My abusive narcissistic ex-husband -- Part 2: In the Pit

My ex never hit me. He came close, but it was mostly emotional games he played with me.

It started off with small, innocuous comments. He would make some comment regarding how I looked or a comment about my family. It would be something offensive, like "Are you sure you want to wear that?" It would be small, but it would sting.

When I tried to tell him I was offended, I would be met with a line I would hear many, many, many times, over and over again throughout the years:

"It was just a joke; don't be so sensitive."

That right there. That was how it started, with complete disregard for my emotions and well-being. A blunt dismissal of whatever mattered to me. His words were never wrong because they were just a joke, after all.

It's hard to remember specific examples, but I remember one "joke" he made about my priest. As a Catholic who also enjoys watching shows like Family Guy and South Park, I've seen all the jokes about Catholic priests and little boys. I can take those. But one day, he "joked" about the priest at my church specifically. I got upset, because that's going from satire about a broad issue and focusing it down into a libelous comment about an individual I respected. I got defensive and upset.

Him: "Gosh, I was just joking."
Me: "I don't find it funny. I think you crossed the line."
Him: "Quit being so sensitive."
Me: "Don't you see how that's offensive? Why can't you just apologize?"
Him: "It's a joke. It's not even about you. Get over it. You get offended too easily."

This would continue in a loop. Eventually, he started figuring out how to really get me going. His M.O. was as follows: (1) Make an offensive comment. (2) Dismiss my protests as "just joking". (3) Keep making offensive comments to rile me up. (4) Wait until I rage-explode. (5) Wait for me to apologize.

Sometimes he wouldn't even have to say anything. One thing he commonly did was "hover" behind me on the computer, whether I was studying or scrolling through Facebook or paying bills. It was highly annoying. He would never back off. "What, do you have something to hide?" he would always ask in an accusatory tone. He would press further and further into my personal space until my polite requests for him to back off snapped into angry demands.

He got off on the apologies and made me think it was my fault.

He knew how to push my buttons and would make me angrier and angrier until I just blew up on him. I would start calling him names, telling him he was hateful, all sorts of stuff. Then when I cooled off, I would feel bad about the things I had said, so I would go apologize. He would tell me he forgave me, then there would be cuddles and all that feel-good make-up stuff.

He never apologized for riling me up in the first place, though. It was always my fault for blowing up, my fault for losing control, my fault for everything. It was never his fault. He was always just "joking," after all.

I remember one argument we were having about current events in the Middle East. He always had very black-and-white thinking, and was arguing for essentially carpet-bombing the entire region, innocent civilians be damned. "It's their fault for living there," he argued. I remember getting more and more frustrated at him and his close-minded argument, and at some point I looked over at him and he was grinning.

Me: "What are you laughing about?"
Him: "I love it when you get all pissed off like that."

Yes, he knew exactly how to push my buttons, and he did it very intentionally. I didn't realize it at the time, but "crazy-making" is a type of emotional abuse.

He never hit me, but things still got physical.

I was feeling bad about the blow-ups, so I started looking for ways I could avoid blowing up. Attempting to calmly explain my feelings wasn't working, because it just turned into the argument cycle where I blew up, so I decided that when I started feeling that angry rage building up inside me, I would instead remove myself from the situation and go somewhere I could calm down and think rationally. This seemed like a very mature, adult thing to do after all.

It actually worked. I stopped blowing up. I still never got apologies from my ex, but I wasn't rage exploding anymore.

At least, not for a while.

I'm very sure my ex was addicted to me apologizing to him because my new strategy didn't last very long. He figured it out, so when I tried to leave by heading to another room, he would follow me. Our bedroom door didn't lock, so he would just barge in and get in my face.

Him: "No! We need to settle this right now!"
Me: "Look, I can't talk. Give me some space."
Him: "I'm talking to you now!"
Me: "Please, just leave me alone! Just go away!"

I could feel the anger rising, and sure enough, eventually I would rage explode.

I tried locking myself in the bathroom. It was the only room in our one-bedroom apartment with a lock. He would pick the lock and burst in on me.

Eventually, I tried leaving the apartment. Just to go sit in my car and cool off. He would start barring the door or even physically grabbing me to prevent me from leaving.

I remember one time I got the front door open, but he grabbed me and pulled me back in. I saw my neighbors watching us as he slammed the door shut. I thought about screaming to them for help as he dragged me back inside, but I was afraid of what would happen if the police got involved.

After all, he wasn't actually hitting me, so it wasn't really abusive...was it? (Yes, yes it was. Yes it definitely was.)

There was a bookshelf in our bedroom, and while he never hit me, there were a few times he cornered me up against it and started punching the bookshelf right next to my head. He would later follow it up with "No, I would never hit you. Stop worrying about it." He would punch furniture and throw things and be very physically intimidating, and then tell me I was crazy for worrying about him hitting me.

The cherry on top is that after I tried to leave and he forced me to stay and escalated the argument until I exploded, he would then get in his car and leave. Sometimes he would make vague insinuations about killing himself before he left, which would then make me furiously try and call and text him to figure out where he went. He would not respond for several hours at times. Eventually he would deem my grovelling sufficient enough to respond and he would eventually come home. That was his game.

He made me think I was the selfish one.

I spent most of that relationship and the whole of the marriage working two jobs. I had a full-time job and a part-time paper route in order to make ends meet. I was working 55 hours a week at a minimum.

He spent the better part of a year of our marriage on unemployment. When he worked, it was only one job. His favorite way to spend free time was to sit on the couch in front of the TV and watch reruns of cartoons until he fell asleep.

When I decided I couldn't handle "just getting by" and went back to school, it was in an online program so I could continue working both jobs. I had very, very little free time. I told him "Look, we can't live like this forever, especially if we want kids someday. I want to go back to school, but it's gonna be hard. It's going to cost money and it means I'm going to be super-busy. Is this okay?

He told me he was on-board.

A sample day for me looked like this: get up at 3 or 3:30AM, deliver papers until 5:30, back in bed by 6, get up at 11AM to eat lunch and study, start getting ready for work at 1:15, head out the door by 2PM, work 3 until 11PM, get back home at midnight to go to bed, lather rinse repeat the next day.

That barely over two-hour window from 11AM-1:15PM was literally the only free time in my day to study, and because it was an online program I had video lectures and such to watch. so it would be highly distracting when my ex would be sitting on the couch watching his cartoons. I would ask him to either put on headphones (the little headphones for my PC were too short to be efficient and I could still hear the TV; he had big noise-cancelling headphones with a specific jack that worked with our TV set-up) or to go into the bedroom.

He would stomp his feet and whine that I was kicking him out and not letting him enjoy his free time. I was the mean selfish one, even though I never actually told him he couldn't watch TV. He had an excuse for why he couldn't just wait until I left for work, too.

Him: "I was going to take a nap this afternoon."

That was it. That was his excuse for days he had off when I had to work for why he had to watch his cartoons, without headphones, in the living room when I was trying to study during my small two-hour window. I mean, how dare I interfere with his afternoon naptime.

I bought it all, too. The tone of voice he said it all in, he made me feel guilty for taking time to go back to school.

There were other things, too. He blamed me for not doing my "share" of the chores, even though I literally did not have the time to do them. I pitched in where I could, especially during school breaks, but it was never enough. He was always the martyr, doing it all, while I was just his lazy wife doing nothing. Nevermind that I was working my ass off and paying all the bills. He made me feel guilty for not doing enough.

Toward the end of our relationship, he would ask "Do you really love me?" I would say yes, of course, and he would demand "Prove it." He could never tell me how to prove it because "if you really loved me, you would know how." So I would stay up late doing extra dishes, or buying him whatever gizmo he'd been hinting at lately, or whatever. It was never enough, because the next month I would have to "prove" I loved him all over again, and again, and again...

My friends pointed out the red flags, and I ignored them.

On Facebook and social media, I of course posted a sanitized version of us, full of cute couple shots and smiling faces. Only a small handful of my friends knew some of the reality behind the curtain, and at the time none of them had all the puzzle pieces. Some of them tried to point out how my ex was really kind of a dick. Due to a mixture of denial and Catholic dogma making me feel stuck, I tried to shrug it all off.

I remember one year for our anniversary, I got him a card and some chocolates. He had forgotten, so he re-wrapped the chocolates and re-gifted them to me. I shared it as a "hah hah look how funny he is" post.

The replies I got instead were "You know, that's really kind of a dick move."

I was like "No, that's just how he is, it's a joke, get it?"

My inbox was flooded with messages of concern that no, it was a real dick move. Deep down, I knew it, too. I saw the same things. I saw the things they didn't see.

But dammit, I had married this person, I was stuck with him, I had to find a way to make it work. So I shrugged off and tried to ignore all those many little demeaning things he did.

He tried to rape me and then made me feel like it was my fault.

About two years before he left me was the real turning point for me when things really started to break down in our marriage. (I later discovered he had been cheating on me for the final three years of our marriage, but I didn't know it at the time.)

Spousal rape is a thing that can happen, despite what some people say. I know because it almost happened to me. Here is what happened:

It was a sunny afternoon. I had the day off, and I was actually a little horny at the time. My ex was at his computer and I came up behind him, wrapped my arms around him, and started flirting. He responded with something that pissed me off. I honestly can't remember what he said, but I know it made me really upset, so upset that I told him "Well, nevermind then," and I stormed off to the bedroom to go cool off.

That day he followed me into the bedroom. He didn't say anything, just pushed me back on the bed and started trying to take my pants off.

"No, I'm not in the mood anymore," I said as I pushed him away. "Go away and leave me alone."

He did not go away. He grabbed my hands and pinned them onto the bed. With his free hand, he kept going at my pants.

"Stop it! I said no!"

I tried to kick him away, but he just pinned me more firmly.

I started to panic and feel trapped. I began to kick and squirm furiously, and he pinned my legs to the edge of the bed with his knees. He worked to undo his belt buckle, then went back to trying to pull my pants off while I kept asking him to stop, each time more pleading than the next.

This went on for what felt like an eternity. Really it was probably only a couple minutes, but it was far too long. Eventually, I managed to get one of my hands free and I hit him across the face.

"I said STOP!" I said.

That stunned him. I didn't hit him super hard, but it was hard enough for him to finally get the message. "Fucking bitch," he muttered as he stood up and rezipped his jeans. He stormed out of the room.

I laid on the bed crying as I tried to process if what had just happened had really just happened. I was hurt, confused, and didn't know what to do. After half an hour, I finally worked up the nerve to go out and confront him about what happened. Pulling myself together, I headed out to the living room to see him playing on his computer again.

"Look, about what just happened...that was really not okay."

"Fuck you," he replied. "You don't know how to show love. I was just trying to appreciate your body."

"You...you just tried to force yourself on me..."

"Oh, whatever," he scoffed. "It was just a game, and you rejected me."

That's right. He was mad and felt he was the victim because I rejected him when he was trying to fucking rape me. He thought that it was "just a game" we were playing. It was inconceivable to him that I might now want to have sex with him right after he had insulted me and pissed me off.

He also loved that term, "appreciate my body", as his term for sex. When we went to marriage counselling he used it every session. "She won't let me appreciate her body," he would tell the counselor. It was a fucking weird term.

As a footnote regarding my ex thinking it was "just a game", I would like to mention that after he left me, after the divorce, after I was healing and rejoining the dating world, I was actually briefly in a bit of a BDSM dom/sub relationship. The guy was the dom; I was the sub. It was kinky and freaky and hella fun and awesome. During my time with him, my dom would push my boundaries, but he always, always made sure I was okay with whatever we were about to do. If something was too much and I said so, he always backed off. Now that is how "just a game, just for fun" is supposed to work. You have consent and understanding and respect for boundaries with the other person.

Forcing yourself on someone and then after the fact saying "I thought we were just playing a game" is not consent, is not understanding, is not respectful, and IS rape. Just making that extra clear to people out there.

I never went to the police about it. I mean, we were married and had consensual sex before, so what could they really do about it anyway? I was afraid of what my ex would do if I had reported it. Plus, I wasn't working two jobs for fun; we were fucking broke and on the off-hand chance they would send him to jail, I would have been in a world of hurt without his paycheck.

Plus, Catholics don't believe in divorce.

So even after that, I stayed. It was never the same after that. Let me tell you, it's really hard to be intimate with someone after they try and force themselves on you like that. Everything after that day, there was a definite rift between us. It had always been there, but that's when I was able to really see it.

I'm not sure he ever even thought he did anything wrong.

To this day, I don't think he fully realizes the extent of the harm he did. I think he really was upset he though I rejected him and that he didn't think about how forcing himself on me like that was wrong. I think he was so selfish and narcissistic that he doesn't realize how abusive he really was.

He thought he was too perfect to ever hurt me. That's why, in his mind, it was always me that was overreacting, it was always me not finding his "jokes" funny, it was me who rejected him, etcetera. In his mind, he can do no wrong. We're always the heroes in our own mind, never the villain. In his mind, I'm sure he sees himself as the martyr for putting up with my "crazy" rage blow-ups. In his mind, he's blind to the fact that he always pushed me to my breaking point.

I didn't leave; he did.

Two years later after the rape attempt, we got into a fight about parts of the blender missing, and that morning he told me he wanted a divorce. Our sex life was dead by that point, and communication had broken down. I was at the point where I was just holding my tongue whenever he tried to engage me in an argument and basically stonewalling him, which pissed him off immensely as he wasn't getting the rise out of me like he used to. We had gone through marriage counseling to no avail. The blender fight was the straw the broke the camel's back. He wanted to still be "roommates," however, because of the aforementioned financial issues.

I was stupid and agreed initially. That same night, he went to a party and came back complaining there were not enough single women. I got mad. He said "Well you're naive to think I wouldn't be looking." That's a direct quote. Two days later he spent the night with his female coworker "just as friends." He spent eight hours with her and didn't get home until after two in the morning. I was in tears and told him either we were going to fix the marriage, or he was moving out.

He moved out, and a few months later made it "Facebook official" he was dating said coworker. Just friends, my ass.

Ultimately it was a blessing he left, but at the time, it didn't feel like it. After six and a half years of marriage, and nearly a decade for the overall relationship, I had a whole mental, emotional, and financial mess left to untangle...

Some resources for domestic abuse

This is the darkest post I've ever had to write, but I wanted to get it out there and get it off my chest.

If you think you're a victim, here is a link to some of the warning signs of domestic abuse in general.

The phone number for the National Domestic Violence is 1−800−799−7233.

At the very least, find a confidant. I had a small handful of friends I vented to. My ex made me think it was my fault and that I was the crazy one. Those friends helped me put things in perspective that no, it wasn't just me. Even though I never left him, having that perspective helped me cling to some semblance of sanity, and I am forever in their debt. They were just there, an open-minded, nonjudgmental shoulder to lean on, and I think that helped more than they even realize.