Why I Stayed (An Essay About Leaving)

from What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Relationship Like This

©Kay Marie Porterfield

The Crossing Press, 1992

“I’m in the driver’s seat, and I’ll be the one to decide when and where we stop.” My husband of ten years said through the mountains that last Fourth of July weekend I spent married to him. Car windows rolled up, he continued to drive through one small town after another for two hours after I’d told him I needed to use the restroom. The evergreen trees, blue-tipped with new growth; columbines and black-eyed Susans – all merged into a blur as we snaked our way down the road, picking up speed. Before long the reality outside lost immediacy as my focus centered only on the stabbing pain in my bladder and on how I was going to make it home without wetting myself. Jaw set, he drove on.

As he continued the tirade, which had after years become a litany, I focused on my own thoughts. Why was he always compelled to work so strenuously at making life insufferable for me and for himself in the process? There was no way of knowing. Why had I stayed sealed in an emotionally abusive relationship for so long? Maybe that was a question I could answer.

Years after the divorce, I’m still uncovering answers. Along the way, I’ve had help. Some women friends tell me it was mostly his fault; the rest of the blame belongs squarely on the doorstep of 4,000 years of patriarchal history. Others refuse to believe my past. Those women who stay and take it aren’t college-educated professionals like us. My marriage must have been an aberration, temporary insanity that has nothing to do with who I am now. The rest scold, saying that there was no excuse for staying. Perhaps not, but during that time there were many reasons, which, given the distorted context of nightmare logic, seemed perfectly valid then.

Seeking them has been a process as time-consuming and painful as I imagine stripping my own skin layer upon layer might be, this exploratory surgery of my psyche. I cautiously biopsy past the obvious, scraping down to the place where the deeper, if les flattering, causes for remaining lie, slicing down to where hidden they wait, curable but lethal if undetected.

Theoretically, I could have walked away from the relationship at any time. After all, I was completely self-supporting and our finances were separate. Genetic entanglement wasn’t a factor; we shared no children. Except for occasional objects carefully aimed to miss me and thrown across the room for theatrical effect, physical violence hadn’t surfaced in years. He wasn’t twisting my arm, only my heart. Yet like too many women who are victims of psychological abuse, I chose to make the best of a bad situation, to convince myself it was normal.

Why did I endure a decade of rage? In the first place, he wasn’t overtly abusive when I met him. Witty, charming and a marvelous lover when he wanted to be, he made me happy at a time when I had few clues about how to nurture myself. Only occasionally did the tyrant inside him surface during our courtship and, even then, his anger his rarely aimed at me. When he grew furious at the IRS, his ex-wife, his boss and the dean of the graduate school he attended, I rationalized that he was a strong-willed man of conviction, that his anger was justified. It was a turn-on, setting off a high-pitched longing inside of me.

On our wedding day I pledged “for better or for worse,” and I meant it with all my heart. When worse came to worst and hoof and horn appeared, abiding love became my potion against the rage-filled incantations he spewed at me and his repeated threats to see other women. This transforming elixir wasn’t found in the pages of Modern Romance or even Cosmopolitan, but was instead a recipe from 1 Corinthians and Beauty and the Beast. I concentrated on the good days, which outnumbered the bad, and waited for the miracle of reconciliation to work.

Growing up, I had learned that love covered the worst of sins, containing and concealing them like a one-size-fits-all garment. I expanded to love him despite his flaws, then to love him because of those flaws, since they gave me an opportunity to practice the virtues of humility and forgiveness. Slowly I turned from lover into holy whore, unaware that stretching to accommodate the hard, hot bulk of a wounded man’s fury isn’t emotional growth or a way to sainthood.

I prayed for patience, choosing to remain frozen in our dark ritual alchemy of dominance and submission in order to redeem my half of the human race. The nights spent cringing on the bed while he raved at me, I did penance for sins committed by women past and present – Medusa, his mother, ex-wife, old lovers and any witches missed in the Spanish Inquisition. “We’re not all like that,” my contrite and constant presence said. “I am a good woman.” Yet because I didn’t fully believe it, I continued to accept the humiliation he inflected as my due.

If my husband was to be my tour guide for inferno, I resolved to be, if not a happy camper, a dutiful one. In Girl Scout days I’d memorized all there was to know about loyalty. (Emotional abuse wasn’t covered in the handbook.) Long after my trust in true love wore thin, I persisted, determined to trade that placebo for a merit badge in tenacity. To leave would be admitting defeat worse than stopping piano lessons for lack of talent, or not pursuing a Ph.D. even though I was once accepted into a doctoral program. Besides, I convinced myself, I couldn’t very well walk away after we’d been through so much together, the concentric circles of fire and ice that made the matrix of our marital Hades.

I stuck it out over the years, certain I would be a better person for it, certain he would be a better person too. He needed me, he begged, to take away his pain from childhood abuse. And so I struggled to heal this man whose broken soul bled battery acid. Feeling sorry for him and ignoring my own wounds, I shifted shape to become a sin-eater, earth mother, high priestess. Sprinkling tears and chanting apologies, dancing evasions on the drum head of his anger, I performed one exorcism after another.

And he was getting better, I told myself, because at least he didn’t hit me anymore. After a severe beating at the very beginning of the marriage and a few subsequent slaps and shoves, he didn’t have to – I was terrified of his anger. Well after our wedding I learned that he had battered his last wife throughout their time together, most brutally when she carried his child. Clearly that was proof, I felt, that he loved me more than he had loved her, that I was a better woman than she was. When he reminded me of how ferociously he fought back his urge to hit me, I thanked him for using only words as weapons, for leaving only invisible scars.

Later I stayed because he blamed me for his temper so often that eventually I believed he was a monster I had created. Perhaps he and his outbursts were a figment of my imagination. Just how does one divorce an imaginary being? In the crucible of suffering and self-sacrifice, I found a small seed of omnipotence, which I chewed on, eager for emotional sustenance. If he were a demon I had conjured from the depths of my own shadow then I was the one with the power, the evil witch. To undo this perverted magic never seemed as simple as simply leaving.

When the intoxicant of self-delusion wore thin, when my daemon lover glittered with wrath, hard-edged as obsidian, I feared him, yes, but I was more afraid to be without him. He held enough fierceness inside for two, and I was certain I needed his savage rage to defend me. So he became my champion, my mercenary. A damsel in distress, I stayed blind to the fact that he provoked most of the dangers he claimed to protect against. His terrorist attacks aimed at me were the price of rescue.

For a time I used him as an antagonist, certain I required his viciousness as a goad to achievement. Without that paradoxical prod of insult and injury moving me to covert resistance, I was aimless. Since childhood I had learned to employ my father’s taunts as a spur for sullen excellence. Now defiantly I achieved recognition in the world outside while at home I cowered and secretly raged inside, wanting to kill him at times. Ashamed of those murderous fantasies, I believed myself mad for having htem, and therefore, even more needy of his protection – this time from my self. In desperation I tried to be a better wife.

When I did consider ending the marriage, I rationalized that I was one of the lucky ones, better off than most. To reveal the parody of marriage I played out would draw attention away from the women’s issues that mattered, away from the women who really needed help. I knew a great deal about the depth of their suffering because I’d written articles on domestic violence for years. Rather than identifying with the pain of battered women, I felt superior to them.

The few times I attempted to reveal the character of my marriage in therapy, support wasn’t forthcoming. In one instance he verbally abused the counselor, and we were asked to leave. Most of the time, though, the issue of emotional terrorism was ignored. After all, he was a social worker and I had a degree in counseling; our marriage couldn’t be the living hell I claimed it to be. My story defied all logic, not to mention raised real issues about the mental health profession as a whole.

Finally my frame of reference blurred until his insults and threats became a condition I accommodated like the dull pain of an old war wound. I endured through the time he ordered me to the doctor to beg for lithium for a bout of manic depression he had conveniently diagnosed, claiming that drugged, I would be easier to live with. I held my ground when the doctor assured me I didn’t need a prescription but a divorce. I stood pat when the man who claimed to love me called me crazy because I still grieved a week after my mother’s death. Turning a deaf ear to the epithets, I paid his back taxes, expanded my repertoire of sexual techniques. I had made my bed and I would lie in it.

In the end, to leave meant facing the reasons why I had stayed all those years, reasons that promised to make me feel more shame than remaining in the relationship and in denial. To walk away meant admitting just how wrong I’d been to love him in the first place. Initially I hadn’t understood the depth of his anger or the impact it would have on me, but I had shuddered with delicious dread and followed this man who enticed me with his sweet bad-boy attitude. I had volunteered to go along for the ride.

In the initial stages of the marriage, at least, I felt a subtle thrill from living with a man on the edge. Rather than masochism, which derives satisfaction from being victimized, mine was a frisson triggered by potential danger, and by the subsequent relief of escaping unscathed each time it failed to completely materialize. It was the seductive lure of horror movies at the drive-in and beyond. Balancing on the precipice without falling off became my test of immortality, the intoxicating excitement of a near miss, easily mistaken for love.

At least my life wasn’t boring, I told myself. There were the adrenaline rushes and the constant throbbing ache of an ulcerated heart to let me know I was alive. I feel pain, therefore I am. If I leave him will I cease to exist? And then there was the flood of relief that mimicked peace of mind – until the next time.

Physical violence is an obvious, black–white, either–or issue – chronic emotional battering is not. It slowly eats away at reason and self-esteem from the inside, spawning an insidious collusion between victim and victimizer. No human being – female or male – is completely immune from this spirit-deadening dance. Perhaps that is why so few people are willing to openly acknowledge the extent of domestic psychological terrorism in our culture or the damage it causes.

Self-blame is self-defeating. I didn’t consciously set out to fall in love with an emotional abuser, and I didn’t ask for or deserve the humiliation I received. Neither did I determine the societal mind-set that dictates women, good women, must keep their mates happy at all costs, often at the price of their own dignity.

At the same time, taking responsibility for my own choices has been a critical part of my healing process. To concede that I chose to act on the initial attraction and afterward made daily decisions to remain in an emotionally abusive relationship is a difficult thing to do. It has been a necessary thing to do. Only when I stopped trying to understand my husband’s motives and focused on self-understanding, could I break free from the enthrallment. Only then could I know that the high-pitched longing I still occasionally feel in the presence of a sweet bad-boy isn’t a mating call but a warning.

“There are plenty of other women…” On the mountain road, somewhere between that nameless place and home, I knew what he said was true. There were other women who would tolerate his outrage. There will always be other women. If they wanted him, they could have him, I decided. That day’s indignity wasn’t the worst I’d endured, but I resolved it would be the final one. After that the rest came easily. Four words were all that were required to break the spell, four words to forge my own declaration of independence: I DON’T LOVE YOU. And then it was over – except for the soul searching.