“I’m married to a psychopath”

Click here to read my Family Court nightmare from the beginning. (This series talks about domestic violence and abuse. Please take care in reading.)

The madness continued, especially because I wasn’t letting go of my concerns like I had for the past ten years. The first time I said I was going to leave, my older son was 2. I talked myself into courage, walked into the house, and told X I wanted to separate. Within an hour, he had spun the conversation so that he was the one leaving me and had me pleading with him to stay. Then there was the time that I discovered an email he had written to a corporate video game company asking for his account back after they kicked him off their platform – but the facts he presented were a giant lie. He had leveraged our home burning down and my getting sick but twisted the facts and even made up family members of mine who don’t exist. I thought I was done then. Instead, X agreed to get a brain scan and go to rehab (he was spending 10s of thousands of dollars on video games a month without my knowing).

I wasn’t so easily swayed this time. I wasn’t latching on to a new shiny solution or fix. I was collecting information, trying to untangle a decade of “love.”

A week after the Women of the Year banquet, we got into another round of circular conversations. By this point, I was keeping notes for myself on a Locked Notes app on my phone. I needed the proof for myself that things were as bad as I believed them to be. As we were talking, X would say things like “I’m not manipulating. You might think this is manipulative, but it is not.” [Oh yeah, sure Jan.] When I mentioned the abuse that I was still trying to figure out, he would say, “You have to stop living in the past.” What I wrote one night to myself was “I am afraid. Challenging X means fear, crazy-making, blame. Our whole relationship is built on him manipulating me for sex.”

I’m a little uncomfortable writing about the sexual abuse. What I will say for now is that it was very common for X to call sex with me “rape” as though it were a joke we were both in on. I spent hours, days, weeks of my life talking about X’s genitals and his related problems down there! This information matters because of what I did next.

I still didn’t quite believe that things were as awful as they actually were. I needed facts and data so that I could base my decision to leave (or stay) on sound logic and not some vague feeling that things were bad. So I woke up one morning and decided I would do an experiment to see how far X would take things (I’m not sure I recommend this strategy).

X was lying down next to me, groping me, saying things like “I know you like this. This is what you want.” I felt nauseated.

I agreed to have sex. And then I started apologizing (I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to see what would happen). I asked X how I could be the wife for him. X told me to get rid of all of the guys who want me. Look, that sounds flattering. But I was a size 16/18 married mother of two who was barely allowed to talk to friends. I didn’t exactly have a secret line of men waiting to f* me. But anyhow.

I kept telling him that I would get rid of men. I told him that I was going to lay in bed all day, every day and wait for him to be ready to have sex with me. In my mind, I was waiting for him to stop, to tell me he didn’t want me to be a sex doll. Instead, he started crying and told me that was the only thing he ever wanted from me. He was so happy. “[Therapist] is going to be so shocked that we figured out our relationship problems in a couple of weeks.” To him, our problem was that I was a living, breathing human with thoughts and feelings of my own.

I’m married to a psychopath. 

That’s what I wrote. In that moment, I knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t solvable by marriage counseling. And if he was a psychopath, I was likely in grave danger. And so were my kids.

We went to marriage counseling that day. While we were in the waiting room, I went to the bathroom. I wrote “help” on the back of an index card and slipped it under the door of our therapist. She came out and met me in a small powder room. Tucked in around the toilet, I lost it. I was crying and shaking.

“Are you being abused?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know. Abuse looked like being hit, bruises, choking, stuff you could hold onto, prove. This was… something else.

Later that afternoon I went to my individual counselor. Things felt so crazy and out of control that I started seeing her twice a week on top of weekly marriage counseling.

“I guess that’s what I’ll do,” I said to her. “Just lay in bed and wait for him until I figure out what else to do.”

Thankfully she cautioned me against this approach.

I once again steeled myself, pulled out the courage that was still inside me, just stuffed way way down, and I went home. I walked into my bedroom where X had been masturbating, waiting for me.

“Listen asshole. Either you learn to respect my boundaries and treat me like a woman who deserves love and respect or you get out of my house.”

I still didn’t leave.