On Marriage and Divorce #001

Narcissistic ex-husbands and rapists: Is there a difference?

I’ve experienced both. They are remarkably similar. 

Rape happens because men can get away with it, by and large.  Men behave as they do in divorce because, again, they can get away with it.  Our society breeds the arrogance of males.  We teach them selfishness and violence, and how to dominate with them.  And women are still hysterical and emasculating when they fight back.  I don’t see a whole lot of difference between surviving the silencing, the taking, the domination of rape; and surviving a bad marriage and worse divorce. 

The years of marriage to someone who berates, ridicules, manipulates, gaslights. The years of supposed freedom after divorce, filled with his contempt and threats.  The years of withholding care and support from our child, and the sadness she now carries into her future.

He picks up dying cats from the freeway and gives them a proper burial.  He cries when his daughter doesn’t want to see him.  He would wake with a song in his head and his embrace was affectionate.  But he watched me cry and did not flinch. And if the morning embrace was not warmly reciprocated, he was wont to take it. 

Which is worse – recovering from decades of domination, or an hour and a half?  Who would I rather speak to now – the rapist who was sentenced to prison for ten years, or the narcissist with whom I had to co-parent for seventeen?  With the latter, it was I who was imprisoned. 

What is more painful – knowing that the man who held a knife to me was sexually tender and did not seem to really want to hurt me; or knowing the man I thought loved me, intended his wounding? 

It is not nice to compare men, who have been our lovers over a decade and have fathered our children and brought us flowers occasionally at appropriate times, to rapists.  But once they walk out the door, and no longer feel they have much skin in the game, there is a fate for women worse in some ways than the utter desperation of a bad marriage. 

Let us beware.  There are not many who can fulfill the spirit of marriage vows even in divorce.  But that’s what it takes, to co-parent. 

So look deep into the hearts of the men you love, and wonder what will happen when you disappoint them, hurt them.  Will they abandon their ethics?  A man who can hold onto them, even while letting go of you, is your only protection.

“Dark Interior” photo by Cheryl McNeil