Monday, December 5, 2011

A Man Convinced Against His Will...

...is of the same opinion still.

I don't know who originally said that, but it's been on my mind this weekend. My husband spent a fair amount of time this weekend telling me how he used to be a happy person until he joined the church, how he doesn't understand how the church leaders say they stand for this or that, blah blah blah. I read him various quotations from different former mormons, and he listened to them, and then returned to his doggerel about how he doesn't understand how the church leaders say they stand for this or that, yet can be so cold and cruel.

The last thing I heard him say on the topic before I fell asleep was that he didn't care what evidence I found to the contrary, he believes the church is true. Based on everything he said the rest of the weekend, he believes God hates him; he believes he is damned; he believes that 2 of our dogs died and our house burned down because of him; he believes he's going to lose everything in the end.

And when he says that particular line, I feel guilty for wanting out of our marriage. Of course, I still want out of our marriage, but would like to lose the guilt. I don't think either of us should bear all the blame/responsibility/whatever for having a bad marriage, but dang! We have a really crappy marriage much of the time. And it seems like every time I try to convince myself that we can salvage it, he does something really assholey that just emphasizes the need to end things. Like Friday night. I stayed home sick Friday with an agonising headache (one of those where your head feels like it's made out of glass, and your brains are bouncing around. I still have it, in fact, and am going to the doctor this afternoon. But I digress.) and he was due to return from a business trip. Now when he comes home from business trips, usually he's horrible--yells about everything, picks fights over nothing. But the last two times he came home, he was decent, and I thought we were making some progress. But when he got home on Friday night, he woke me up yelling at me 3 or 4 times about various things, some of which I didn't even do, but he didn't believe me when I said I didn't do them. Like the garage. He said that I scraped some paint off the wall or something when I parked in the garage. Only problem was, I hadn't parked in the garage. He didn't believe me, of course. And he was mad about 3 or 4 other things, and finally it registered with him that I had taken all my medicines and had been asleep, so I wasn't able to coherently answer him. I felt like he was still convinced I'd parked in the garage, and just thought it was my drugs that made me say I hadn't.

Speaking of drugs, I have 4 prescription medications I take. They keep me on a more or less even keel. But he thinks I'm a drug addict. So yesterday he said he thinks the acute headaches I've been having are due to my medications. The fact that I have been on these medicines for at least 3 years doesn't seem to matter, nor does the fact that I haven't had acute headaches for the entire time I've been taking the medicines. I'm a drug addict. And yes, he's told me that flat out.

When he's nice, he's amazingly so. When he's a jerk, he's amazingly so. (And I can be a real jerk, too, I know, so I'm really not trying to only blame him.) We know how to press the buttons that instantly set each other off.

Sorry--I didn't mean to be so vent-y today.  It was a long, painful weekend.

2 comments:

  1. Sorry for your troubles. Can you see a professional? At least for you because he probably won't go. You need to look out for your own self, then see if the two of you can work something out. You need to be selfish for a while.

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