kml - Would you have heeded their reservations though? My family was concerned about X's physical aggression and his control of our finances. They didn't mention it before the marriage. I'm not sure I would have heeded it either.
May - I left out the key summary of my wall of text. It should have gone in this paragraph:
Love is stupid and makes you act stupid - our spouses are proof of this. It doesn't matter whether or not I love him or whether or not he's always been an a$$hole. All that matters is that this relationship is not acceptable to me now. This person is not an acceptable partner for me now.
So I just watched Athlete A on Netflix - doco about Larry Nassar and the sexual abuse cover-up in USA gymnastics - and found it extremely heartbreaking but also revelatory for my own life. All the talk of abuse here lately has made me examine things that I haven’t really thought about for years. And this is actually hurting me right now.
I’ve mentioned before about my swimming coach. He coached me from the age of 8 until I graduated high school at 16. From learning to swim in the local pool I eventually became a National age medallist and a member of elite squads as a young teen. I was determined to make it to the olympics (spoiler: I didn’t, LOL). I was a born overachiever and swimming is a very tough sport. Even from a young age, pre-teen, there is always someone training harder than you. By the age of 9 I was training before and after school five days a week.
The coach was a young man in his twenties. He had been a swimmer and his dad was a notoriously tough coach. My coach didn’t make it big and had settled for coaching the local squad in my home town. I was the breakout star of his small squad - a big name in our small town. I started making headlines and getting attention from talent scouts. My coach boasted and basked in my achievements. He made a bad rep for himself in the national swimming community for being arrogant and rude. Other coaches had multiple olympians in their squads and mine was small potatoes in comparison, but he thought he was a big shot.
He used me to gain glory for himself. He would push me to the point of physical injury and mental breakdown and then accuse me of lying about being hurt. He isolated me from the rest of the squad and made me train privately with him where we were the only two people in the pool complex at 5:30 in the morning - a 25-year old man and a 12-year old girl. He would assign me a main set, knowing it was just beyond the limits of what I could achieve, and yet I would deliver, because I didn’t feel that saying no was an option. Then, after watching me cry or vomit following the set, he would tell me that it was actually just a warm-up set, and there was a more difficult set to come. And still, I would do it. I became pretty good at sprinting laps while sobbing and choking on water. I was just a child of 12, 13, 14 years old.
So I was conditioned to believe I had no voice and no choice. I brushed off my mum’s concerns at the time because this was my dream and I wasn’t about to give it up. My schoolwork suffered in my senior year of high school. I wasn’t allowed to go to parties because I always had training the next morning. I never tasted alcohol until my graduation. My family couldn’t go on holidays because I couldn’t be out of the pool for a week. I began having nightmares about drowning in the pool and the town being flooded. Even years later, when I was in my twenties and had retired, I still had nightmares. One in particular I screamed at the coach “you can’t tell me what to do anymore!”
This is the part of the doco that stood out more than anything:
“You know, in other sports, the athletes are adults. They can reasonably make choices about what they want... these kids go to national training centres when they are ten years old. They are abused and mistreated for years, so even by the time they’re of age, the line between tough coaching and child abuse is blurred. So then when real, obvious abuse [like sexual abuse, fortunately nothing of the sort in my case] happens, you already don’t believe your own take on things.”
I know on the scale of abuse, my experience doesn’t rank that seriously. But what happened to me went beyond tough coaching. It was child abuse. In the literal sense of the word as I shared with May - the improper usage of a thing in order to gain benefit. The exploitation of a power imbalance for personal gain. It goes a long way toward explaining why I allowed myself to stay in an increasingly abusive relationship ten years later.
Once I burned out after graduation, the coach moved away to become an assistant coach at a larger, more prestigious program. He was still using me to pump himself up though, and after hearing all about my achievements, the head coach eventually contacted me and convinced me to give swimming another shot. He believed I was too young and too talented to retire. I moved out of home at 16 and boarded with a family an hour away from home. My old coach couldn’t accept that he didn’t have control over me anymore. He would approach me during training when he was supposed to be coaching the juniors. Eventually I told my new coach that I wasn’t comfortable with it and he took me very seriously - old coach was fired from the program. The last I heard, he dropped out of the swimming community altogether and left the country.
I’ve never shared this before but it helps to write it all down and reflect. The doco left me in tears, but some of those tears were for myself.
I think on any scale of abuse your experience ranks VERY high. 2x daily abuse for years. Quite an extraordinary abuse of power on his part. Let’s not downplay it because it was not sexual. Abuse is abuse is abuse.
Regarding talk of physical abuse here lately, it’s quite alarming and sad to me to be reading some of the responses, truth he told. Just like the coach was in a position of power, “vets” here can wield that same degree of authority to people who are in a desperately low time of their lives. I see an abuse of power in telling someone who is physically abused that you can help or “this too shall pass” or “just GAL and DB and you too can reconcile.” It is unhealthy to enable.
Meanwhile some of these same “vets” tell a man to throw a WAW wife out for being disrespectful.
I can see why reading some of this is drawing forth past demons. I have no abuse in my background and I am disturbed.
Me 41, H 47, M 15 yrs, S11, S13 BD 1: 11/4/14 we work on it; really I pretzel myself BD 2: 3/31/15 H goes down to "dorm room" 8/15: H back to MBR 10/15: H back in dorm room 1/18: H files, now divorced
First off... thank you for sharing that. I know you've talked about it a bit before, but not to this extent. I can relate because I was a swimmer too and did doubles all through high school. I was nowhere near as good as you, but I saw a similar dynamic with our coach and the swimmers in our program who competed nationally, who ended up totally burning out. I got major overuse injuries in both shoulders. There is something wrong with the system itself, I think, that allows for those abusive coach-athlete dynamics to flourish and it feel OK to push your body past the point of injury.
As a side note, D10 joined a relatively relaxed swim team this past year. They only use five lanes for swim team and have free lap swimming in that last lane, so I started swimming again. The first practice was so awful. It was so hard for her (and me!), I could see her struggling to keep up, so so tired, and I was so tired and muscles burning swimming next to her... and realized that this was the first time she'd ever pushed herself to the edge physically for no purpose other than that. She plays soccer and runs hard to get the ball, but getting physically exhausted is a side effect, not the purpose. I felt SO BAD for her. I was exhausted and out of shape and wanted to stop, but kept going because I figured I couldn't quit if my tiny daughter was going to keep going. Anyway. It just was a huge eye opener for me about what swimming is really like.
It is really wonderful to see, though, how you can recognize how that experience has shaped you and maybe set you up in some ways for not recognizing the abuse that was happening in real time with your H. And he does continue to really sound like a piece of work that I'm so glad you have escaped.
Originally Posted by scout
Love is stupid and makes you act stupid - our spouses are proof of this. It doesn't matter whether or not I love him or whether or not he's always been an a$$hole. All that matters is that this relationship is not acceptable to me now. This person is not an acceptable partner for me now.
This is gold and so important. And so, so hard to tease apart the present from the past, the father from the husband, the history and the house and the shared friends and accounts and what actually remains once all of that is cleared out of the kernel of the relationship between H and W. I bounce back and forth between wishing I had your sitch, a true walkaway who didn't look back vs my own situation which-- to me, at least, today-- feels complicated and difficult. I often think, if we didn't have children, I'd be gone. If he moves out, I'd be gone. Sorting through my actual feelings on all of this and what *I* really want and need in this moment, now; what I want for the future for me and my kids; and to be able to look, clear-eyed, at my H and decide what the chances are of him becoming the H I need, and how to balance that with the kids.
Anyway. thanks for continuing to share your story.
Me (46) H (42) M:14 T:18, D9 & D11 4/19 - 12/19: series of escalating BDs 9/20 - present: R and piecing
Can’t help but hear Tina Turner singing “What’s love but a second hand emotion....”
As an older, wiser woman, I think much of what we mistake for “love” in our youth is need - need for validation, need for sex, the urge to procreate. I think the reason it’s so difficult when we lose a romantic partner is because so much of our identity is wrapped up in that relationship.
At my age now, I see love very differently. Love is affection and caring for a person. Love is as love does. I don’t need a man to validate me. I’ve loved many people In my life because I am capable of love. Sure, you need to be attracted to someone - but that can grow, even if someone doesn’t initially seem like your type. The really important things are kindness, shared values, intellectual companionship, and sexual compatibility. If you’re a young person planning a life together, sharing a similar idea of your goals in life is important.
kml - Tina Turner is an amazing, inspirational woman. I completely agree with your thoughts on love. Love is a verb, not a noun.
May - your sitch sounds incredibly hard to handle, but you are doing so well. I don't know what I would have done if X had refused to leave or tried to come back. Taking space in every possible dimension was key for me. You don't want to be stuck in the same place a year or two from now. It's unsustainable.
HaWho - thank you for validating, it was really hard for me to admit to myself the nature of that relationship. I don't believe that people set out to harm other people (for the most part, psychopaths and some cluster B personalities excepted) but that's not an excuse for abuse.
Some random things have been happening. Nothing much on their own, but interesting in tandem.
1. A collection notice for an unpaid bill in X's name came to me by mistake today.
2. Someone tried to login to my Facebook account (which is deactivated) and my Amazon account yesterday.
3. My BIL (who works for the the same company as X) told me last week that no employee wants to work at X's location because he has such a bad rep as a manager.
4. X responded to my L last week about the D paperwork saying "Apologies, will action as soon as possible". Since then - nothing.
5. I went on a date last week and realised I'm capable of having feelings for someone again. Whether it goes anywhere or not is irrelevant. I'm not broken!
5. I went on a date last week and realised I'm capable of having feelings for someone again. Whether it goes anywhere or not is irrelevant. I'm not broken!
Somehow, the WAS had psychic powers when the LBS starts to date, I swear. Even if they don’t consciously know about it, they sense it. And even though they threw the LBS away, it drives them crazy that you’re not sitting on a shelf waiting as Plan B.
Another funny thing. X was pretty conscious about device privacy and security. Everything was password protected and we didn’t share anything. We had our own phones, tablets, desktop PCs. He practically lived on his computer playing video games (and conducting his affair, I guess).
S2 just came home and was chatting about what he did with dad. Went to the butcher and watched TV. Sounds like he had a fun time - yay. OW didn’t come because she was working from home. On dad’s computer.
I guess there isn’t a lot of trust between two cheaters
