The Empirical Manifesto

I feel as though a heavy weight has been lifted from me; I am light as air - best mood I've been in for months! In fact, looking back, I don't even know how she was able to pull off exerting such crippling control over me. It has all the tell-tale signs of an abusive relationship; I just didn't see it. It was so insidious I didn't even notice it happening and I swore to myself I'd never live like that again, yet here I was.

Please understand, I am not accusing anyone of purposely being abusive, simply that these things can sometimes occur in the background without either party being aware, but once identified, they lose their iron-grip of power immediately, which is where I now find myself. There are indicators of controlling relationships that I didn't think applied for obvious reasons - that being, falling in love with my wife's BFF - so they seemed reasonable until she was able to get a handle on them I think, as we all sometimes do. I now believe it was these perspectivally humble beginnings which caused me to be blinded to their escalation; being told when and when not to communicate, and jealousy which increases instead of subsides, that sort of thing. But it was the last two of these three which completely blindsided and ensnared me:

• A controlling partner will tell you what you are and are not allowed to do.


• A controlling partner twists your experience around.


• A controlling partner will always say that their emotions are your fault.

During one six-month period she demanded I stop texting BFF but allowed me one email per day. Because she wasn't making any attempt to offset the loss, I became withdrawn, and crawled into myself for six months. There was no physical affection, no emotional affection, and no interaction - for half a year. At the conclusion of her little experiment, and myself very nearly completely broken, she told the BFF that our marriage was, "the best it's ever been." After re-establishing communication with the BFF, she redoubled her efforts for me to cut all communication. That's a controlling partner telling you what you are and are not allowed to do.

As far as twisting experiences around, readers of this blog are probably bored with the many times I bring up endeavoring to practice, to the fullest extent, transparency, vulnerability, dialogue, and reciprocity. Gaslighting - if that's what this is - absolutely works, which is why it took me so long to see it. I wrote these words over a week ago:

When transparency is seen as betrayal, vulnerability is subject to judgment, reciprocity is nonexistent despite clear, unequivocal communication for it, intimacy no longer exists.

 
Her reaction to the most pure things I have to offer, were twisted into their dark, opposite meanings. I saw it, but didn't understand that's what was happening.

The last one has been the most difficult because I suggested therapy. And our Licensed Master Social Worker agreed with my wife that her emotions were indeed...my fault, and as she is speaking from a position of authority, is to be believed.

But on to a brighter future! Once I realized what had happened to my life over the last 12-months, I was immediately shed from (most, not all) fears and self-doubts. The behavior I was beholden to lost its control because this is absolutely NOT how mature, adult relationships are supposed to work. I remember wringing my hands thinking if my wife and BFF stopped being friends would I ever see her again? That was the controlling relationship reaction. As it stands now, I may drive out there and stay the weekend. My wife is welcome to join me if she likes, but never again will she tell me what I can and cannot do. Since she won't freely give me the same respect I give her, I'll simply operate under assumption of the same respect.

Tough session today.

My wife did articulate that she doesn't want to, "lose me" but also that she'll likely be unable to ever reconcile that with my being in love with her BFF. So...impasse? Either way, I'm trying to take everything with a grain of salt until the requisite six weeks have passed for acclimation with the new meds. Not because I think she'll change her mind, rather my hope is she'll be able to better express herself where we can engage in meaningful discourse. We can certainly revisit this topic then.

When the therapist asked what each of us was willing to do as a compromise to alleviate the other's concerns, I admitted that I assumed my love for the BFF would surely lessen over time, because let's face it, it's been 18-months of non-reciprocal affection. One might think that would be enough. But that hasn't happened. At all. Hey, I'm just as surprised as you are. So while I'm no longer controlled by the flood of emotions which wrecked havoc upon my body, I'm also very much still in love with her, which of course my wife sees as the root of her distress, and the roadblock to her impasse. And just between us, dear reader, I have no idea why I'm not discouraged by her lack of affection toward me, nor what that means in my continued pursuit of her. I may need to re-read Wuthering Heights. Of course this is only a problem because my wife feels, "less than" because I love her BFF, even if there were zero changes in my behavior. So I still need to wrap my head around that.

As for me, processing the parallel grief-cycles seemed to contain a hint of finality to them, something which was weighing heavily upon me, until I started explaining to the therapist how grief is the opposite of NRE. Suddenly, it dawned on me that if NRE can be experienced over and over when the relationship itself changes then surely the inverse is also true! This removes the finality of grief and replaces it with the hope that - if the relationship with my wife improves enough through medication and therapy - perhaps that will halt the grief-cycle. So while I'm still grieving over the loss of my former relationship with her (and the irrationality of simultaneously losing Cass), I am no longer beholden to it being a foregone conclusion.

Mind you, this doesn't actually solve anything, but it helps smooth over the feelings of dread in the interim :D