I’ve been debating doing this for a while, not for anyone special but for me. Maybe to help someone else? Gosh, I don’t even know anymore.
I was in a relationship for eleven years. We were married. Everyone thought we were just the best couple. Having that picture perfect relationship was something I relished, I thought it was healthy, functioning and it was a partnership. I thought this is exactly what marriage was. Being married to your best friend, your constant — always laughing. But when you fought, you fought hard — and the words would cut to the bone. Maybe there’d be a shove, or a shake of the shoulders. But we were perfect, everyone said so!
It was around the start of 2015, I began to become very aware of the unhealthiness of the cycle of behaviour, our relationship, my involvement in it, his complete lack of awareness to it. It was around then, whenever I’d leave for work in the morning, I’d get the vague threats of ‘Something really bad is going to happen today when you’re at work’, this generally meant suicide — whether it be cutting himself, hanging himself or overdosing on the copious amount of drugs (both illegal and prescription) which he’d began bringing into the house. He was spiralling and I was utterly lost. What do I do when someone you love so hard, so much starts circling the drain like that? He didn’t work, he didn’t function — he’d become so disillusioned with living and life, he didn’t see the effort anymore. The harder I pushed to get him help, the more he pushed away. By that stage he’d stopped coming to bed (preferred sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the lounge room and staying awake all night to chat online and play games). I begged him to stop smoking weed, because beside the fact it was making me utterly unwell, he was mixing it with a cocktail of other medications and I just couldn’t be sure of what they were all doing mixed together. Every day I’d go to work under the veiled threat of ‘something bad would happen’ and would be petrified that I’d come home and discover his body. That’d I’d be planning a funeral.
I suggested that we start to spend more time together. Our lives had become this solar system of where we just rotated around each other in the house, barely ate dinner together, would hardly engage in conversation. I was frightened to have ongoing conversations with him — as they were largely negative and I could feel myself getting to breaking point. I am sure he felt that I was pushing him away, because there was something exhausting about asking how someone was and having them respond ‘Shit’ or ‘Fucked’ every single time, without a positive thing to say about their day.
It was about the third weekend of ‘where we were spending time together’, and we went out with friends. That evening, when we came home, I was delighted that he was positive, and seemed happy to be out with people — we’d gotten into a nasty habit of where he’d prefer to stay home than go out with friends and so I did most of the socialisation on my own, including going to family events like weddings and the such. I’d obviously misinterpreted his positivity, because the scowl returned the moment we set foot in the house and he grumbled about being out and was I happy now we did something together. I explained that this was an all the time thing, that we should spend time together, but also with friends as well. He exploded about how it was useless, everything was useless and not worth it. His outbursts at that point had become quite aggressive, and scary.
Then at the end of May, I found the messages on his iPad. Detailed sexually graphic conversations with a female that he’d gone to high school with. Devastated, I couldn’t understand in that moment what I was fighting for. Had I spent the last year fighting for something that he had didn’t care about? He didn’t want to climb into bed with me, not to be intimate and not even to sleep next too — but he’d prefer to tell this woman who he hadn’t seen in well over 15 years how much he’d like to go down on her and ‘grind her clit between his teeth’.
It was at that moment I was done. I had gone down swinging in this fight against an invisible opponent. I felt utterly defeated.
I packed some of my things and headed to my mother’s. It was temporary I said. I needed to get my head together. I didn’t confront him about the message. It was too hard, to painful. How do I even start that conversation?
He didn’t beg me to stay. I’d previously expressed that I wanted to do counselling together — he wasn’t interested in doing that either. His actions showed he was done, he didn’t want to save anything. He’d given up the fight without even stepping foot into the ring.
When it became clear to me that our relationship was over — four days later, I officially ended it and said I was leaving. The only things he cared about was who was going to pay for him to live in the unit we shared, and how was he going to get money now. It’s what I had become, his cash cow. I offered to cover the bills and rent for the next three months while he got his head together and decided what to do — it was a generous offer considering I’d just found out he’d been sending dirty messages to girls on Facebook and Instagram.
Barely half an hour had passed when he began my trial via social media.
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