Who was that woman?

The longer I am away from my first marriage, the more I wonder how I put up with so many aspects of it. Over the years, I had gotten to where I simply let P’s self-centeredness slide off my back. It was sometimes embarrassing in front of others, true, and it often annoyed me; but I knew pointing it out or challenging it would only punish me, and not change him. So as it increased, I gradually said less, not more. Looking back, I think we probably could not have continued so long any other way. It was only the supremely self-centered handling of his love affair that brought to light, even to him, that something had to give.
But this time, it wasn’t me.

I still marvel how he never went the 2nd logical step, never went beyond learning how his brokenness through early and extended abuse affected himself, to how it affected others, most especially his wife. He always did have great difficulty facing the fact that he was the problem, even when everything he learned pointed to that. The family knew it for years. It was our unspoken secret.
When P finally, after over half a year of being in love and months of counseling, did admit to a degree of culpability to me (weeping, saying he was busted and he was sorry I married such poor material; much self-pity), his consequent behavior seemed far more to say “Okay, I've admitted I am broken, therefore you must accommodate me” rather than “I see now I am the one who is most broken, I am the problem here, therefore I should now try to accommodate YOU.” And his counselor was impatient with me because I was no longer willing to do what I had been doing for all of our married life: enable this nonsense. I had known how broken he was many years before he faced it. I think by then I had reached my breaking point; there was no longer a willingness in me to have less than the whole deal.

The abusive mindset is most clearly seen in how P reacted to the truths he learned. The logical and healthy outcome of learning that all these years one really had been largely the one in the wrong would normally be a repentant attitude, a “Oh no, what have I done to you, how can I make it up to you?” heart. His reaction was, instead, anger and offense when I agreed with all that he now claimed to know about himself. This is not repentance. Self-defense has no place in genuine repentance.
The attitude that came from him was: “I’ve been so messed up, and that’s not my fault, so you have to excuse everything I’ve ever done/said/ways I’ve hurt you because of it. And you can’t hold me accountable for any way in which I am now acting hurtfully toward you, because I’ve been far more hurt than you have, so you must support me even when you are being victimized by me.” He turned the tables and made himself the victim; there was no room for ME to be a victim, his victim. What he had learned about how the abuse damaged him was used as a buffer against holding himself accountable, rather than as a tool for doing so. And that’s what never changed, no matter what words he spoke to his counselor.

I am aware I am well out of that relationship, and relieved and glad to have the blessed chance I have been given to start a new life without emotional abuse at home. But I do wonder about the person I was, who put up with this for so long. I guess believing I didn’t have any other option was a large part of it. I married without a back door, without the thought of divorce being an option.
But when that option was extended to me, it was still very hard to actually take it. For all of our initial talk about not holding it against each other, P did not keep his word; it was a rather messy divorce, with lack of genuine communication, ridiculous quibbling and unfair treatment of me. I ended up far more materially impoverished than I would have been had we not gone the "mutual agreement" route. But as I always said when we had plenty of my inheritance left: “It’s only money.”
And so it is. What I have now, even with the pain of leaving my money, my country, my children and 30 years of my life behind, is worth far more than a dollar amount.

I still do care how P gets on in life, but it is a very distant caring. I would like to know him to be happy, but I don’t want to be involved in it in any way. It would be nice, since our children live nearby and still have regular communication with him, if he could someday wake up and comprehend the truth of certain things; but his parents (in spite of being told and shown) never did, and it’s highly unlikely he will be able to get very far if he hasn’t been able to by now.
I suppose it’s one of those bittersweet things in life: being so very thankful for my second chance while at the same time rather sad, and sometimes a bit resentful, that I so needed one.