Married to an Asshole

 

What is love?

            Honestly, I have no idea.  I believe it is different for everyone.  For some, love might be opening doors and buying flowers.  For others, it’s shared interests and security.  Some people might find love in passionate kisses and covert caresses.  The word love is hard to define, as most feelings are. 

            In the heat of the moment, sometimes people get married or divorced.  They get swept up in their feelings and carried away with them.  The lure of the heart is one difficult to resist.  The feelings swoop in and override even the most logical brain, taking over one’s body and making a person do things they never thought they’d do.

            Like sleep with married people, try the other gender, date someone younger.  We all just want to feel alive, and relationships have the potential to make us feel so many good things … and so many bad.  Both are equally life affirming (confirming?), your stomach twists into butterfly knots, your skin gets tingly, and you feel every sensation a thousand times more.  It can be a beautiful thing.

            Until it ends.  Then it’s the most agony a heart can feel.

            I married a man I was with for four years. Our marriage lasted a year.  What happened?  He says he loves me, but my definition of love is different than his.  For me, love is not making your partner cry then, instead of comforting them and apologizing, screaming at them for an hour.  Love is not taking off to your parents’ house over a tiny fight and blocking your spouse’s number and refusing to talk to her.  Love is not ignoring her and refusing to open the door as the she stands in wet slippers in the cold of winter on your parents’ porch sobbing.

            All I wanted was a man who didn’t like to see me cry.  To me, that says love.  I know that when I make him cry, it tears my heart out.  I cannot stand knowing that I hurt the person I love enough to make him cry.  It kills me, and the fight ends.  I wrap my arms around him and apologize immediately.  But, after five years, I’ve learned not to expect that from him.  When I cry, I can usually expect to be shouted at for a good long time. 

            I’m not saying I don’t have my share of blame in this relationship.  I am stubborn, strong, and I like things done in the quickest, least time-consuming, most logical, common sensical way.  I also have a bit of OCD when it comes to cleaning.  Because if you just put things away after you use them, take your dishes with you when you get up, and declutter surfaces once a day, you wouldn’t need to spend an entire day cleaning.

            My husband doesn’t see the messes.  He takes off his clothes and leaves them in a pile next to the bed for me to trip over.  I ask him to take out the trash and two weeks later, the bags are still sitting there.  I ask him to put his shoes in the cupboard, and I trip over them a couple times a week.  I tell him to throw away cracker wrappers and chip bags, and I’ll find cracker boxes from a month ago under his bedside table and molding chocolate milk bottles …

            Love can’t work if one person in the relationship is an adult and the other is a child.  Relationships are about equal partnership, and that’s why this one is ending.  I know that he thinks I don’t do much in our relationship, but he is wrong.  He doesn’t realize how much work it is putting up with him.  If I want things cleaned, I either have to do it myself−and this means cleaning up after him as well−or I have to ask him a thousand times to do it over the course of a month.  To me, you’re a fucking grown-ass adult.  If you see the toilet needs to be scrubbed, fucking scrub it.  The carpet needs to be vacuumed?  You know where it is. Laundry needs to be put away, there’s the closet. 

            But he sees none of this and he does none of this. After five years of feeling like the mother fighting with the toddler or teen to clean his room, I have given up.  It is fucking exhausting.  Much easier to just live in filth and try my best to look away.  I still clean the toilet, I’m not a savage.  But things pile up, I don’t have a craft space it’s so littered with crap.  Sometimes I just clean his bedside table and under the bed on his side myself because I can’t handle it after a certain point, but I’m fucking exhausted in every way possible from him, and he has the right to yell at me when I’m crying and then block my number and leave?  He says he wants a few days away from me …

            Well, I think I’m ready for the rest of my life away from him.  I’ll probably start writing again.  Oh, look, I am!  I’ll probably finally get some crafting done and paint the bedroom walls.  Open the curtains, let in some light and make this room a safe haven of cleanliness and organization.  Then I’ll make sure he signs those divorce papers and never let the filth back into my life.

            I suggest, when you are looking for love, don’t settle for an asshole.  They drain the life right out of you.