He Did Not Love Me

That is the bald truth and I have known it for some time now. In the wake of the divorce becoming final I have been able to understand and accept it more. During the relationship I kept trying to run away from what was staring me in the face. I spent our entire courtship and engagement worrying that he didn’t love me in the way I loved him. He seemed to need ‘breaks’ from the relationship and what he called ‘nights off’, whereas I wanted to be with him all the time; maybe a hangover from losing my husband previously. I remember clearly that we had been going out for 3 months when it was my birthday and I was really looking forward to celebrating it with him. I was surprised when he said he wouldn’t be here, because he was going to Brands Hatch with his cousin for the last bike meet of the season. This upset me and when I talked to friends I got a mixed response; women seemed to understand why I was upset and men thought it was fine. He didn’t organise anything special instead and when I fell ill with pneumonia he still went away. Of course he left presents and a card, but it wasn’t the same as him being there. He admitted later that he had done it on purpose, to show me that he wasn’t going to disrupt the life he had built for himself and make me aware I couldn’t stop him doing what he wanted.

If I love I am all in, feet first or even head first. There is not a part of me I will not handover to the person I love. In the book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Elizabeth Gilbert says that if she loves someone she will give them everything – her time, her money, her dog. I recognised myself in this statement. I give everything until there is nothing left for me. I gave him my time, my money and my hope for the future. When we met I was a widow and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to find some happiness again. I thought it was a gift after the horrible time I’d had.

I may have missed the first time I was abused emotionally by my husband. I would have put it down to stress or him feeling under the weather. His anger happened only once before we got married and I remember sitting on the bed in the middle of the night, wondering whether to pack my bags or not; I should have. We were arguing over buying a house – he was more wedded to the idea than I was. I had fallen in love with a little Victorian villa in town, with a lovely decked garden and beautifully restored. I thought it was easy to maintain, with good dog walking nearby on the common and close to college and work. The house he wanted was just out of reach for us in my opinion; it was expensive and needed an awful lot of work. I didn’t want the stress of all that work, but also wanted some money floating around spare so we could actually enjoy life. I had been wondering aloud about whether it was a good idea or not, when he suddenly turned: ‘if you don’t trust me we may as well not get married’, he snapped. The issue wasn’t about trust as far as I could see. It was about whether something was a good practical idea for both of us or not. He proclaimed to know what was best for both of us and I was beginning to suspect he was more interested in having the house than having me.

I actually started to pack the one drawer I had in his house, when he finally relented. ‘I didn’t mean that’ he said ‘it was stress talking’. I took his explanation and climbed back into bed thankful that whatever I had done to offend him had passed. And so it began.

It followed a pattern. His moods were varied and impossible to predict. For the wedding day and honeymoon it really was wonderful and I felt I had been right to hang in there. I put his moods down to being stressed by moving house (the one he wanted) and the run up to a big wedding. I hadn’t really wanted the big wedding, but he wanted to show off and ‘celebrate’. I couldn’t find an argument against celebrating, but kept worrying that it was a lot of money to spend and this was my third marriage. I wanted to be quiet and low key, with just close family and friends. He asked me why I thought I didn’t deserve a big wedding. I couldn’t think of an answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t deserve it, I just didn’t want it.

His temper was unexpected when it came and always completely sideswiped me. I would just start to feel comfortable that the relationship was ticking along nicely when he would withdraw into himself and into his study. He would push me away when I went to cuddle him and hated if I made a move on him sexually – sex was for bedtime and the bedroom and nowhere else.  The comments he made seemed like jokes or thoughtless asides that it was hard to make a fuss about. He commented that if I wanted to go on his motorbike he would have to check that the bike would take my weight. He said I looked like a little piglet naked, but then told me he meant it to be endearing.

Then he made comments about my disability – that maybe if I just tried harder or lost weight it would miraculously disappear. He wouldn’t let me keep my medication where people could see them and made me have them in a drawer that I found hard to bend and reach into. He said people didn’t need to know all about it. I asked him straight out if he was ashamed of me, but he said no of course he wasn’t. I thought about getting a Motability vehicle, but he thought it wasn’t necessary. What was so special about me that I needed a brand new car? I could just have a normal car like everyone else. I was told to buy something that he could manage to fix and look after; I agreed but he never looked after it. He would comment when he thought I wasn’t doing enough or if I’d been doing too much and felt too tired to cook tea. He wanted me to walk the dog more and do some exercise. Maybe I could have some liposuction to take some weight off my joints. One day I was going to see a client who had a very dirty house and I kept my housework clothes on. He came out of his workshop and looked at me:

 ‘I thought you had more respect for yourself than to go out like that’. He said

This time I wasn’t going to let it go: ‘Does it make you feel good to say things like that. To make other people feel small?’ I asked.

He looked startled, as if I was the aggressor. ‘Of course not’, he said

‘I think it must, I think you must need to say hateful things to others to make yourself feel better’. I then got in the car and drove away.

He said I never did anything for him. He would have sudden plans to go and look at a car or to start a new project or business and just expect me to fall in line. When my friend was taken unexpectedly ill one afternoon and ended up in A and E, we rang him because we were exhausted from waiting and standing around. I asked if he could come in and pick us up. ‘Get a taxi’ he said. A few weeks later he decided one morning he was going to Birmingham to fetch a car and would I take him? I refused because I already had plans that day. He stood shaking his head at me. He told me I was selfish and never wanted to help him with anything.

Every time we had a party or barbecue at the house and something was not done in the way he liked he would be enraged. I started to recognise the look on his face when I’d done something wrong. One bonfire night we had friends over and while he was entertaining in the field and lighting the bonfire, I was in the kitchen getting food ready. I came outside and one of our friends had lit the barbecue already, trying to help. I knew that my husband had asked me to light it after he had lit the bonfire, but it was already done. At parties I very much liked to go with the flow and not plan too much. I figured it didn’t matter when things happened as long as everyone enjoyed themselves and got fed. After everyone had left he exploded about me taking the focus away from him. He was yelling about lighting the barbecue early so no one was paying attention to the bonfire. I pointed out that it was a party and he couldn’t control what people were doing. This made him even angrier, because we had agreed a plan and I had deliberately drawn everyone away from his fire to the food. His behaviour was so out of proportion to what had happened and seemed irrational to me so I went upstairs to bed. It took a full 24 hours for him to speak to me. People argue in marriages he told me. No one can be in a good mood all the time. I kept thinking that my experience of marriage must be completely different to his. He seemed to forget I was a widow when he met me so I had another marriage to compare this to.

One evening my parents came to collect their cat; we had been looking after it when they were on holiday. The cat stayed in our static caravan with all his stuff and a litter tray. He went out to check the caravan and came in yelling about my father. They had left a litter tray with some cat poo in it. I was quite calm and said that yes it was a bit rude to have left it. My husband seemed to think it had been left specifically as a message to him. He was yelling that it was disrespectful and my father had done it on purpose. He said he knew how my father’s mind worked and he would be at home, happy because he would think of him cleaning out their cat’s shit. I couldn’t argue with him and made my way into the caravan on crutches and cleaned it up myself. Again I simply went to bed and left him seething.

If it wasn’t one thing it was another. If I was looking at him ‘cow eyed’ he would tell me that wouldn’t last. I always wanted affection he said, I was needy and practically a nymphomaniac. I thought I was better than other people. I was selfish and lazy. I left him a letter one day when I went out, propped up against the kettle – he thought I’d left him when he saw it. I explained how all his comments made me feel and that I had never in any relationship, felt so criticised and inadequate. He told me he had a tendency to be critical of those closest to him.

He rarely wanted to have sex with me. Some weeks he was keen, then other weeks he was a no go area. He was stood at the cooker one day and I came up behind him and pushed my hands into his pockets. He backed up immediately and pushed me away. He was looking past me out of the window as if he expected someone to be watching. Yet we lived in the middle of nowhere. He wanted to know why I had to turn every touch into something sexual. I wasn’t actually being sexual; it had just been a natural movement I hadn’t thought about really. It was part of a hug. Yet I became the villain of the piece: always wanting something, constantly on him and unable to control myself. If I went to bed naked and he wasn’t in the mood he told me to cover up. I felt like my desire was abnormal and I was ashamed and humiliated. I stopped making any advance towards him and as a result we barely touched each other. All affection was for the bedroom and in bed so I couldn’t surprise him. Then he came to bed later and later so that I knew he was just waiting for me to be asleep before he felt safe. He told me he found my illness a turn off. If I had been feeling poorly and rested during the day he told me I couldn’t possibly want to have sex at night. It would be wrong to have sex with a sick person, or with someone who was in pain. My illness had made me unattractive to him.

Then when the benefit cuts came in he spent all his time telling me that disabled people were given too much money. He didn’t like me to use disabled parking spaces and he pulled me up if I talked too much about my illness. He never read a single blog I wrote, but told me they were self-indulgent. He criticised my friends, especially the ones with disabilities. He said they took from me all the time and didn’t care. Every time my disabled friends bought something he pointed out it was with his tax money, neglecting to realise that I did pay tax too. He didn’t care if he made me cry about it either. If football happened to be on he would support any team that opposed Liverpool because that was where my family were from. He would get great enjoyment from shouting negative comments about Liverpuddlians and he said the cruellest things about Hillsborough that I just prayed he didn’t repeat in front of any member of the family.

Then the trolling started. He would put a deliberately inflammatory status on Facebook and then just wait for the comments to roll in. All night on the couch he would be typing back and forth, espousing views he didn’t even believe in but really enjoying the arguments he started. I used to try and smooth these arguments over or apologise for him but I gave up in the end. I could see that the best response was to ignore him, but there was always someone willing to take the bait. Long political arguments or religious ones were his favourites. As long as he could offend someone he was happy. Even other people’s statuses were easy pickings and he was particularly fond of pricking my mother’s happiness bubbles. She wrote about our visit to the Beatles museum and how much she had loved John Lennon and under other people’s positive comments he wrote: ‘John Lennon is a twat’. He could spot happiness a mile away and shit all over it. When one of his sons bought his girlfriend some beautiful flowers he commented ‘I see he is letting the side down. I’ll have to have a word’.

He was actually intelligent, but pretended not to be. He said I was pretentious and how sick he was of intellectual conversations about writing or disability. Often he would be deliberately obtuse, particularly where his parents were concerned. He would make out he had no idea what they were talking about or come out with the most boorish statement possible to make them feel stupid. He would encourage his mum to make comments that were racist or offensive in order to cause arguments at the dinner table. One of the worst arguments came after he sold his shop and the girls who worked for him were unhappy about the way he had changed; I commented they seemed to think it was my fault and I could feel an icy silence. At home he made it clear that the shop was nothing to do with me, that I always thought everything was about me and what made me think I was so important. His relationship with one of the girls at the shop worried me – she would send him cards to ‘daddy’ signed ‘from your sexy girl’. She was only 19, very provocative, and some of the comments she made on his Facebook page I really objected to because I felt they were disrespectful to me and his sons who didn’t need to see sexual comments about their father. He told me that anything that happened to do with the shop was his domain and I should keep my nose out. He didn’t see anything wrong with her comments or the glamour modelling pictures she sent to his page. Finally, after she put something very offensive about giving him oral sex, he finally agreed it was inappropriate.

Without the shop and his girls his mood seemed to deflate. He had looked forward to spending time at home, doing up the house and enjoying time together. However, he seemed to lose all focus and the house seemed to overwhelm him. My dad didn’t necessarily help things because he had a lot of building and gardening skills and could butt in a little. Yet, I advised him to use my dad because his expertise was invaluable. Yet, my husband did not want to learn from someone else. He said my dad made him feel stupid and inadequate. He painted the house one summer which was a good sign and it did look lovely. I thought maybe the completion of a successful job might motivate him to do more, but this didn’t happen. Instead he started a new business, in antiques and collectibles and while the house sat needing maintenance he would sit in his office scouring auction catalogues and trawling ebay. He had no experience in the area so we talked about my friend Nigel, who had 50 years of experience, mentoring him and taking him to a few auctions. He refused the help and kept going to auctions until his office was full and the stuff was starting to spill into the hallway. During this time he was claiming carer’s allowance for me, but wasn’t enjoying it. I thought it might be better for our relationship if he gave up the caring role and went back to work. Then we would have the money to pay for some care and he would be free. He agreed he didn’t want to do the care, but he still wanted to claim the carer’s allowance and run his home business, which as yet was bringing in no money. I pointed out that claiming the allowance but doing nothing was just as bad as the fraudulent claimants he moaned about. He saw it as claiming back all the tax he’d paid over the years. I thought the benefit should be free for someone else to claim and he could work because being at home seemed to depress him and if he wasn’t going to do the maintenance around the house then we needed to pay someone to do that. The argument went on till 3am and he said being with me was just too hard.

The marriage muddled on for a few more months, but then I started to have panic attacks. I had been trying to do a PhD, but finding it quite stressful alongside everything I was doing at home. He told me that they’d only given me a place because I had the money to pay and it was simply getting ‘paying bums on seats’. I started to lose my confidence and he told me he thought I couldn’t keep it up with my commitments at home. I gave it up and found myself feeling depressed and without focus. I visited my GP in tears and she recommended anti-depressants and therapy. I had both but during the whole experience I never once mentioned how things were at home. I was too scared to say I’d failed, that I’d made another mistake and that maybe the people who warned me off had been right.  I also loved my stepsons and couldn’t imagine a life other than the one we’d created. As time went on though, through our final summer, I started to go to bed early on my own and pray for peace and quiet in my life. I longed to go to bed alone, with my dog and not have anyone sharing the room with me. It had now got so bad I didn’t care anymore.

I kept saying to me ‘if someone loves me why would they do this or say this?’ This must have gone through my head a thousand times in the last year we were together and it took me that long to wake up and notice what I was saying. He did it because he didn’t love me. Love is ability or a reflex action; it is not what you say it is what you do. Everything he was doing made it very clear that he didn’t love me and this worked as a release for me. I didn’t have to try, or strive anymore to make the relationship work because I’d done everything I could.