Posted by:
catnip
(
)
Date: November 29, 2017 05:43AM
"Verbal Abuse" until after I had endured 17 years of it and was divorced, absolutely reeling in depression and confusion.
I happened to find Patricia Evans' books about verbal abuse, and it was creepy. Parts of it could have been taken verbatim from first my mother in my early life, and then in my first marriage.
I knew that I was very unhappy when husband the first was around, and I was very happy when his job took him "on the road" for several days at a time.It eventually occurred to me that if I were happily married, I wouldn't look forward so eagerly to his next absence.
I remember my mother saying, "At least, he doesn't hit you," and I thought that covered the abuse thing.
I was on my own for a couple of years after getting divorced, learning to stand on my own two feet. Great learning experience.
And then I met DH. We were both VERY wary, as we had been badly burned in previous relationships. We dated for 14 months.
Getting engaged wasn't especially romantic. We were in a department store. He was looking, with his usual intensity, at vacuum cleaners. Since I don't have a domestic bone in my body, I was bored witness, and began wandering around. I happened to find the jewelry counter, and found a pretty cubic zirconia ring that we could afford and that would suffice as an engagement ring.
I dragged him over and pointed it out. "Let's get that one, and tell our mothers we are engaged. You know we spend most of our time at each other's apartments anyway. I can pay for it if you can't." (We were pretty broke back then.)
He put the ring on my finger and said, "Is it official now?" I said, "I think so. Let's go tell your mother."
We went over to his mother's house, and the first thing I told her after "Guess what? We're engaged!" was, "Don't worry, it isn't a real diamond. But don't tell anybody." (She would have killed me if I had let her son buy a real diamond. He couldn't afford one.) We laughed about that, many times since.
Twenty-six years later, we are still very much in love. But I think for us both, we had to get it wrong before we learned to do a relationship right.