Hello. My name is Amy. I am a person in someone's mind, but that is less important than what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about dreams--dreams which were broken and why: dreams of being a wife and a mother.
In 1996 I was married. I remember it vaguely. It was a sunny day. A lot of people came. The wedding was perfect as far as weddings could go. People wished us well. We had our pictures taken and ate cake. We even sort of had a honeymoon.
But something was wrong. I was unhappy in this marriage. I was unhappy before it began and unhappy until it ended. There were many elements which contributed to the problems in the marriage and to my unhappiness. Some were mine, and some were his. The biggest problem was that neither of us felt loved or cherished, and we responded to this in ways which pushed us further apart rather than closer together. We both came from dysfunctional families, and neither of us was very far along in the healing process at the time of our marriage. We were both crying out for each other's affections, but we couldn't break through the walls between us.
One of my difficulties is that I am a nurturer. This is a great quality to have, and it's a quality I like in myself. But it can be taken overboard, and that's what I did in some of my friendships. Watching me pour my life into these friendships until I had nothing left hurt my husband. Knowing that I was blind to what I was doing hurt him even more. When his first attempts to help me open my eyes failed, he resorted to attempts which got my attention but did not get the message across in a way that I could understand. I interpreted his actions as mocking my pain from events in the past and restricting my access to my friends and family, not as attempts to help me understand that he needed me or that he was watching my life slip away from me. I felt abused and neglected emotionally, and I sought refuge anywhere I could find it ... anywhere but in the presence of the man who had promised to love and cherish me; anywhere but in the presence of the man whom I had promised to love and cherish.
The hardest thing for me has been to admit that I entered into marriage without God's blessing. All the right words were said, and all the people gave their blessing; but that's different from knowing in your heart that you are giving yourself to the person God has chosen for you. I could not say that I knew that. I was afraid of being alone, afraid that the world of love was not a place where I would ever belong. That's not a good reason to get married.
It's hard to admit that someone who is kind is abusing you. It's hard for anyone to admit to being an abuser. But both of us were abusing and neglecting each other. No one saw it... In fact, all of our friends and acquaintances were shocked when I left 13 months later.
Such is often the case with nonphysical abuse. Mary Susan Miller wrote in her book, No Visible Wounds: Identifying Nonphysical Abuse of Women by Their Men:
Their husbands ... batter their wives but come away with clean hands because they land more refined blows; they undermine the wife's self-esteem and break her spirit and knock supporting pins out from under her. They know what matters most to her-her dog, her car, her friends, maybe her red suit-and destroy it.
They manipulate her into thinking she's to blame and, as a result, into trying harder and harder to please. For a long time they keep her believing that things will get better by allowing her occasional moments of compatibility, but after a while they leave only the ceaseless pain of hope and excuses and wishful thinking: "He didn't mean what he said his behavior is just a phase ... he'll change." But he does mean it, it's not just a phase, and he won't change. He can't. He needs it: power, control. (pp. 6-7)
Sadly, this does not apply only to men. I suspect that most abusers don't know they're perpetrating abuse. They don't wake up in the morning and think, "I'm going to withhold something from her today." Neither did I. I never once made a conscious decision to withhold my affection from him. I thought of myself as the victim, and in my pain I fled emotionally, mentally, and sometimes physically under the guise of studying. I suspect the only person who believed the studying excuse was I, and I didn't believe it but felt horribly guilty because I had lied rather than discuss my pain and fear with him.
Sometimes, looking back on my life, I wonder how I got into that marriage. I thought I was a person who could judge character. I thought I had enough self-respect not to let people hurt me. My husband was not a bad person. But he couldn't meet my needs--I didn't know what those needs were. And I couldn't meet his. I understand now that I had two problems. One was that I didn't appreciate the importance of emotional pain and thus deprived myself of what I really needed. The other was that I didn't know how to choose my marriage partner.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Did you say that as a child? Did you use it as a come-back when another child said something cruel to you, trying to push your buttons? Did it really make you feel better? If you were like me, it didn't. It just allowed you to pretend to feel better. It was a statement designed to make the other child think you were incapable of being hurt. If I could make them believe this, perhaps they'd get tired of hurting me and stop.
It didn't often work. Instead of feeling better, I hid my hurts deep inside myself. This habit was not only condoned but encouraged by adults who minimized all emotional scars. "Oh, don't let it hurt you." "They're just trying to get a rise out of you." "You're too sensitive. Let it roll like water off a duck's back." ... I learned that emotional pain was not important. I learned not to protest when I was teased, when questions were asked which I did not want to answer, etc.
I carried these habits into my dating relationships and, eventually, into my marriage. I did not insist on being treated respectfully. I was to submit. The husband was the head of the house. Surely he would always know best. For me to question his judgments or to set any emotional boundaries with him was equal to a lack of submission.
There were clear signals that I had no business being married. In fact, I had been engaged twice. I broke off the first engagement after enduring six months of emotional and sexual abuse and finally realizing that I was not wanted as a marriage partner because of who I was as a person but because I had the potential to satisfy, at least in part, a sexual addiction. I fell easily into the second engagement, which ended up becoming a legal marriage. He told me that it was God's will for us to be together. Not really knowing how to rightly discern God's will for my own life, I accepted his marriage proposal because at the time I could not think of a reason not to.
I began to see signs that I should not get married during our engagement. However, an accusation my previous fiance had made haunted me. His final words to me in an argument following my informing him that I didn't want to marry him were: "Thanks for keeping your promises."
Thanks for keeping my promises. Guilt washed over me. Loyalty and reliability had been two of the few qualities I appreciated in myself. Now I had failed at both. I had hurt someone, and I intended not to ever do it again. This time, I would get married, even if it meant a life of unhappiness for me. I would prove that I could keep my promises.
If the above sounds like flawed logic, it is. It is so flawed that it stares me in the face like the sun. But I was not a logical person in 1996. I was not logical in anything I did, and my marriage is just one example.
I quickly moved into the role of the submissive wife, trying to please. There were many things we never argued about. Perhaps this was what kept me thinking the marriage was healthy for a time. But as time went on, we began to fight several times a week. Often we fought in the middle of the night, and often I would wake up and attend classes at the university despite getting only three or four hours of sleep. Our difficulties in communication caused our arguments to run in circles.
Miller distinguishes between loss of temper and abuse...
... Wife battering, whether physical or nonphysical, is not a lone instance of bad temper or two or three instances. A man doesn't commit a single abusive act in anger, apologize, and then in another fit of pique strike out again sometime later. That's an outburst of temper, of which most of us are occasionally guilty. Abuse is different: rather than a series of unrelated events in which a man lashes out randomly, abuse is systematic behavior following a specific pattern that is designed to gain, secure, and exercise control. (p. 101)
I have a hard time with this paragraph. I understand that abuse is systematic; but this makes it also seem intentional, and I just can't believe that most people set out to hurt someone intentionally. They only know their own fears and needs, and those are the things that drive their behavior.
Control was not a thing that I willingly wanted to keep from him. In fact, I desperately wanted to trust him. But because of his own vulnerabilities, he entered into our relationship with a lack of trust in me, and it was our lack of trust in each other which paved the way for us to abuse each other, he through insults and I through pulling away or overreacting emotionally and promising to do things I could never hope to do.
In the book, four types of nonphysical abuse are identified. These are emotional abuse, psychological abuse, social abuse, and economic abuse. Neither of us understood the concept of abuse, and neither of us would have been willing or able to see that we were behaving abusively or in what manner. He thought he was working for the good of the marriage--and he was working for the good of his portion of it. I, in turn, thought that I was working for the good of the marriage, that if I could please him I would then get what I needed in return. Ms. Miller puts it this way on p. 8:
The man does not select one form of nonphysical abuse with which to control and shun the other three; he uses what is available and effective. For instance, while social abuse against a woman close to her family and friends is a powerful weapon, so may be economic deprivation, psychological mind games, and the ego pummeling of emotional abuse. The abuser sustains dominance by using them all.
Similarly, the anguished woman makes no effort to label the various kinds of abuse her man heaps on her; her concern is survival. Nonphysical abuse by any name is the overlapping destruction of a woman's emotional, psychological, social, and economic well-being.
It was precisely this concern for survival which kept me locked into the patterns of behavior I was using. I was dependent on him for what little approval and emotional nurturing he gave to me, and I did not think I could survive without it. I know much better now, but it took reaching the point where I was near committing suicide to make me realize how serious the problem of this dependency was. Dying was not an option I wanted to take. So I chose to leave. Like most women in similar situations, I considered myself a victim and did not want to entertain any possibility that my actions or lack of actions were contributing to the problem. It was too painful then. It felt too much like I was admitting that he was right. Admitting that would have sealed my despair of ever being able to please him--or any man, for that matter.
I never did prove to him that I was reliable. The truth is that when I am not attacked emotionally or threatened, I am very reliable and loyal. By the time I decided to divorce him, I was even more guilt-ridden than when I married him. That caused its own problems, and this is the final issue I'd like to address.
Abuse affects people. It affects all parties involved. When it happens in marriage, it divides the couple. It causes hearts to become hard and riddled with pain. Wherever it begins, it always ends in a mess. I don't pretend to know whether divorce is right or wrong. Never for one moment do I believe that it involves simply a matter of to divorce or not to divorce. When hearts are hard, reconciliation cannot take place. If my heart is hard because someone has hurt me, I cannot forgive. If his heart is hard because I have not forgiven--or because I have not otherwise lived up to his expectations--he cannot forgive me. And neither of us is free in Christ to take responsibility for our portion of the problems and allow God to heal the marriage. What would be the greater sin: to continue living in this bondage or to legally do what has already been done emotionally and allow one another to be set free? When Jesus spoke of divorce, it was never the divorce that caused a person to be "defiled". It was the sin of adultery. I will not discuss that here; for it is not what this page is designed to discuss.
When confronted with the defense that divorce was not in God's plan, I had to realize that abuse was not in it either. God could repair the damage done by my divorce. He could forgive me for it if forgiveness was needed. But I could not believe that He intended for me to continue to live outside of His plan. In 1997, I left, and my divorce was legal in 1998. Today I am rebuilding my life and learning what it means to believe in--to cling to and trust in and rely on--Jesus. I am learning how to bear witness to him in my life. I am learning how to exercise self-control in my emotional responses and how to communicate effectively. I am learning to trust that He knows my heart and my needs and will provide them in His perfect time, that I don't have to get married by a certain age to "keep up with society". I do not know if I will someday have another chance to have a family. I do know that preparing myself for a strong, healthy relationship never hurts.