Dear Roe,
I met my husband when I was 16, got married at 23 and have been married over 14 years. My husband is 8 years older than me and when I met him I idolised him. However, during the five years we dated he would regularly text other women. When I would confront him he would tell me I was controlling and paranoid, and that he couldn't put up with me. He was having (at least) an emotional affair the month before we got married, was texting her on our honeymoon. I thought he would stop but by the time our third child was born he was still texting other women I knew from the town we live in. Three weeks after I had a miscarriage he met up with his best friend's wife. I confronted him, however he denied anything and again told me I was jealous, etc. It was only when we went to counselling that he told me they had discussed having an affair that night. There are no words to describe the pain I feel when I think about this.
I confided in a man at work and told him everything that had gone on over the years. He was the first person to tell me it wasn't my fault, that my husband had taken advantage of me and my love for him. We began a relationship that was intense and a complete distraction for us both. However, my husband found out when he went through my phone bills. He also put a tracker and recording device in my car to listen to our conversations. This was four years ago. My husband and I have tried so many times to move on, however he regularly brings up my relationship with the man I work with, and continues to lie to me. I feel as though I can't give him another chance, but I am so utterly broken but the thought of breaking my family apart and changing my children's lives breaks my heart.
There’s so much about this letter that breaks my own heart, so much in your letter that I couldn’t fit in here, more examples of infidelity and controlling and belittling, but what is so acutely devastating is that you met this man when you were 16. You have known him over half your life. He has been your formative, adult and all-encompassing experience of love and relationships. You have never had a healthy adult relationship. And so it is no wonder you are finding it difficult to disentangle yourself from him, that it’s been so hard for you to even imagine a life without him. Since you were a teenager, you have been absorbing his explicit and implicit messaging that he is better than you, that you don’t deserve to be treated well, that love and relationships involve shrinking yourself down to nothing, accepting every ounce of mistreatment, and hoping that one day the person you love will start acting like they love you back.
He will never love you back. Not because there is anything wrong with you, not because there is something you aren’t doing, not because there is another woman out there that he could love. He will never love you back because he doesn’t want to love anyone. He wants to control them. He wants to have power over them. He wants to win, and will destroy everyone around him to do it.
Emotional abuse causes so much damage to a person. It breaks you, and literally changes how your brain works. It completely alters how you experience the world, in ways people who have not experienced it will never fully comprehend. Emotional abuse makes you believe that staying and being shattered by a person every day is somehow better than leaving, somehow more real, somehow what you deserve. You believe that somehow, it’s love.
This isn’t love. It’s abuse.
You don’t deserve this, because no one does.
Because I know how adept a person can become at defending what their abuser does to them, let us for one moment take you out of the equation. Imagine that this was someone else’s husband, and look at this man on his own merits. This is a man who pursued a teenager when he was in his mid-20s, made her feel insecure, cheated on her, wielded his money and power over her like a weapon. Any time she asked for basic loyalty or respect, he gaslit her, threatened to leave her. He taught her that she had no right to her feelings, her experience of the world, to any say in their relationship. He doesn’t care about her, or their relationship.
This is a man who will flirt with women his wife knows, will have an affair with his best friend’s wife, because he does not care about other people’s relationships, his own friends, loyalty, respect, anyone else.
This is a man who contemplated an affair three weeks after his wife has a miscarriage, makes her doubt her completely accurate perception of the world when her world is already crumbling around her. He does not care about empathy, emotion, grief, the miscarriage of his baby.
This is a man who cheats and lies, but also goes through his wife’s phone bills and puts recording devices in his wife’s car. This is a man who continues to lie and cheat, but continues to hold his wife’s one grasping reach towards empathy over her, punish her for it. He does not care about fidelity, trust, accountability, equality. He does not care about causing her pain. He does not care if he breaks up his family. He does not care enough to change.
These are the choices your husband has made. This is who he is. You are not the problem, were never the problem. You deserve love and respect and safety. And it exists. That relief you felt when the other man listened to you; the tenderness and empathy he offered you? You can have that in a faithful relationship. That can be your life. That can be the type of love your children see and normalise and try to emulate later in life.
Get a lawyer, get somewhere safe to go, get friends and family to help you leave – and leave.
I know how impossible it feels to leave. But it will be one of the hardest things you will ever do, and the single most important. Believe me when I say you deserve more, that your life can be different, that it can be beautiful. Go.
