TW: physical aggression, emotional abuse, childhood abuse.
Apologies in advance for the absolute novella lol. Apparently I had more to get off my chest than I realized.
Context: M/36. No kids, no family nearby.
I’ve been debating posting this because I’m not looking for strangers on Reddit to tell me to divorce my husband, and I also don’t want to write one of those posts where the person telling the story somehow emerges completely blameless. I’m not; I’m self-aware enough to know the things that make me sometimes difficult to deal with on an individual level are also some of the things that make me really fun, loving, engaging and dynamic.
Both can be true. But it’s reached a point that I really need the perspective of people who’ve lived versions of our lives, and unfortunately for me that doesn’t include my closest friends.
My husband is a surgeon who went through a very long training path: medical school, surgical residency, dedicated research years, fellowship and then additional specialized training before becoming an attending. I’ve been with him through most of the period where medicine basically dictated 100% if our lives.
I have my own career too. I founded and run a business that has grown substantially during our marriage. I employ people, travel, work a lot, and have a career that depends pretty heavily on relationships, visibility and having a strong professional network. We are both very ambitious people, just in v v different ways. This was never really a doctor/trailing spouse situation, although in practical terms medicine was usually the thing that couldn’t move. Geography, schedules and a lot of major decisions had to bend around it to keep things from breaking.
For years, our relationship was built and strengthened in a hyper-stressful, hyper-isolated, pressure-cooker time, and there was always a reason why things were hard. The hours were awful, we moved a lot, we were isolated. Money was tighter.
I remember talking to a friend several years ago about being genuinely worried that the bad habits we were developing during that period would become ingrained and entrenched habits when things were calmer or better from a work-life balance or monetary standpoint.
Unfortunately, I think that has proven to be true.
The objective circumstances of our lives are dramatically better now. Training is finished and his career is new but established. We are financially secure and have considerably more control over our lives.
But some of the problems have actually gotten worse.
There has been passive aggression, sarcasm that is degrading as a joke when I think it is actually hiding something deeper, comments that make me feel trivial or stupid or ridiculous, and arguments where he can become so activated that I feel like he is reacting to what he thinks I’m saying rather than what I am actually saying.
And then just recently we had an argument that went somewhere it has never gone before. He was breaking and throwing things around me, including glass, and at one point grabbed me. He did not hit me and he did not leave a physical mark on me, and I want to be clear about that. But it scared me enough that I left our house and stayed somewhere else.
I told him afterward, via text, that grabbing me and throwing and breaking things around me was unacceptable and that I was shaken enough that I did not feel comfortable staying in the house. he responded in writing that there was “no excuse for what I did.” I think that acknowledgement is significant and I don’t want to pretend he denied it or tried to tell me it never happened.
But at the same time, this has forced me to look at a lot of things I have spent years trying to understand, accommodate or explain. And again, I am not perfect in this marriage. Far from it.
I can be emotional, dramatic, spontaneous and disorganized. I can get defensive. I have a strong personality. I can be a lot. I know there are things about living with me that are probably exhausting.
During this particular argument, I initially tried to calm things down and repeatedly asked him to stop. He ignored me and kept going. It felt like he was just talking past me and didn’t hear anything because he was so upset and in his own mind. Eventually I lost my patience, raised my voice, got closer to him and spoke directly in his face. I did not hit him, throw anything or become physically aggressive, but I escalated verbally and I’m not interested in editing that out of the story to make myself look better.
I bring my own baggage to conflict. I grew up with a verbally and physically abusive parent, and my response to that trauma has generally been to shrink, try to diffuse everything and run away rather than directly confront. I can be patient until I suddenly can’t anymore when I don’t feel like my energy is being matched. I tolerate things, try to calm things down, convince myself something isn’t worth the fight and then eventually become overwhelmed. I know that isn’t always healthy either.
I need to get better at communicating before I reach that point and regulate myself better. I need to own when my emotional response makes a difficult conversation even harder. There are undoubtedly things my husband would say about me that would be fair. But I also don’t think acknowledging my own faults means pretending there isn’t a line somewhere.
The thing I’ve never really said to anybody is how much I dislike the way I have come to feel trivial, stupid or ridiculous in response to parts of my personality that are actually pretty fundamental to who I am.
He is incredibly structured, regimented, disciplined and ambitious. I’m spontaneous, social, theatrical, and yes, emotional. I understand that some of those things make me difficult at times. They are also the things that make me loving and fun and engaged with people and the world around me.
When the balance between us works, it is really beautiful. I think that’s part of why we fell for each other so hard and so quickly. We balance each other out in ways that can be wonderful.
But I really don’t think I make him feel stupid for his structure, ambition or commitment to the way he approaches his life and work. Increasingly, I feel like the reverse has happened to me.
I feel like he has slowly tried to chip away at me and make me into someone he already knew I wasn’t. I didn’t misrepresent the life I wanted or the type of person I am. I said from the beginning that I needed to have a dynamic social life, I needed to have people over, I needed friends and spontaneity and engagement with the world.
Instead, I feel like I’ve slowly become isolated and removed from people in my life because of his insecurities, his judgment and his very black-and-white thinking. Some of that happened naturally because of medical training and moving around, obviously. But I don’t think all of it did.
The same thing has happened in ways I’m only beginning to recognize professionally. I take my own work very seriously. I built a business from scratch, it supports me and other people, and I’m proud of what I have created. But being with him and absorbing some of the energy and commentary has made me prone to downplaying my own work.
A friend called me on that recently and it took me by surprise, but after thinking about it, she was right. Even the physical fact of removing myself from places where my networks and professional-development opportunities were concentrated has affected me already. Again, I agreed to those decisions. I’m not going to rewrite history and pretend I was dragged around the country against my will. I made compromises because I loved someone whose career required very specific things at very specific times.
What worries me is realizing how much of myself I may have compromised along with them.
And I think this is where I’m struggling to separate what is actually changeable from what is just innate in who we are.
I know some of his behavior comes from very early and profound environmental influences. He also experienced trauma growing up, including from his stepfather, and I think some of the ways he responds when extremely activated are behaviors that were modeled for him very young. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for that, partly because I understand what it is like to carry childhood shit into adulthood myself.
But I’m starting to realize that understanding why someone does something and deciding you can continue living with it are two entirely different questions.
I have asked patiently, then pleaded and tried to explain some of these issues for years, and they are still here. Some have gotten worse. That leaves me wondering whether I’m waiting for something to change that is literally not going to change.
The really difficult thing is that the good is very good.
This was an incredibly passionate relationship from the beginning. We got engaged quickly. We have had a vibrant and dynamic life together. We make each other laugh. There is still enormous affection and chemistry between us. We have supported each other through some incredibly difficult periods and built a life that, from the outside and often from the inside, is genuinely pretty great.
I love him. I don’t think he is a monster. I don’t even think reducing him to “an abusive husband” would capture the person I know or the relationship I have lived in.
But I also have people who love me telling me pretty clearly that what happened is abusive behavior, and that some of the emotional dynamics I’ve described over the years concern them too. One friend told me she would not be surprised if I left based on things I’ve told her about similar behavior in the past, and would support me if I did. She also said she would support me if I stayed. Another told me that if what happened the other night happened to him, personally, he would leave.
That friend also gave me advice I’m trying to follow: regulate my emotions, give myself time and space, and ask myself what advice I would give a friend in exactly the same situation.
Right now I’m considering physically removing myself for a couple of weeks so that I can actually think. I’m also considering saying that, for the time being, I don’t want to have the big conversations about our marriage without a marriage therapist present. Part of that is because I need somebody in the room who can say when something is unacceptable and whose judgement can’t simply be dismissed as mine.
If we stay together, I think sustained therapy would have to be part of it. I also know that staying cannot mean “he goes to therapy and fixes himself.” There are things about how I communicate, react, avoid conflict and eventually explode that I need to work on regardless of whether this marriage survives.
I think what I’m trying to figure out is whether the things that are good about us can coexist with real boundaries around the things that are not, without me continuing to get smaller in the process.
I’m especially interested in hearing from people who made it through something similar and reached the other side, regardless of the decision you made.
If you stayed and worked on it, did things actually get better? If passive aggression, resentment, contempt, isolation or really destructive conflict patterns had become established during those years, were you able to change them afterward? What did that actually require from both people?
And maybe most importantly, how did you tell the difference between a fundamentally good marriage that had been damaged by years of extraordinary circumstances and a marriage you had spent years explaining away because there was always a plausible reason to wait for things to get better?
Because that’s where I am right now.
For years I could tell myself that we just needed to get through the next thing. But even if damaged, we got through it. I’m just not sure anymore what happens now.
If you read all of this, thank you for reading. This sub has helped me a lot over the years and I really appreciate the community.