? Are my needs and my experiences of pain and disappointment less important than his need to be thought well of by others? When he was alive, these questions were a large part of my chronic sense of confusion because I felt no hope of my own needs being met. I felt forced to live with the false public persona because I kept hoping that someday he would become indeed what he projected to be to others, and what he may have had good intentions of being. My honest belief is that he never saw the gap between what he projected publicly and what he was like at home, but that was because he was never willing to examine himself honestly, much less get help to change. Trying to be a “good wife” and knowing that I had to live within the commitment and choice I had made when I married him, I prayed over and over for God to rescue me, hoping the answer would be that someone would be a Nathan to him and help him see, “You’re the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7ff). I even asked several Christian men who were as close as any ever would be to him to get involved with him, but if they did, my assumption is that he pushed back against any attempts to get close enough to see what was really happening in our marriage and to help him see himself more clearly. There was one time that someone did respond to my request and talked to him, but though he seemed to agree that he needed to “grow up,” as he said, there was no lasting change and I could tell that after that talk, he was starting to push that friend away because his attitude changed to being critical and he seemed to be looking for rationalizations for cutting off the friendship which proved true later.
There are 3 kinds of abuse that can happen in relationships:
Sexual abuse is where sex is used as a weapon of power and dominance over the victim, who can be anyone from a stranger as in rape or a child or even a spouse. A sexually abused person knows that he or she been or is being abused, and if it is caught and exposed or even reported to authorities, there is an obvious need for the victim to recover from the trauma and resources are available to help with that. I was not overtly sexually abused, but I am starting to understand that sexual abuse by omission where there is a lack of physical intimacy in a relationship that should have it is just as real as abuse by commission. The unspoken message I received, “You’re not attractive to me, you don’t arouse any passion or desire in me, and I don’t care about you enough to consider or act on meeting your needs,” is deeply painful and yes, abusive, especially because he gave the opposite impression in public. Months and even years would go by with no physical affection, and so many times when I would finally ask to talk about it, he would reply that he had been thinking about it and had just been planning to initiate with me, with the clear message that I should have waited a little longer and then I would have realized that. Yeah, right. One of those times when I raised the subject, I asked if there was something about me that wasn’t attractive to him to explain his disinterest in me physically, and he replied with asking me to change a certain thing about my appearance and then he would be attracted to me. Yeah, right – I did as he requested and nothing changed except for me to feel even more unattractive and lonely. So I have to acknowledge that I experienced deep pain in this part of our relationship. I also know that this affected my parenting, because I couldn’t bring myself to talk to my daughters of the joys of married sex and the wisdom of waiting until marriage because I wasn’t able to be an example to them in this area, which has been a big regret, especially having wanted to give my own children what I wished I’d received from my own parents.
Physical abuse is where the victim is attacked in some way, hit, shoved, or even stabbed, shot, or choked. A physically abused person has physical wounds that are obvious and there may be an active cover up, literally, if the abused person for whatever reason can’t feel free to expose it to anyone. But the victim at least knows very consciously that abuse is happening. If or when the wounds are exposed to someone outside of the abusive relationship, again there is an obvious need for the victim to receive help to overcome the trauma. I was never overtly physically abused, but I am starting to understand that emotional abuse also affects one physically though there are no visible wounds that show. Chronic stress and unhappiness, especially when there is pressure to hide it and not express it, takes a physical toll. I’m thankful to be freed from being subjected daily to his oppressive presence, and yet I have come to realize that he can continue to dominate my life even though he’s gone, as long as I hide the truth. I hope that being honest will have a physical benefit in terms of my long-term health, especially the relief from stress and the freedom to enjoy happiness without the dread of the next difficulty caused by him.
Emotional abuse, also called psychological abuse, is where the victim is manipulated and mistreated verbally and in other nonviolent ways that inflict pain not of the body, but of the emotions, the spirit, and the psyche. It is much more insidious, much easier for the abuser to conceal from exposure, and much more difficult even for the victim to spot and realize that help is needed to stop it, overcome it, and recover from it. Emotional abuse receives little publicity because there are no real laws against it for the victim to seek justice through and no physical wounds to show from it. My assumption is that most victims of emotional abuse don’t even realize that the dynamics in the relationship are abusive and abnormal. The perpetuation of this abuse is possible because the victim is manipulated into accepting the blame for the treatment or into feeling it must be deserved or at least that it is the responsibility of the abused to cater to the abuser’s sensitivities to avoid arousing the abusive treatment, thus excusing the abuser. The abuser may not even know consciously that the treatment of the other is abusive, and may not intend to abuse or have malicious motives but rather be acting from his own warped definition of normal shaped by his own background. My purpose here is not to expound at length on the different forms this abuse can take. There are plenty of resources online for anyone to find if they need more information.
Someone posted this on Facebook after I had already accepted the fact of what I had experienced. This to me summarizes emotional abuse very well and confirmed to me that I need not second-guess the conclusion of abuse having been real in my life. Every one of these was true of my relationship with my husband:
5 Signs of an Emotionally Abusive Relationship:
1. You walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting your partner.
2. Your feelings and opinions are rarely validated.
3. Your partner is mistrustful of you for no reason.
4. You feel like you are unable to discuss problems in the relationship.
5. You feel “stuck” or confused most of the time.
I was helped to recognize that the dynamics in my marriage were emotionally abusive by a friend who has known me since childhood, who is a counselor and who has experienced it herself. She had discerned signs through the years and finally as I shared more openly with her in the months after his death about my struggles in processing my grief, she expressed her concerns and her conclusion. I reacted pretty strongly against the possibility and even stopped communicating with her for awhile. But her honesty with me prompted me to look more honestly at the possibility that my experience might actually fit the definition, though it was very hard to be willing to accept that conclusion. After a few more months I was able to discuss it more with her and admit that she was right, and even thank her for taking the risk in telling me and then enduring my reaction against it. She is the only person who knows my whole story, including specifics I can’t share here publicly, and I’m so thankful to have a friend like her. We have both agreed that had she tried to help me see it when he was still alive, I probably wouldn’t have been willing to consider it and our friendship may have been seriously hurt. But I do wish that I had somehow had the opportunity to see what was happening years ago so I could have taken more proactive steps to end my submission to it.
She also told me that my mother came to see her once on a visit back to my hometown years ago when my daughters were still young. My parents moved from Minnesota to North Carolina when my oldest daughter was a year old, and my dad worked in our printing business and my mom took care of my girls sometimes when I worked there, so they had an up-close view of our family. I never had good, open communication with either of my parents though I always wished for it, and I never felt that they paid much attention to me or thought about me very much, being the middle child of seven and their family backgrounds both being not expressive of emotion or affection. But my mother had noticed and become concerned about the dynamics she saw in my family, especially how much responsibility was put on my shoulders for our business and care of our children and home and how lazy she thought he was, but she didn’t believe she could come directly to me about it so she visited my friend hoping she might be able to help me because she knew we stayed close. I didn’t learn of this from my friend until she expressed her own concern as I already described, and it was very bittersweet to learn of my mom’s loving concern when it was too late to speak to her about it since she was already gone from me, having died after years of dementia. But I know that I probably wouldn’t have been able to accept her input at the time, so I am thankful to know about it now and it does help me accept the truth of what she saw as I face it now. She knew that he was working the hours the shop was open, 9 to 5 on weekdays, and then spending the evenings watching TV by himself (which was his habit our whole married life) while I did all the housework, parenting, and frequent overtime going back to the shop after getting our daughters to bed, and it angered her. I wished he would have helped more but I didn’t dare ask for fear of his reaction.
My mindset through the years was, amidst my angst and confusion, to apply as best I could the Scriptures about my role as a wife, to look at myself first and focus on living up to what I understood no matter what he did or didn’t do. The lesson I took from the creation account of God providing Eve for Adam was that I should try to be a “helper suitable” for him specifically, accommodating myself to his temperament and being willing to respect and submit to him. The Bible praises Sarah for being submissive to Abraham, even when he made unwise decisions such as to say she was his sister (she was his half sister) and hiding the fact that she was also his wife, or to have a child by her servant, because her perspective was trust in God “without fear of what your husbands might do” (1 Peter 3:6). I knew I needed to follow her example and continue to love and respect him as my husband that I had committed to, and trust God to help me endure and perhaps someday bring about the relief I hoped for, though my hope was for our marriage to improve, not end. I also knew from the Bible that it was my responsibility to be honest with him without nagging or complaining or being disrespectful, and that how he responded to my honesty was his responsibility before God. I do have a clear conscience about doing the best I could figure out to live up to what I understood to be my responsibility.
I tried to be honest with him about how I was affected by his treatment of me. It did little good and usually was met with me being blamed for not saying it in the right way. For years our communication was more about how we communicated than about the issues I was hoping to work through. The unspoken message that I understand more clearly in retrospect was, “Until you can say something to me in just the right way, I will not hear what you say and will not consider whether what you say is valid.” My daughters and I had a pitiful way of joking about this as having to deal with his “delicate sensibilities.” He used this way of exerting pressure on me to accept the blame and to excuse himself for why he should not be expected to meet my needs. His strong reactions and emotional outbursts when he didn’t like what was being said to him pushed me away emotionally and thickened his self-protective shell.
Gradually I became more and more determined to be honest and to endure whatever reactions would come in order to hash through the problems in our relationship. When we had been married for about ten years I asked for a regular set time to talk so that things wouldn’t build up as they had especially in the first seven or so years of our marriage, and it took pushing through his resistance to eventually get him to try it. I clung to hope that this routine would prove its worth, and there were times when I felt we made progress in exposing deeper issues and growing in our understanding of each other. But we would easily be thrown off schedule and he never initiated getting back to it, which revealed to me his lack of real desire to work at our relationship or even to care about my expressed need for that time to talk. Eventually I would ask for a time to talk again, we would hash through the things that had built up between us, and I would again ask for regular time to talk to keep the air clear. This pattern of brief periods of better communication and long periods of growing apart was a repeating cycle. I prayed that God would help me not give in to hopelessness, and I clung to whatever little improvement there was, however short-lived, to remain hopeful that someday he would become more open and less resistant to really working at our marriage.
An ongoing disagreement between my husband and me was over the subject of repentance and forgiveness. He would sometimes say he was sorry, but eventually I started to question whether he had godly sorrow or merely worldly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:8-11) because repentance didn’t result, and he only apologized when I didn’t back down with him about something he did that bothered me, which felt more like he was admitting than confessing. I became suspicious of his motives for asking for forgiveness because he seemed to want me to grant it without really taking responsibility for his actions. I tried responding to his request for forgiveness with my own question back to him, “Have you repented?” That made him mad, because he didn’t think it was right for me to question his heart or to require proof of repentance as a condition of forgiveness. His opinion was that we are just supposed to be quick to forgive others when they ask for it. I disagreed because we are commanded to repent when we want to become reconciled to God, and it was surprising to me that he would react negatively to the principle of repentance being connected to forgiveness. He seemed to have the erroneous idea that I was asking him to earn my forgiveness or to grovel for it, which was not true. This was an issue we never talked through thoroughly because he was good at shutting me down. I brought up the passage in Corinthians about godly sorrow versus worldly sorrow, and did tell him honestly that I didn’t see that he had godly sorrow. But he ended up making the issue seem to be my unwillingness to forgive freely rather than his need to change what he did that he admitted was wrong. He was very good at twisting conversations away from himself to blaming me for not treating him as he thought I should. He was not open to looking at how he treated me yet he was quick to rebuke me for how wrong I was in my treatment of him. I see this pattern clearly now in hindsight, but at the time I remained confused and discouraged and shut down more and more.
There were two specific times that I summoned all my courage and prayed for strength to endure his reactions in order to tell him honestly what I felt and what I needed from him. The first time was in 2004 when we were able to get away for a weekend using a borrowed condo at the beach, and I asked him beforehand if we could use the time to talk through some things that had been building up. He had been in a ministry role part time during the previous year until it unexpectedly ended 4 months before our talk, and he had been wallowing in his disappointment and not yet made the effort to rebuild his insurance career, which he had completely neglected even though he knew that the part-time ministry work was not intended to be his sole financial contribution, so he was bringing in no income. We had once again gotten away from regular time to talk, and we had been going through some especially difficult financial circumstances trying to make it on my small salary. When we did get around to talking during our beach weekend, I told him what I felt, basically that I didn’t feel loved by him because he wasn’t willing to do whatever was needed to provide for us. I expected a reaction, but not like what I got, which was the strongest I had ever experienced, a rage against me because, he said, “No wife should ever say to a husband that he doesn’t love her.” Needless to say, the way he made it all about him while blaming me yet again had the effect of shutting me down even more, and keeping me in my state of hopeless endurance.
The second time was two years later, in 2006. I had been reminded by my oldest daughter’s marriage in 2005 of the resources for marriage by Dr. Willard Harley, who had coincidentally been a professor of mine in college in Minnesota and who had told his students about his early stages of success in marriage therapy. When our oldest married, I gave them his first and classic book, His Needs, Her Needs, hoping they would learn some good principles from the start of their marriage. I discovered another, more practical book he wrote called Fall in Love, Stay in Love, and because I had reached the point of admitting to myself (and to my husband in the disastrous talk earlier) that we were not “in love,” anymore, I allowed my hopes to be raised that perhaps with the help of Dr. Harley, we could follow a plan to work on our marriage and rekindle those feelings. The first step was to complete individual questionnaires to discern our own needs and then prioritize them to identify the most important ones that our spouse could then learn how to meet, with the assurance that being proactive in that way would arouse loving feelings again in any marriage. He was clearly reluctant to commit to anything, but he did agree to do the questionnaires with me and talk together about them. But when it was hard to get him to commit to a time to go through them together, I felt disappointment and more loss of hope. Eventually we did go over them together, but he wouldn’t commit to any plan going forward.
After that talk, I quit asking for anything from him and pretty much remained in endurance mode for the rest of his life. I endured his neglect, his false public persona, lack of intimacy, and lack of financial provision for those five years. When I look back now, I realize that the only way I was able to endure at all was by becoming very good at compartmentalizing and stuffing down my feelings more and more. I am amazed at how I continued on after that going through the motions of daily life and interacting with him knowing that he did not really want to know nor care about what I felt or what I needed. We were really only housemates, and I occasionally admitted to myself that my life felt mostly to be full of drudgery with my job, responsibility for shopping and meals and most housework, and with the juggling of money to pay the bills resting only on my shoulders. For the last five years of his life, his mother also lived with us and as her physical and mental health deteriorated into senility and incontinence, her daily care also became my responsibility (and continued to be for six months after he died until she became ill and went to the hospital and then a nursing home until she died).
I asked to take on more responsibility at my job twice when other employees left, eager to earn as much as possible because I had given up hope of him producing reliable or predictable income, and yet he was never appreciative of my willingness to work, never sympathetic or supportive when I had to put in long hours at the job in order to learn and do the added roles I had asked to take on. Instead, he was critical of me not getting home earlier, as if I was to blame for my work requiring overtime instead of acknowledging that my need to work more was because he was not working enough. In fact, he had pushed me to go to work before I did, and I resisted doing so for several years because I knew it wasn’t fair for me to be expected to work if he wasn’t first doing more than he had been to provide for us. He claimed that other insurance agents he knew whose wives worked did better in their work because they didn’t feel too much pressure because their wives’ income was a cushion. I told him I was willing to work, but that I needed to see him working full time first. He said that if I worked, he would work more because it would relieve what he felt was excessive and crippling pressure to succeed, and he was sure he’d actually be more successful because he wouldn’t come across as desperate to prospective customers. Finally, after several months of extreme financial struggling, giving in to his pressure to ask friends and family for money, and then a month where his work brought in almost no money, I did go out and find a job in early 2001, starting with a temporary job and then the job I now have was clearly provided by God and I am very thankful for it, especially now that I must support myself. But as I suspected would happen, as I worked more and more, he worked less and less. I would get home late and then have to prepare a meal, and he never offered to take on more at home in light of the fact that I was working while he basically was not. He did his own laundry and occasionally vacuumed the part of the house he spent time in, and he thought that was commendable.
I saw my daughters suffer in their own constant struggle to be honest with their dad and to endure his reactions and his lack of spiritual fathering, trying to act respectful to him while not feeling it because he didn’t inspire it in them. I was often stuck as a go-between, trying to help them sort through how they needed to act and react and communicate with him, and trying to help him understand how to interact with them. He was always very reactive to me and accusing me of trying to put myself in the middle and causing them to disrespect him, but I saw no way to avoid it unless he would become more approachable and worthy of their respect. But I couldn’t express that to him knowing what his reaction would be and that he wouldn’t take it to heart coming from me, so I just continued to try to stand in the gap the best I could, hoping to lessen the impact and damage to my daughters. I knew they would leave home with much damage they would have to overcome, and I told them that I knew that so they’d be conscious of their need to look for it and work through it. But I didn’t spell out to them in specific terms that I knew their dysfunctional relationship with their dad would need to be overcome because I hoped that someday it would improve.
I felt some relief for each of my daughters when they moved away from home, hoping and praying for them to find the freedom to grow and live out from under the shadow of their father’s dominance and judgmental oppression, and hoping that the efforts I had made through the years to try to counterbalance his effect on them would prove to be helpful in the long run. Their love and support and reassurance since leaving home has been comforting, but I still find that I break into tears whenever I think about the unnecessary damage they have to overcome, because I so much wanted my children to have a much different childhood experience than they ended up with. I find great comfort in knowing that they have a heavenly Father who loves them even more than I know how to and that he will always be working in their lives.
They all agreed near the end of 2009 that it was time to try to be honest with their dad about the struggles they had endured in their relationships with him, with the goal of improvement going forward as adults. The youngest was 19 and still at home but knew she’d be moving out to finish college in a few months, and the others had been out of the household for several years by then. So, at their request, I asked my husband to agree to a family meeting right after the New Year. He was reluctant but I had determined to insist on it, so he accepted it as a necessary evil. I see now as I think back on it that his power over my daughters and me was, for the first time ever, diminished by our shared truth being spoken to him in a setting where we had the support and empathy of one other to encourage us. After that talk I knew he felt reactions, but he didn’t dare vent them to us because that was exactly what we had told him was the chronic problem in our relationships with him. Having the truth out there at last did make a difference for my daughters and they seemed more free and relaxed in their interactions with him, and he behaved better toward them, too. But several months later he said something to me which revealed that he had nursed resentment over that family talk ever since it happened, especially that he didn’t like the whole family together and thought it would have been better to have individual conversations, and I lost a little more of my fading hope of repentance from the heart. He still wasn’t really open to facing the truth of what was said and wanted to focus on how it was said and blame me for how he felt. His comment confirmed to me that meeting all together had been wise because it proved that he was only considering his own comfort and not ours. The talk did seem to provide extra pressure on him to be more considerate toward them, though, and they each had a good talk with him in the weeks before he died, so I’m thankful they have that good experience to remember.
A major symptom of emotional abuse is confusion. Many times there was a sense of knowing something wasn’t right, something shouldn’t be the way it was, there should be more positive feelings if the marriage really was good as he projected to others, and there was the constant question of why I was being treated in a way that I wouldn’t treat others – why can he feel fine about treating me in a way that he wouldn’t accept if I treated him the same way? The expression of negative feelings is not tolerated by an abuser, so they are stuffed down. My husband used to want me to be more emotional and teased me about not being so. He was proud of being emotional and he viewed himself as a giver because he gave people hugs and smiles and he had a facial expression he would put on (yes, turned on and turned off at will) that exuded his persona of being tenderhearted and caring. He could be impatient, irritated, and even angry all the way to church and then turn on this persona to church members as soon as we arrived, as one of my daughters recently pointed out to me which reminded me of the hypocrisy that was a turnoff to all of them to some degree.
I am actually a deeply emotional person, but he couldn’t see that. He only wanted me to be expressive of positive emotions and reacted against my honest negative ones, so I became more and more squelched and inward. I wasn’t free to express all of my emotions to him so he assumed wrongly that I didn’t feel them. I have a box full of journals in which I tried to sort through my emotions and confusion through the years, and at times I was able to see the truth more clearly, but most of my agonizing through writing was my attempt to make sense of my circumstances and to find ways to endure them in light of having little reason to hope for change. I had occasional opportunities to appeal to God with loud cries and tears, mostly in the car alone when there was enough time to recompose myself before arriving at my destination. I also years ago took a day occasionally to retreat and dig down deep when I knew things were building up, using a friend’s house when she was away and using a cabin at a lake that was owned by someone I knew. That helped me some, but didn’t change my circumstances, only gave me more strength to endure them.
There were several glaring hypocrisies in my husband that were unavoidable to me and to my children that I’ll describe later, but were off limits to talk about openly in the family. Along with that, my husband demanded and expected that nobody in our family should talk to anyone outside the family about what he believed was family business only. He would probe and question us when we spent time with friends, suspicious of and critical of how open we might be with them about what he believed was nobody else’s business. This isolation and suppression is another common characteristic of emotional abuse. I believe he was motivated by self-protectiveness and not malicious motives toward me or his daughters, but the effect on us was the same no matter what his motives may have been.
For me, the hardest part of my circumstances was that I am a Christian and I see in the Bible what a Christian marriage can be, what God intends for it to be, and what I hoped and expected mine to be, but I wasn’t experiencing it. The Bible makes clear that God’s design and intention is for marriage to meet those needs he created in us, not only to entice us into marriage but to bless us and give us pleasure that Christians can freely enjoy more than those who are separated from the love and grace of God could hope for. Only Christians have the spiritual power and qualities God provides that are so necessary to marriage between two weak and sinful people. A happy and emotionally fulfilling relationship, one that is truly intimate in every way – spiritually and emotionally as well as physically – is intended by God to last a lifetime and to bring more happiness over time rather than less.
The Old Testament book, Song of Solomon, describes the intense love possible between a man and a woman, and not only possible but obviously planned by God as the goal to hope for and act on. And God makes clear that age should not diminish that love. Malachi 2:14-16 admonishes men to guard their hearts and remain faithful to the wife of their youth. Proverbs 5:15-19 urges men to “Rejoice in the wife of your youth….May you always be captivated by her love.” Proverbs 12:22 says, “The man who finds a wife finds a treasure, and he receives favor from the Lord.” Psalm 128 promises, “How joyful are those who fear the Lord – all who follow his ways! You will enjoy the fruit of your labor. How joyful and prosperous you will be! Your wife will be like a fruitful grapevine, flourishing within your home. Your children will be like vigorous young olive trees as they sit around your table. That is the Lord’s blessing for those who fear him.”
God even gave instructions that seem extravagant by today’s standards in Deuteronomy 24:5: “A newly married man must not be drafted into the army or be given any other official responsibilities. He must be free to spend one year at home, bringing happiness to the wife he has married.” Does anyone think that after that first year, God’s plan would be for that happiness to wane? If a man develops the good habit of seeking his wife’s happiness for the first year, he’ll be much more likely to continue it for the rest of his life! Is there any woman who would find it difficult to love a man whose goal is to seek her happiness?
Ephesians 5:21,25-29 says: “And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ…For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church.” I believe that this passage speaks to the way God made women to need and crave being loved and cared for by a man. In verse 33, we see the different needs of men and women: “So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Just as women need love, men need respect, and if both spouses feel the freedom to express what that means to them in practical terms and there is mutual commitment to meet each other’s needs, then both will have those needs met, which is really how “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” works.
1 Peter 3:3-7 also gives wives and husbands instructions that would ensure life-long love: “…clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful….you husbands must give honor to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together. She may be weaker than you are, but she is your equal partner in God’s gift of new life. Treat her as you should so your prayers will not be hindered.” With the woman cultivating inner beauty that a godly man will find truly attractive and the man treating her with honor and understanding that will win her heart every time, happiness and love will be enjoyed by both.
We see God’s reason for designing marriage, creating for Adam “a helper who is just right for him” (Genesis 2:18) and we see his enthusiastic response (Genesis 2:23), “‘At last!’ the man exclaimed.” And we see that this is God’s design for all time (Genesis 2:24), “This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.”
Of course, we also see soon after Eve’s creation that it doesn’t take long for issues to arise in a marriage! When she gave in to the temptation to eat of the forbidden fruit, turned the temptation to Adam and he ate, and he blamed her to God for his own sin, we must all say, “Been there, done that,” no matter which part we have played in a similar scenario in our own relationships. It can be discouraging to see that every human being is prone to the same weaknesses, or it can be encouraging to know that even with our failings and sins, God still intends for us to be able to enjoy a happy lifelong marriage.
One of the most interesting Scriptures about marriage is in Ecclesiastes 9:9. In the context of life’s futility because of the fact that we will all die someday and that so much of life doesn’t make sense, we find this nugget, “Live happily with the woman you love through all the meaningless days of life that God has given you under the sun. The wife God gives you is your reward for all your earthly toil.” A happy marriage can be an island of joy in the storm-tossed seas of life, and it is possible for any couple.
But in order to experience what God intended for us, in marriage as in every other area of our lives, we need his instructions, forgiveness, and strength to live up to our desire to overcome our weaknesses. Marriage is full of temptations to take rather than give, to be self-focused and prideful and lazy, to handle conflicts in hurtful ways, and to give up when difficult circumstances or misunderstandings arise. Add to that the understandable ignorance that men have of women and women have of men, and it’s not surprising at all that so many marriages disappoint or fail.
After my request to use Dr. Harley’s resources failed, I gave up hope of ever experiencing what I knew was possible as Christians. He knew what the Bible says about how a husband should treat his wife, how he should treat his children, and his responsibility to work and provide for his family, but he never applied the teachings to himself to the point of becoming convicted or repenting. The fact that these verses are so well known and so unmistakable in their meaning made it especially hard to live without their benefit, compounded by his pride in being able to see the weaknesses in others as a minister or elder while remaining blind to his own. In addition to the verses mentioned above, he knew these but didn’t obey them also:
Colossians 3:19: “Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.”
1 Corinthians 7:5: “Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self control.”
Colossians 3:21: “Fathers, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged.”
Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.”
James 1:19-20: “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires.”
2 Thessalonians 3:10: “Even while we were with you, we gave you this command: ‘Those unwilling to work will not get to eat.’“
1 Timothy 5:8 is one of the saddest passages for me to read, because it describes such a strong condemnation of a man who doesn’t provide for his family: “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
When he died unexpectedly of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, I felt a sense of rescue at last and gratitude to God for releasing me from the years I expected to have to endure an unhappy, affection-less, superficial and financially struggling marriage. But then began the added burden of knowing that no one knew the real state of our marriage and that I could not be honest with anyone who knew us. I couldn’t express my honest feelings of relief to anyone. I was faced every Sunday at church with having to continue to perpetuate the false persona as people expressed their admiration and love for him and their sadness for me based on their assumption that I missed him. I haven’t arrived on time to the worship service yet in the three-plus years since he died, I think on some subconscious level not wanting to have to endure either conversations about him or superficial small talk, so I focus on enjoying time to talk on a deeper level with a couple of close friends after the service is over. But I will live in the shadow of his public persona there as long as my truth remains hidden.
Yes, I am thankful that my years with him are over. I believe he remained ignorant of how much damage he was doing, but I also believe it was a willful ignorance because he had many opportunities to see it and change it, and I don’t excuse him any longer. He not only should have been willing to hear and consider what my daughters and I said to him through the years, as a Christian he was responsible for his own need to examine himself and seek to grow and change. He was very good at applying Scripture to everyone else, but he didn’t apply it to himself first. He outright refused to view any of our circumstances as caused or at least allowed by God as the loving discipline intended for his growth (Hebrews 12:4-13), and he never set about to “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level paths for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” He avoided self-examination and allowed his emotions to dictate to and control him. He avoided responsibility and escaped reality via television, movies, novels, working on cars, and yard work. He spent many hours every day secluded in his own escapist world and reacted to intrusions with anger or irritation. In other words, he chose to be self-protective and self-centered, and though his motives may not have been to be abusive, living with someone who is cloistered away from real intimacy of any kind is very hurtful and damaging. That was my daily life situation. That was my truth, and that was what nobody outside of the family knew, except for what my hometown friend could read between the lines in my emails through the years and what I revealed to two close friends from church with whom I gradually became more honest over the last four years of his life as both of their marriages fell apart and their honesty with me helped me feel free to be more honest with them, too.
I found an audiotape in his mini-recorder after he died from when he was on staff part time with his role being designated as outreach minister. I knew that it was hypocritical for him to be in that role because he never was personally evangelistic in his own daily life, but he was good at leading small group Bible studies and at studying the Bible with people who were already to the point of wanting to learn how to become a Christian, and I hoped that by being in that role he might become more ready to lead us in finding a way to share our faith together in our circumstances of living 50 miles away from our congregation. I hoped that he would see that he couldn’t ask of others what he wasn’t doing himself. When his ministry position was ended largely due to turmoil in the congregation (which he likely was the catalyst of in the first place by being confrontational to other staff members), I thought it was probably for the best because I didn’t see that he had been effective in the role. On the audiotape, he started out with what seemed like very humble honesty about his own need to grow in sharing his faith. I was happy to hear that part, and felt some reassurance that at least he did know that he was weak in that area and had wanted to change. But then abruptly his tone of voice changed to what can only be described as a “preacher’s tone” (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever noticed it in a preacher yourself) and he turned the focus to his imaginary hearers and their need to talk to others about Jesus. That’s when I realized that he was making verbal notes apparently in preparation for a sermon about evangelism. I felt so disgusted, so disillusioned, proven right when I didn’t want to be, that this was a perfect example of his chronic pattern of looking for the speck in others’ eyes while disregarding the log in his own eye (Matthew 7:3-5). He used a show of humility, pointing to himself only as a means to his real end and not from godly sorrow and true repentance. It’s probably a common temptation among ministers to read the Bible with the mindset of applying it to others without first applying it only to oneself. It was a pitfall that my husband succumbed to over and over, whether he was in ministry or not, from the time he decided to pursue ministry while we were in college.
Another instance of his false public persona was unwittingly shared with me after he died by a man he had spent some time with shortly before he died. The man is an elder from another congregation who lives in our area and my husband was doing an insurance quote for him so they had talked some and had lunch together and had plans made for the week after he died. This man was enjoying becoming better friends and was so impressed with how my husband had asked the waitress if there was anything they could pray about for her when they prayed before their meal. The obvious impression this friend had was that my husband was very evangelistic and used opportunities like that to reach out. I don’t know how I responded, because my reaction was once again disgust at the public show that was not true in his daily life with his family. He never could see his own hypocrisy and the effect it had on his family to preach to others what he didn’t practice himself and to appear humble and spiritual-minded publicly while being lazy, judgmental, prideful, inconsiderate, self-centered, domineering, reactive and closed-minded in his own home.
I take comfort in God’s mercy to me in ending my circumstances that were so painful for so long. I’ve seen God’s love and care and provision for me in amazing ways in the past 3 years of living alone, especially in several difficult circumstances during the first year after he died. I was very thankful when it became clear that it was time for his mother to leave my care, but then I had to endure his siblings’ threat to sue me over what they believed had been the wrong use of her funds while she lived with us, though I had no responsibility for those decisions. Their ingratitude and suspicious assumptions of me after spending five years caring daily for their mother in my home was a shock, but I was thankful for an attorney’s advice that they would not have a case against me so I could reject their accusations and resist the temptation to yet again take on responsibility or blame that was really my husband’s. Another challenge was to find ways to reduce my budget to fit within my income once his mother’s contribution to expenses ended and then when my taxes increased due to losing exemptions for my husband and our youngest daughter when she graduated from college and was no longer a dependent. I’ve been thankful for how so far I’ve survived month to month, and I know that God will bless and provide for me in the remaining years of my life here on earth since my husband provided no insurance or retirement benefits.
I’m so thankful for my 3 daughters and for how they’ve grown and matured as young women. I see how self-aware they are and that they all live self-examined lives, and I’m thankful for how much wiser they are than I was at their ages. I pray for them to be seekers of God and his truth, and for God to bless them with relationships that will help them in that quest, because I know that I can’t undo the damage they suffered within our family and that they will have to make their own choices and learn their own lessons without the solid spiritual grounding that I wished for them to receive from their father and me. I am watchful over their relationships with the men in their lives, always hoping to see signs of greater success in their communication, mutual consideration, and happiness than I experienced at their ages. I do speak up honestly if I sense any lack of progress in those areas, and I’m thankful that I feel free to do so, especially because I didn’t have that honest communication with my own mother.
I am sharing this publicly because I believe I must, for my own sake, the sake of my daughters, and the sake of those who knew my husband. I’ve realized that all truth, whatever it may be, good or bad, is needed. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32), in the context of remaining faithful to his teachings. And it is in light of his truth about what marriage can be, and by facing the truth about the consequences of not living according to what he promises and teaches, that I will find the freedom to move forward in my own life. I believe that those who knew my husband can take to heart the lesson of his life, that it would have been better for him and for those he claimed to love to have been more self-examining and open to the involvement and help of those who did truly love him. I feel sadness for him for what he missed out on as well as sadness for how his crippling weaknesses affected his family. He was especially crippled by his insecurities that produced a self-protective shell around him that no one could penetrate, so he never experienced the truth that he would have been loved and liked even more had he been able to let others into the depths of his heart rather than settling for superficial smiles and hugs.
I loved him with agape as I vowed I would in our wedding, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” But I was not in love with him for a long time. I always wanted him to become open to what I knew could have been possible in his own life, in our marriage, and in our family. So when he died suddenly and unexpectedly, I was happy for him that his struggles in this life were over and happy for me that my years of hopelessness and pain were over. I am also going public with my story because I hope others who have had an unhappy marriage that ended in the death of a spouse may be helped to face the truth of their own past in order to go forward in their lives with honesty and renewed hope. I also hope that anyone who may be in an unhappy or abusive marriage now may find the courage to face it and seek help to bring about the changes needed and not settle for merely enduring it any longer.
Facing the reality that what I experienced was abusive emotionally has been very difficult. But now that I have allowed myself to accept the truth of my years with my husband, I have had to also allow myself to feel whatever emotions were stuffed down while in endurance mode for so long. I have felt pain mostly, as well as sadness and regret and disappointment. I have realized how insecure and unworthy of kindness and love and consideration his treatment tempted me to feel and I did often feel deeply as I journaled and prayed but continued to stuff down because I didn’t know what else to do. And yet I also know that God has provided others in my life who have kept me encouraged and hopeful, like my childhood friend and now also a few long-time friends at church, and even customers at work who have been kind to and clearly like me.
I have seen honest responses of anger at my husband as I’ve revealed some of my experiences to a couple of these friends, and that has raised the question within myself of whether I feel anger toward him. I have had a perspective of pity for him and for how his own weaknesses hurt him as well as his family, which has been the reason that I would never have seen the abusive consequences of those weaknesses without the help of others. But yes, I have occasionally allowed myself to vent my emotions verbally and honestly. I no longer have to snatch opportunities for privacy while on my way somewhere in my car alone as I used to, and have felt mostly free alone at home to let my emotions flow (except for the concern my dogs and cats show when they know I’m upset). And so now that I have seen that anger is a natural response to feel, I have allowed my own stuffed-down anger to be felt and expressed.
I want to share two resources that have helped me. The first is a website that I stumbled upon (http://www.griefrecoverymethod.com/) that provided exactly the kind of help I had tried to search for without success soon after his death. I urge anyone who has experienced the death of someone in his or her life to use this help in proactively processing grief. I bought The Grief Recovery Handbook and followed its advice, which gave me the permission and encouragement I needed to start being honest about my years with my husband.
The second resource is the website of Dr. Willard Harley who wrote His Needs, Her Needs and Fall in Love, Stay in Love as well as eighteen other books and workbooks: http://www.marriagebuilders.com/. The website is full of free resources and a daily radio show that he does with his wife. I urge everyone to check it out because he is the only marriage therapist I know of who has a long successful track record and whose goal and promise is to be truly “in love” for a lifetime. Plus, he’s been happily married for 52 years by following his own advice! His resources have helped me to confirm that I was not wrong to believe that my husband needed to change, to be more of a giver and less of a taker, to learn how to stop the chronic love buster behaviors (selfish demands, angry outbursts, disrespectful judgments, annoying habits, independent behavior, and dishonesty) that eroded our love, and to be willing to learn together with me how to meet each other’s needs. My husband didn’t want to change and was especially reactive against the need for accountability, which Dr. Harley teaches. Even when he admitted he needed to change, he never went beyond good intentions and wouldn’t allow anyone else to help him. I am able to see in hindsight how I succumbed to the abusive dynamics and missed out on the help available on the website and in his books when I gave in to the temptation to withdraw rather than to continue to seek solutions and try more ideas. I was wrong to abdicate to my husband out of misplaced fear of being a bother, being a nag, or being disrespectful. Dr. Harley’s resources have helped me understand myself better and to accept the importance of my own needs being met, and he gives very practical guidance for how to have a marriage that meets the needs of both spouses. Real happiness for both spouses is only possible when both experience their needs being met by the other, where give and take is mutual. He offers guidance on how to overcome every possible cause of marital unhappiness, including how to prevent or recover from an affair, so common in our culture and one grief I’m so thankful not to have experienced though I did have to fight my own temptations to wish for someone to be attracted to me when I lost hope of my marriage providing that. I’m so thankful that no man came along who would have allowed me to indulge that temptation!
The question of what it means to forgive him lingered as still not resolved though I attempted to answer it many times over these three years. Writing this account has been very helpful in this process, and I do feel more able to forgive him not only from my will but also from my heart. As my painful emotions have been faced and revealed to close friends and family, the love and sympathy and genuine care and concern I’ve felt has been a very healing experience. While writing this account, I have allowed myself to indulge in many good cries over it. My hope is to reach the point of truly casting everything onto God because I know he does care for me as he has promised (1 Peter 5:7). I’d like to feel finished once and for all and able to truly put my past behind, but I’ve realized that I can’t impose an artificial deadline or assume that my emotions will never rise up again in the future. I’ll need to continue to allow myself to feel whatever I feel, to get it out and not stuff it down any longer. I believe that over time, my past will fade more and more, especially as I focus on my present and my optimistic hopes for the future.
I suspect that some healing can only be experienced if or when what I hoped for but never received from my husband comes my way with a godly man who I can love freely and be loved by as God designed and intended. I do pray for that someday, trusting God’s timing and provision. He will know when I’m ready for a second opportunity to fall in love, and this time I will stay in love until I die. I am aware of the danger of presuming wrongly that any one man is sent by God, however. I believe that was the big mistake I made when I met my husband. We fell in love one day and decided to marry literally the next day based on our naïve assumption that it was God who put us together. That resulted in our lack of questioning and paying attention to signs and symptoms of incompatibility as well as the lack of working at the relationship proactively. He took me for granted from the start and I let him do so. I know more clearly now what my own responsibility is, to be truly honest with myself and with any man I am attracted to, to be proactive in making “love bank” deposits (per Dr. Harley) and to deal quickly with any “love busters.” If I never marry again, I know that being single is better than being in a bad marriage. I’m content alone, but I know I’d be very happy to experience marriage as God intended it to be.
The biggest lesson I have learned as I have faced the truth about my marriage is that I am ultimately responsible for what kind of treatment I allow and submit to, and I will never again give someone the abusive power over me that I allowed my husband to assert. I accept my responsibility without excusing him, because I should not have been put in a position of having to resist and push back against mistreatment by the man who vowed to love and care for me. As I look forward to the rest of my life and hope for another opportunity to marry someday, knowing that I have the responsibility to choose wisely what I will or will not accept in and from a mate is empowering and encouraging.
I have put thought into what I must ask myself if (hopefully when) I find myself attracted to a man who may have the potential to win my heart. I have my list of ten questions ready to help me resist the temptation to commit prematurely and unwisely to a relationship that may not be truly compatible. I’m actually easy to please and always have been. My needs are basic and common: free-flowing communication, to be liked for who I am, kindness and consideration from a giving heart, affection, and to be of one heart and mind spiritually. Though it has been hard for me to face the reality that I never really had those needs met by my husband and to allow myself to feel the pain I stuffed down for so long, it has been good to sort through all of this and realize the lessons I needed to learn. I believe I’m ready to look forward to the rest of my life, and to focus on the ways that God’s promise in Romans 8:28 plays out in my life: “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”
One way I’ve seen God work already is in giving me opportunities to talk to other women who are experiencing their own marriage struggles or their own complicated grief when death ended the marriage. As I’ve broached the subject of my marriage not having been happy, it has opened the door for them to share honestly with me. I’m wondering if there may be a way to find and minister to others I can empathize with. Becoming certified as a Grief Counselor through the Grief Recovery Institute is one practical option I plan to investigate someday. But whether I do anything official or not, I believe that God can and will use my truth to help others.
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Precious Promises 