He started screaming at me that I didn’t really love him. That I was a liar like all the rest of them (whoever “they” were, I didn’t know) and that this marriage was over.
“I never want to see you again unless it’s in a courtroom!” he screamed.
I froze. No one had ever spoken to me like that before. I’d never experienced such direct cruelty. I felt wholly unprepared to defend myself.
But he wasn’t finished yet. He called me a slut and a whore and dropped the f-bomb like he was armed with a truck full of vulgar ammunition. I’d never been called those names before, and I never could have fathomed I would hear them spewing from the mouth of my husband. Each word hit me with nearly physical force. Whore. It felt like a vacuum was sucking the air out of my lungs. Slut. A fist to my gut. And then there was the worst one yet: the c-word. Yeah, you know the one. I can’t even stand to type it. His accusations felt like a screwdriver to my chest, puncturing everything I thought I knew about myself, then turning and twisting further to convince me I was worthless . . . nothing more than trash he was ready to dump out.
I stood there, dumbfounded. Then, to my horror, he started throwing clothes in a suitcase.
“I’m leaving!” he screamed. “I never want to see you again!”
I made the mistake of trying to talk to him logically at first. Now, if you’ve ever attempted to have a rational conversation with someone who’s had too much to drink, you know my obstacle there.
“Where is this coming from? What are you talking about?” I gasped.
He responded by hurling more insults at me, accusing me of being unfaithful.
Okay. Reason was not working. Next I found myself pleading with him.
“Please, Justin. I don’t understand! Please calm down.”
Then it happened. Boom! Boom! The sound of splintering wood. I looked over, and there were two holes in the bedroom door the size of his fist. He took off his wedding ring and threw it at me. Then he punched a wall. I just stood on the other side of the room, terrified to get too close to him. What if he decided to go from the wall . . . to me?
In the middle of this whole fiasco, one of our old friends from the station in West Virginia called. I answered, and he could immediately hear the commotion in the room and the fear in my voice. I said I’d call him back.
When Justin finally passed out on the couch three hours later, I took the phone into the bathroom and curled up in the fetal position on the floor. I slowly dialed the number.
“Christi, what happened? What’s Justin mad about?” Our friend seemed as stunned as I was.
“I don’t know! I have no idea.” The words came out between sobs and gasps for air.
I had no answers.
I felt utterly torn. On one hand, I was furious. I will not let him treat me like this again, I promised myself. Why had I allowed myself to be someone else’s emotional punching bag for the past three hours? Is this what I’d moved my entire life around for?
But on the other hand, I had made a commitment—to God, to Justin, to myself. I had a ring on my finger, after all. It would have been different if I’d been dating him and could just walk away. But I’d always believed marriage is sacred. I had a responsibility here—to give this relationship all I had. To fight for it. To fight for him. To fight for us. For better or for worse.
I sat there in the corner of the bathroom, trying to dissect what had just happened. And in that half hour or so, empathy kicked in. I’d seen this man be compassionate. I’d witnessed him care for people who were hurting and celebrate people’s joys with them. There had to be an explanation for his behavior tonight.
That’s when I came to the conclusion that at some point someone must have hurt Justin so badly that he was taking it out on me. Somewhere in the fog of his past he’d been so wounded that he couldn’t process it in a healthy way. Maybe he had never known lasting love before—maybe he’d never had the security of someone sticking around and saying, “I’m not going to leave.” Whatever the cause, this man I’d married—this man I loved—was hurting.
And I felt sorry for him.
That’s when I decided I needed to prove to him that he could count on me. This is my husband, I thought. I’m his wife. I cannot abandon him.
I had made my resolution. But that didn’t change the fact that I spent that night curled up in a ball, feeling violated and frightened.
The next morning I decided to face my fear head-on. When Justin woke up, I sat down next to him and said, “I can’t live like this, Justin. I don’t deserve what happened last night. I can’t live with that kind of disrespect and listen to those threats.”
“I know,” he replied.
“But you need to know that I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I love you, and I want this to work.”
“So do I.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. I was trying to tread lightly. “Why would you accuse me of cheating on you? Did something happen while you were out?”
“I just had too much to drink. That’s all,” he said. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
It was clear that no amount of prodding was going to get me anywhere. Justin was only getting more agitated as we talked, so I backed down. The fear of a second round washed over me, and I sat there silently as he got up to shower.
Part of me wanted to walk out. But he was my husband. Not my boyfriend. Not an acquaintance. My husband. I coupled that commitment with a fistful of hope that this wouldn’t happen again.
We did have moments of light and laughter during that first year. There were some wonderful days spent giggling together and poking innocent fun at each other, going to movies, hanging with our friends. We had a sweet first Christmas together, too, decorating the tree and attending holiday parties.
One thing that touched me was the effort he put into gift giving. The gifts weren’t particularly elaborate or expensive, but they were thoughtful. For instance, he surprised me with a purse I’d admired at a store while on our honeymoon, and he got me a book by Point of Grace, my favorite Christian music group (music that he himself didn’t listen to but knew I enjoyed). I was moved by the effort he’d made to search for things he knew would mean something to me.
But our good days were punctuated by drunken stupors: Justin coming home, ripping the covers off the bed as I slept, and screaming at me to get out. One time as he was yelling at me, I started crying and walked into the living room to get away from him. He stormed after me and then, to my horror, egged me on to cry harder. As I sat there curled up on the couch, he hovered over me. “Oh, come on,” he mocked. “You can do better than that! Cry harder, baby. . . . Cry harder!”
He was like that redheaded kid in A Christmas Story—the bully who follows Ralphie home, tormenting him.
Only I wasn’t Ralphie. I didn’t have that switch where suddenly rage took over and I was compelled to attack my aggressor, tackling him to the ground and punching away at him.
Instead, I sat on the couch in utter shock. I didn’t cry harder—in fact, I stopped crying altogether. I was so taken aback by what Justin was saying, I could only stare at him. Who is this man? I wondered. This is not the Justin I fell in love with. This wasn’t the man who used to call to make sure I got home okay in bad weather. Who I once overheard gushing to his friend about me. Who said he loved having me around. Who was this person in front of me?
I looked him in the eye. “Why, when I’m obviously hurting, would you intentionally hurt me more?”
He immediately got a pensive expression on his face. Silence. Then he spoke: “Touché.”
Just that one word. Then he walked into the bedroom, crawled into bed, and went to sleep.
He never apologized.
I sat in the living room for a long time. What should I do? I considered going to counseling. But in the past when I’d brought it up with Justin, he refused to go. Would it do any good if I went by myself?
Should I stay? Go? I knew I couldn�
�t continue like this. But if I left, how would I explain it to my family? My friends? Our coworkers and boss? And where would I go? I’d have to stay in Boise because that’s where my job was. How could I move out and then go to work and face Justin every day? Besides, my dad had just spent all that money on a wedding. And most haunting of all, I’d made a commitment before God and everyone I loved that I fully intended to be forever. How could we call it quits now? We’d been married only four months!
My soul was numb. There might as well have been a vacancy sign hanging around my neck—I felt like an empty shell of the person I used to be. I was too afraid to let myself feel anything.
But I wasn’t ready to give up. The next morning I confronted Justin as diplomatically as I could. I used we instead of you. I made it our problem, not his problem, hoping he’d realize what this was doing to both of us.
“We don’t fight fair, Justin, and we have to learn to do that. I’m in this for the long haul. I’m your wife. But I don’t deserve what happened last night. If you’re upset about something, let’s talk about it. But when you’re angry, even when you have a right to be, that doesn’t give you license to be cruel to me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened last night, but it won’t happen again.” His usual response. I sensed no remorse in his voice—no real desire to change.
Inside I was fuming. I felt like he was just saying what I wanted to hear so I’d shut up. Was he really sorry? I didn’t know. Could he guarantee that this wouldn’t happen again? I wasn’t convinced. It was like he was choosing anger as a way of life—as if it would protect him from something. But I knew it wouldn’t. It would only expand the fracture that was growing between us. I didn’t know how to make it better because I didn’t even know what he was really angry about.
I did know, however, why I was angry. I was hurt and scared. And it was starting to feel like God was abandoning me. As desperately as I’d been praying for help, things weren’t getting any better.
But my anger was drowned out by fear. I was terrified that if I pressed things further, I’d spark a repeat of the night before.
Yes, fear won out. Again.
I managed to shut down my voice, but I couldn’t erase the nagging in my head. Something was very off here.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we know when something isn’t right. We feel it in our bones—if we allow ourselves to feel, that is. Maybe that’s why we work so hard to ignore our emotions. Sometimes it’s just easier to shut down than to admit that our choices have brought us to a place of feeling unsafe or insecure or unloved.
And if our attempts to reach out are met with rejection, it only adds to the emotional deadening. If we try to make things better, to offer a hand, and our efforts are rejected, we feel the pain. The thing is, unless we’re willing to examine that pain, we start collecting bricks to build a wall around ourselves—a barricade that will help us avoid feeling anything. We think this will be our protection. But it’s really just the beginning of hope depletion.
I hadn’t gotten to that point yet, but I was well on my way. Ironically, I was doing exactly what Justin had apparently already mastered: transforming my hurt into anger and using that fury to construct a fortress no one could pass through.
I felt myself starting to pull away from him, and I recognized the danger in that. I was ready to get help—I wanted to sit down and talk it out with him. But I couldn’t force him to do that.
So I employed a new tactic: I decided to start giving more respect to this marriage myself. I believed God had made both this man and me with inherent value. If this relationship was going to last, something had to be done to reflect that.
Maybe if Justin saw that I treated him with dignity, I’d get some back.
But as the months wore on, there were several more blowups. One night things went further than I ever imagined possible.
Again, Justin came home after being out with the guys. I was in bed because I had to work early the next morning.
He flew in and ripped the covers off me. “Get out, whore!” he snarled.
As he kept yelling, I got out of bed and went into the living room, trying to get some distance from him. He followed me. Then he grabbed my arms with an iron grip and swung me around to look at him. He was still screaming.
“Stop it, Justin! You’re hurting me!” I cried.
The more I tried to wiggle away, the harder he gripped. He shoved me around, clenching his fingers more tightly around my arms. His fingers bore harder into my skin until finally I stopped fighting. And then all at once he chuckled, plopped down on the couch, and eventually passed out.
I went back into the bedroom in a fog. What had just happened? I rubbed my hands over my arms, trying to take the sting out of where he had grabbed me. I got back in bed, just grateful not to be lying next to him.
The next day when I got home from work, I walked into the bathroom to wash my face. As I reached for the towel, I saw them. Bruises. Black-and-blue finger marks wrapped around my triceps.
I blinked to get a better look. Surely I was seeing things!
But there they were—four dark marks on my right arm, two on my left.
I reached my right arm over my head, examining it more closely in the mirror. That’s when Justin walked in. I was startled, but I could tell he’d spotted them too. Our gaze locked for a second, and I saw that tears were welling up in his eyes. Then he turned around, his head hanging low, and walked out without a word.
I didn’t know what to say either. I put on my workout clothes and went for a run.
As I crossed the bridge over the river, I stopped and looked at the water streaming between the trees on both sides of the banks. I wanted to jump in. Not to kill myself, mind you, but to swim away. Far away. I wanted to ride the current to a new life—a life where I was free to make choices, free to be myself, free to live out the purpose God had created me for, free to just breathe. But I knew that wasn’t the answer.
I prayed, “Dear God, please help me. I don’t know what to do. This is my husband. I married him. How do I stick with this? How can I help him? How can I make this better for both of us?”
All I wanted to do was leave. But I didn’t.
I didn’t think anything could rattle me more than the arm-grabbing incident. But just a few months later something happened that terrified me even more.
Justin and I had been out for dinner with several people from work. As the evening went on, Justin proceeded to get plowed. I wasn’t drinking at all because with each sip he took, more fear seeped into me. Every time he put the glass to his mouth and swallowed, I found myself getting filled up—not with vodka, but with anger, resentment, and fear.
Things kept escalating until at one point Justin made a joke about me and grabbed my chest—right in front of our coworkers! Everyone sat there in shocked silence. There wasn’t anything funny about it. I was humiliated.
By the time we left, I was fuming. As we drove home, Justin egged me on about how I was no fun, how I must not be happy, and how maybe we should just get divorced.
I was silent. I didn’t want to add any fuel to the fire. But it didn’t matter—the longer I remained quiet, the more infuriated he got. Finally I had to say something. “Stop it, Justin!” All I could do was hope he’d pass out so I didn’t have to deal with his comments.
As soon as we walked in the door of our apartment, he really let loose—hurling vulgarities at me, accusing me of infidelity, and calling me names. He got right up in my face, screaming at the top of his lungs. It was like one of those old military movies where the drill sergeant gets nose-to-nose with his subordinate and launches into a tirade.
My body involuntarily started shaking, and I tried to get away. I tried to bolt, but Justin stepped in front of me, blocking me with his body.
He grabbed my arm again, this time with a force that stunned me. Then he threw me on the bed. When I got up and tried to make a break for the door, he wrapped his hand around the
back of my neck, threw me against the wall, and hissed, “I’m going to bash your f---ing head into this wall!”
I stopped breathing momentarily and closed my eyes, anticipating a fist. But instead, I heard a crash in the wall right next to my head. The punch was so close to me that I could feel the swish of his fist as it flew by. It felt like a warning: Watch out! Next time I might not miss!
If this was his way of trying to scare me, it worked.
I couldn’t deny it anymore—not only had he gotten physical, but now he’d verbally threatened me with more. Would he do it? I wondered. I suddenly felt nauseated.
Justin kept me pinned there for a few seconds. When he loosened his grip on my neck, I turned to see his eyes boring into me. I was terrified.
He walked over to the couch and put his head in his hands.
“Please listen to me,” he begged.
I stood there, paralyzed. I was afraid to breathe, let alone speak or move.
He said he wasn’t happy about the stress of our jobs. He wasn’t happy that we were on different schedules so we didn’t see each other much. He said he didn’t mean what he’d said, that he loved me.
I just kept looking at the floor. I’d heard all of this before. Only this time I had the physical ache in my neck to serve as a jolting reminder of how far he’d taken things this time, and I couldn’t shake it off.
After Justin passed out, I called one of our friends from work and told her what had happened. “I just want to leave!”
There, I’d said it. And I meant it.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I told her. “I need to get out. Can I come to your place?”
She paused, and I heard her sniffle. She was crying. “Are you sure? I really think you should wait until morning and talk to him.”
My heart dropped to my gut. I knew I was putting her in a terribly awkward position. She worked with both of us, and while she and I had certainly connected, I could understand why she wouldn’t want to get in the middle of this. I guess I just desperately wanted someone to give me permission to leave. Maybe I felt this need so strongly because I’d been married only a few months. Maybe it was because I was living in a new city with a new job and a new husband, and although I’d made some good friends, there was no one close enough—geographically or emotionally—for me to talk to about all this. I was desperate to have someone validate my pain, to agree that I didn’t deserve this.
Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt Page 4