229 days of processing what I have been through and I now realise that the cheating created a host of other cruelty and abuse over the years.
There was the manipulation, the gaslighting, the lies and the constant speaking down to me. I can now place those within the familiar categories of emotional, psychological and verbal abuse. But beneath all of that, there was something else that I struggled to name.
For months, I kept trying to fit it into one of those three boxes because I did not want to open a fourth, more painful one. A box that carried humiliation. A box I could not even articulate to the people closest to me, including my therapist.
I eventually turned to Google to help me understand what I was experiencing and then to Claude to verify it. Even now, writing it down feels difficult.
This is what I described:
My husband would flick my breast or smack my bottom as he walked past me. It happened so often that I would physically move out of his way to avoid it. When I pushed his hand away and scream for him to stop, he would respond with, "What? I can't even touch you now?" Over time, he made me feel as though this was acceptable behaviour because he was my husband and that my discomfort somehow meant I was frigid or unreasonable.
What came back from Google was page after page discussing domestic abuse and domestic violence. Claude described it as non-consensual sexual touching within an intimate relationship.
The response that followed about my objection was also something I had never heard named before. Apparently, "What? I can't even touch you now?" is a textbook DARVO response: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Rather than respecting my boundary, he made my boundary the problem.
What makes this even harder to process is that he did not behave this way in the earlier years of our marriage. If my understanding of the timeline of his adultery is correct, this behaviour appeared around the same period that he was seeking sex elsewhere.
This form of abuse feels heavier to carry than I expected.
I know the obvious question people might ask: How did a strong, highly intelligent, no-nonsense woman stay in a situation like this?
The truth is that intelligence does not necessarily protect us. Sometimes it does the opposite. Intelligent people can become very good at explaining away red flags, finding reasons for behaviour, extending grace and trying to solve problems that were never theirs to solve. That realisation makes me angry.
Looking back, it feels as though there was an element of power and humiliation woven into these interactions. Not only was I being subjected to behaviour I repeatedly asked him to stop, but I was also being made to feel guilty for objecting to it. The focus was shifted away from his actions and onto my reaction.
Today, I understand something I could not understand then.
This was never my humiliation to carry.
He did not do these things because I was too strong, not strong enough, too demanding, too emotional or lacking in some way. He did them because he could. And because I loved him and trusted him, he had access.
Perhaps that is one of the cruellest aspects of intimate abuse: it requires love and trust to work.
He used some of the best parts of me - my loyalty, empathy, optimism and willingness to see the good in people - against me.
I did not deserve any of it. None of it was ever a reflection of my worth. But it was a reflection of his own low value.
(I write stories about what I am going through, hoping someone else might find the words they have been unable to say aloud.)
