People are complicated.
People do stupid things.
People do mean, hurtful things, often without meaning to.
Sometimes people do mean, hurtful things … and meant to. But later on, realize how mean their actions were, and either feel shame, or claim they didn’t do any such thing, or both.
I don’t know that anyone in particular will want to read what I have to say here, but I’m going to say it anyway, mostly for the sake of getting my feelings out in an organized fashion. Should you happen to read on, have a little pity on me. I know I’m an asshole.
Carole and I have been together for a long time. Since late 1995, in fact.
In all that time, we’ve had our share of fights. Sometimes they’ve been pretty bad. Sometimes they’ve been amazingly bad.
A lot of the time our fights are sparked by Carole doing something just plain unbelievably petty and then doubling down on it rather than admitting that her actions might have been hurtful.
Yes, that sounds awfully self-serving of me to say that, right? Everything’s the other person’s fault.
I have many flaws. I can be very needy for attention (in fact, that’s almost my defining characteristic), I’ve got a truly annoying sense of humor, and I can sometimes say and do things that aren’t, um, well thought out … and that I’d almost immediately like to have back.
But on the other hand, I think I’m pretty damn good at saying “I was wrong.” And I like to think that I’m a helpful, supportive person who does try to treat other people the way I’d like to be treated.
So when I say that most of our fights are the result of Carole being over-the-top nasty and then refusing to back down, say she was sorry, or, well, do anything to indicate regret, I’m not actually kidding or exaggerrating.
Carole has a problem with narcissism.
She’s not hyper-narcissistic like your acquaintance with the perm and the flashy clothes and the me-me-me attitude.
She’s narcissistic like the person you know who wants an elaborate birthday party every year, but never buys anyone else a gift. She’s narcissistic like the person you know who absolutely flips out when they think someone’s criticizing them. She’s narcissistic like the person who wouldn’t think twice about hogging more than her share of a plate of cookies even if it meant that someone else didn’t get any. She simply doesn’t seem to understand that other people have feelings and rights too.
Cases in point:
- Carole insisted on buying me an ice cream cake for my birthday one year, even though ice cream cakes aren’t something I look forward to and don’t generally want. I went out of town for work the day after my birthday, having gotten to have one piece of said ice cream cake. When I returned four days later, the cake was gone. Carole’d eaten the whole thing and justified it by saying “Jay doesn’t really appreciate ice cream cakes, and I do, I’ll enjoy it much more than he would, that makes it okay.”
- On Christmas Day 1996, when we’d been together about a year and were living together in an apartment in Durham, NC, Carole looked up after we’d gotten done exchanging gifts and asked me if I wouldn’t mind just going out and driving around for a few hours so she could have the apartment to herself. Our two-bedroom apartment. That I needed to vacate entirely so she could have it to herself. On Christmas.
- We used to have to drive to the library to look words up in the unabridged dictionary (this was before we owned one, and before the Internet made owning one more or less unnecessary) because Carole would insist that a word I’d used in a particular context didn’t mean “that” at all, and that her preferred definition of the word was the “true” definition. Yes, that sounds batshit insane, doesn’t it? But it happened. We’d go to the library, look the word up, and every single time my definition would be the first or second listed and hers, if it was listed at all, was well down on the list. And even then she’d double down and say that the dictionary was not up to date with current usage. She simply could not be wrong.
- Carole always wants a ton of gifts for Christmas and her birthday and so on. She sees no need to get me anything at all. Most years, if I get a birthday cake, it’s because I ordered it myself or basically walked her to the keyboard and brought up the website where she could order a cake from the local bakery. I came to accept this pretty early on — birthdays were pretty grim in my family of origin as well (I’d get gifts, but then I’d get the same emotional browbeating from my father that I got the other 364 days of the year), and so it really wasn’t that weird for the birthdays-don’t-mean-anything thing to continue into my married life.But for my fiftieth birthday, in 2017, I told her “just this once, it’d be nice to actually celebrate my birthday and get to feel special somehow.” And she told me over and over as the summer wore on that she had all kinds of plans and that she knew how important the occasion was to me. And I told her “thanks. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that this really is important to me, just this one time, that I get to have a real birthday.” And she’d say “I know, I know, I’m so sorry for all the years I did nothing, this year will be different. I promise.” Come the day — I got: a cake she ordered at the last minute. And nothing else.
- Carole is almost always late to things. And the reason she gives for being late is that she doesn’t want to have to wait for other people to get there; it would be wrong if Carole were there ten minutes early, or even on time, if other people are going to be late arriving. Waiting is for other people. They can wait for her.
Carole grew up smart as a whip, but with very poor social skills. Unfortunately, rather than learning how to get along with other kids, Carole took the attitude that they were just mean and nasty and selfish and so on and so on, and that her failure to fit in was their fault… a belief encouraged by her mother, who told Carole the other kids were just “envious”. Carole didn’t really date until college because, even though she was very pretty, no one in her school could stand her. She started dating at Harvard, but did some flat out appalling things, like stringing a guy along so he’d take her out for her birthday and then, immediately afterwards, breaking up with him. She had one long-term boyfriend but fucked that up by demanding an open relationship so she could, um, “enjoy” more guys, believing that his grudging consent meant there wouldn’t be any negative consequences. There were: she lost him for good.
Going to Harvard was, in a sense, part of the problem. It was very important to her that she was smarter than other people… that she’d gone to Harvard and they hadn’t. She had a bad grandiosity complex: she could disregard the thoughts and opinions of other people because they hadn’t gone to Harvard.
She liked to rub my nose in the fact that I’d gone to a “cow college” — the University of Georgia. (Which, frankly, wasn’t that awesome a school when I went there; it became much more selective after my time.) There was one absolutely hilarious (in hindsight) episode that happened after we’d been together a few months — she referenced the “chocolate cream soldier” from Shaw’s Arms and the Man and told me that the fact that I wasn’t familiar with it meant that I was a cultural lowbrow and not in her league. I simply hadn’t read that play, but I’d read plenty of others that she hadn’t. Somehow, though, that got me no credit.
But over time, it slowly dawned on Carole that I wasn’t a lowbrow, that I was actually pretty damn smart. And had a very wide “net” and knew a lot about a lot of things. And this all led to one of the core problems in our marriage: Carole eventually realized that I’m at least as smart as she is, and a hell of a lot smarter in certain areas… and she’s never forgiven me for that.
She’s smarter than I am in certain areas and she’s certainly more talented than me at applied math, music, mechanical aptitude (she’s the one who performs household repairs; I cook). But her whole self-image and concept of self worth was based for a long time (and to a large extent still is) on her being smarter/better than everyone else. And she hates to the nth degree — I mean hates hates hates — that she can’t be superior to me.
For my part, I’ve never sought to be superior to my spouse. I just want to get along and have each person contribute what they can to the success of the marriage. Marriage isn’t supposed to be some weird zero-sum game where one person’s gain is the other person’s loss. My being smart doesn’t mean Carole’s dumb.
But Carole doesn’t see it that way. She has an unfortunate need to tear me down, to humiliate me, to embarrass me, to deflate me. And she likes to do this in public when she’s got an audience and she’s, therefore, safe from anything I might do back, like angrily retorting or losing my temper.
Yes, yes, I know. Why the hell do you stay married to someone like that?
Yes, this is the woman I’m married to that I’m talking about. Yes, we have a very dysfunctional marriage. Yes, I know it seems very very weird for a husband to spend this much time cataloging his spouse’s deficiencies. Humor me.
Carole has a second problem on top of the narcissism: disassociation. I’m not saying that she has multiple personalities, but she definitely has multiple ego states. When she is tired, low on caffeine, overstimulated, overheated, or otherwise having to dedicate a significant amount of her CPU to physical, external factors, she can be mean, nasty, and spiteful as the day is long. When Carole is not tired/overstimulated/overheated/cranky/etcetera, she can be very good company and that’s when I enjoy being with her. And she’s that person enough of the time that I stay married to her.
But it is like being married to Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.
Carole can absolutely forget something bastardly that she did in her Cranky Bitch ego state; it may take an hour, it may take a day, but before you know it, references to the unfortunate incident will be met with “that never happened”. Sometimes it doesn’t even take an hour: if something had really severe, sudden, hugely embarrassing consequences she can blank it out within a few minutes or at the very least rewrite the scenario so she was utterly blameless and the other person was completely at fault.
Her emotional memory is tied to the ego state she was in, e.g. “things done while cranky are not remembered when one is not cranky.”
Is Carole aware of all this? Or is this just all in my head?
Carole does know that she’s got a bad narcissistic streak.
Carole does know that she disassociates.
Carole does know that she absolutely flips out when someone, especially me, criticizes her.
Carole does know that she has tremendous problems with empathy, with being able to see her actions from another person’s point of view, with being able to understand/care about someone else’s feelings.
The problem is that thinking about her flaws leaves her feeling shamed and devastated and basically in a mental fetal position… so she tries to avoid that by never thinking about them.
She sees a therapist regularly — but to the best of my knowledge, never discusses her narcissism and disassociation. In theory, she sees him to try to get help with her obsessive tendency to play computer games at work (Sudoku, KenKen, crosswords, 2048, that kind of thing), but in practice, it sounds like a lot of her sessions consist of her irritably venting about whatever I’ve done lately. She can tell me “I really need to work with therapist on actual problem” and if I casually ask, later on, if she did bring that topic up, the answer is almost without exception, “no.”
She can’t bear the shame of admitting flaws.
We’ve tried couples counseling a few times over the years. It never, ever works. Sessions will start off agreeably enough, it’s true, but as soon as an actual topic of conflict comes up and we each share our points of view on the topic, Carole gets hyperdefensive. She starts saying that she flat out doesn’t remember doing whatever it is I’m trying to discuss that week. And the therapist will assume it’s a typical matter of he-said/she-said and that we’re both somewhat wrong… but I’ll keep going, citing more and more details, until suddenly, Carole goes “oh, fuck, yes. Now I remember what you’re talking about. Yes, I did that.” And then the tears start to flow, and she essentially curls up into a ball. One of our therapists, seeing this week after week, suggested she get some sort of neurological workup done — it was that out there.
Disassociation.
And that’s why things never get better. Carole simply can’t bear the shame of having flaws, of being “guilty”, so she just scrubs her negative acts and behavior out of her mind, and focuses instead on tearing me down to make herself feel better.
There was a period a few years ago when Carole’s addictive behavior (yes, there actually is such a thing as computer gaming addiction) was really out of control. She’d lost yet another job (Carole has had a lot of jobs over the years and has lost most of them by just being staggeringly unproductive due to her addiction) and spent her time sitting around all day at the house doing crossword puzzles and basically no household chores, leaving those for me to do when I came back each weekend from whichever work trip I’d been away on. I would express disappointment with how little she’d done and how she hadn’t applied for jobs, hadn’t done any chores, hadn’t done pretty much anything while I’d been gone. This led to a lot of arguments and shouting matches.
And so Carole decided the best way to handle this was to go to church each Sunday and spend twenty minutes (or more) standing in the back of the sanctuary after the service was over, telling some sympathetic acquaintances of how awful and horrible I’d been that week.
Addicts do that kind of thing. Blaming others, refusing to take any responsibility for their own actions. Add in a solid dose of I’m-perfect-and-you’re-trying-to-tear-me-down narcissism, and on top of that add disassociative thinking that literally blocks out anything Carole might have done, and she was able to, week after week, essentially depict me as the Antichrist.
That period of our marriage really sucked.
Because, think about it: what could I do? Storm in while she was in mid-rant and tell her to stop lying and to come on and get in the car? That certainly wouldn’t have led her audience to believe all her stories about how controlling and mean and nasty and awful I was.
I did the only thing I could do: I sat on a bench in the narthex, outside the sanctuary, and gave her her space, even though I knew what she was doing. And I’d wait and wait and eventually realize she wasn’t going to stop of her own accord — so I’d drift back into the sanctuary and sit on the other side of the room, visible, but not in her immediate proximity, just calmly waiting. And even then she usually wouldn’t wind down. I got to hear all sorts of stuff about how awful I was, got to hear her absolutely tearing strips off me, while basically not having any opportunity to defend myself.
(I eventually came to refer to these sessions as the “Five Minute Hate”, having forgotten that in 1984 they were actually Two Minute Hates. But they had as much connection with reality — as in, “We have always been at war with Eastasia” — as the ones in the book.)
This eventually led to me being kicked out of said church when one particular Sunday I did go over to say “Okay, come on, stop, enough” and another woman — one of Carole’s regular confidants — flipped out, assumed that Mister Abusive Husband was storming over to do some more Abusing, and started shouting for others to come help, to call the police, etcetera.
I retreated, dumbfounded. Carole eventually came out to the car and said that she hadn’t asked her to do that.
But over the next week said confidant ranted extensively on Facebook about how horrible I was and how I had to be expelled from the church. This led to the pastor and a senior lay member asking to meet with me offsite, and wanted me to agree to a covenant on my actions where I was not to sit with Carole at church, and so on, and various other weird things that probably all made sense if you believed the crazy-ass stuff Carole was sharing each week. Or I could, well, leave the church.
Humiliated, I wrote a letter and formally left the church.
I could go on and on. Carole has had so many angry meltdowns and temper tantrums over the years that I could write for hours and not run out of material.
But here’s the thing: I know she’s mentally ill. This sort of behavior — extreme how-dare-you-criticize-me narcissism, disassociation, temper, anger, and so forth — is not that of someone with a healthy mind. And I understand that to a certain extent, you have to give someone who is mentally ill a bit of latitude and a lot of understanding. You don’t have to stop loving someone just because they’re mentally ill.
But it sure as hell would be nice if Carole would seek competent help and stop going to a therapist who can’t/won’t read between the lines and give Carole the help she actually needs. But I guess the average therapist isn’t going to demand a client work on a topic they don’t want to work on. If you go to a therapist to get help quitting smoking the therapist isn’t on their own accord going to insist you also work on your anger management problems. Or your depression. Or any other topic you didn’t explicitly ask to work on.
As I said above, Carole knows she has these problems. Intellectually, she knows she has these problems.
But emotionally, she can’t accept that she’s not perfect, that she bears responsibility for the harm she causes me and other people.
This all came to a head this weekend when a bunch of Carole’s relatives came up here to Vermont to hold a family reunion in a rented vacation house about half an hour from our home. Some of her relatives are pleasant people and nice to be around, and some are … well, a bit frustrating. Pretty much like anyone’s family is. Everyone’s got their share of characters in their extended family.
I expected to come along to the reunion, take along my tablet with a few books loaded, and be present but have something to go off and do if things got boring or unpleasant.
But so far, that all sounds fine, right?
Well — let me add in two key bits of data:
- Carole’s birthday is Tuesday and I know she loves to have a big fuss made of her on her birthday. So, about a week ago I ordered a big-ass cake, enough for 12+ people, from my preferred local bakery, planning on surprising her with it on Saturday when all her relatives were there to celebrate with us. It was scheduled to be ready on Friday, the day the reunion was scheduled to commence. I figured I’d go pick it up, take it to the vacation house while Carole was still at work, and hide it in one of the refrigerators, to be brought out at the appropriate time the following day.
- Carole informed me on Thursday that she didn’t actually want me to attend the reunion. She made it clear that she definitely didn’t want me there on Saturday when the more, um, challenging relatives would be there, but then she went so far as to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t want me to come on Friday either. Why not? Because first, she can be more “herself” when I’m not around, and second, when I am around she finds that she “has” to keep explaining my stupid sense of humor to people, and she’s sick of having to do that. (This is, in my opinion, part of the chronic-need-to-tear-Jay-down thing she’s got going on. Other people don’t seem to mind my silly sense of humor, but one of Carole’s ego states seems to think my jokes are intolerably dumb and infuriating.)
Er.
So there I was with this huge cake on order, all set for a family reunion that I was now officially persona non grata at.
Fuck.
There was nothing I could do, really, other than proceed with the original plan — picking up the cake, buying some candles and little festive plates, and dropping it all off at the vacation house while Carole was at work. We hid the cake in a refrigerator in the house’s basement and I took pains to show the candles, matches, and plates to Carole’s dad — which might have tipped him off that I didn’t expect to be there when the cake was served. But I said nothing to anyone about “have a great time, too bad I can’t be here” … and just waved and got the heck out of Dodge.
Carole started to feel guilty about having disinvited me — and the guilt led to the usual editing-of-reality where she hadn’t said that I wasn’t welcome and if she had, it was only for my protection since her relatives are the annoying ones, and so on and so on, contradicting herself from one sentence to the next. For my part, I didn’t grump and piss and moan about it; I knew it would accomplish nothing. I told her that, change of mind or not, I didn’t want to go, because I knew that her first instinct had been “no way do I want Jay there” … and that I knew that if I did go she would find herself resenting me, if not actually doing the normal tearing-Jay-down thing she does in company. So she went without me, which was fine, and I did chores and things at home.
As for the cake — well, she glimpsed the cake in the fridge early on Saturday afternoon when she went down with a relative to get something else out of the basement, but had no idea that it was from me. When they brought the cake out, candles and everything, and said it was from me, it suddenly hit her how awkward the situation was. I’d delivered a big birthday cake for her and then been told to stay the hell away.
Oops.
When Carole came back home last night, around midnight, she was feeling very sad and guilty about what she’d done and what had happened as a result. Her brain went around in circles, unable to grasp that she had told me to stay away and trying to make it come out that it was all my choice and blah blah blah and it was for my own good since I wouldn’t have to deal with her family, and so on.
I didn’t scream and rant and cuss. I actually never did throughout the weekend. It would have accomplished nothing. It wasn’t as though I’d been told I wasn’t welcome at some awesome party where they were going to be giving out a free car to every guest and where there’d be champagne fountains and stuff. It was just a family reunion with my wife’s in-laws. If I missed out on that, the world would go on turning.
I just asked her to understand how utterly screwed up her world-view really is. She has managed to create, in her mind, a Jay that can’t possibly actually exist. A Jay who:
- is a complete total bastard
- is constantly doing incredibly nice and sweet things
Between sobs, she admitted that this did in fact make no sense whatsoever. But that she couldn’t control her desperate need to bring me down, to beat me … and yet, at the same time, be so dependent on me for so much: for tasty home-cooked meals, nice vacations, surprise birthday celebrations, emotional support, picking her up when she’s down, and all that other stuff that I do out of a sense that I should treat her the way I’d like to be treated.
Intellectually, she knows this behavior is wrong. That the way she treats me and the way she thinks about me is wrong.
But emotionally, she just can’t handle it. The shame of how badly she treats me overwhelms her. And consequently, she just blocks it out and reverts to the Jay-is-the-devil mindset. And that’s the mindset she was in when she told me she didn’t want me at the reunion. And it’s the mindset she was in when she ranted to people at church all those Sundays. And it’s the mindset she’s in far too much of the time.
The mindset that life is easier if you can just blame all your problems on someone else.
I would like to get Carole help. But I don’t know how. I can’t walk in to a session with a therapist — even if she got a new one with whom she could start fresh — and say “here’s the thing you have to understand about Carole: she’s gonna lie to you a lot. Read between the lines.” There’s no therapist on Earth who wouldn’t find that alarming.
Sigh.
Life is too short to spend it caught up in demons of one’s own invention. I have a ton of sympathy for Carole, but at the same time, I have a ton of frustration. It’s like loving an alcoholic who just can’t and won’t get help. You can’t make them want to change. That has to come from inside — and for a lot of people, the desire to change never comes.
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