Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt

by Paul, Christi

  “Okay.” I sighed.

  She jumped in. “But if he’s not better tomorrow, then yes, I think you need to start making some alternate plans and think about your next move. I’ll be here for you, and I’m so sorry you’re going through this, Christi.”

  I hung up the phone and looked at my car keys sitting on the table. I wanted to grab them and take off as fast as I could. But where would I go?

  It felt like one of those old cartoons I used to watch on Saturday mornings, with the nice twin on my right shoulder and the evil twin on my left.

  Evil twin: You’ve only been married five months. How could you possibly leave a commitment as significant as a marriage only a few months in? You’re not a quitter, are you?

  Nice twin: You know he didn’t mean it. You know he’s hurting.

  Evil twin: But that’s no reason for him to abuse you!

  Nice twin: He’ll be sorry in the morning. It’ll all work out.

  In retrospect, though, I think it was actually the other way around—the “good” twin was the one egging me to leave, and perhaps that was the best advice. But I wasn’t ready to listen.

  Aside from the practical issues of not having anywhere to go, there was something else. Truth be told, I still believed in Justin. Those moments when he was kind, thoughtful, childlike—they were powerful. Those gentle glimpses reminded me of the person I’d fallen in love with, offering hope that the tender, loving side would win in the end.

  When you’re in the midst of abuse, it’s nearly impossible to identify it. You assume it’s something that happens to other people but not to you. Sure, rancid words had been hurled at me and fists had flown into the wall and I had bruises again, but I hadn’t actually been hit.

  This is how we rationalize. Why do we have to absorb a punch to be convinced that this kind of treatment is not acceptable? Where did we learn that, unless a hand smacks our skin, it’s not abuse?

  But there is no justification for ugly words, name-calling, threats, shoving, screaming. It is wrong. It is abuse. And no one deserves that. No one.

  Sadly, I couldn’t see that truth yet. Not that evening.

  Later that night as I stared blankly at the lights piercing the darkness from the restaurant across the lake, I had a hideous thought: I wish he had hit me.

  My eyes started to sting. How grotesque had my life become that I was wishing my husband had hit me?

  The thought lasted no longer than a blink, but it was long enough to give a little clarity to the situation. If Justin had hit me, I realized, I could leave with no questions. No one would admonish me for giving up. No one would judge me for walking away. One blow from him would be my out.

  But in my mind, since he hadn’t hit me, it wasn’t bad enough for me to walk.

  It struck me then that I was becoming as sick as he was. The moment I found myself wishing that he’d struck me, I realized how warped my sense of self and relationships had become.

  I felt completely vulnerable. Devoid of any human value. How did I allow myself to get here? I wondered.

  Chapter 4

  The Most Important Things in Life Aren’t Things

  The next morning I told Justin I couldn’t do this anymore. Either we had to go to counseling or this would never work.

  “I know it’s all my fault,” he said. His eyes were red, and he had his head down. “It’s not our marriage—it’s me.”

  He admitted he knew it was the drinking. Then, to my shock, he got up and poured a brand-new bottle of vodka into the kitchen sink. I stood there with my mouth open, watching the poison slither down the drain.

  “I’ll do anything. Whatever it takes,” he said. “Because I love you.”

  It was the first time he promised he’d do whatever it took. The first time he rejected alcohol. The first time he admitted this was his problem.

  I clung to the hope that he meant it. And things did get better . . . for a while.

  We’d made some close friends in Boise. We’d all go to dinner and baseball games together and host parties at our homes. We also liked to go skiing up at Bogus Basin. Justin was a much better skier than I was, and he surprised me with his patience as he coached me down the hill. I saw glimpses of his sweet, loving side again, and I soaked it up.

  It was around this time that one of the photographers at the station, Jason, and his wife, Lisa, became dear friends of mine. They could always make me cackle with laughter, and I felt a real sense of peace with them. And apparently my ignorance cracked them up, so we made for a good team.

  I remember being in the news truck with Jason on the way to the Basque festival. Now, mind you, I’m a small-town Ohio girl at heart, and I hadn’t seen much of the world. I asked him, “What’s a Basque?” In response, he busted out laughing so hard the windows must have shook. I couldn’t help but laugh too.

  The way I felt with these new friends, especially Lisa and Jason, posed a striking contrast to the instability I experienced with Justin. I didn’t mind letting my naiveté show with them. It was freeing to just be myself and not feel afraid to ask questions, to learn, to admit I didn’t know certain things. I knew that while they might give me some good-natured grief, they weren’t criticizing me or berating me the way Justin often did. It was a refreshing taste of being accepted for who I was.

  Despite the relative calm, though, Justin’s bouts of anger hadn’t completely stopped. And by now I knew his drinking wasn’t simply “just out of college” behavior; he had a serious drinking problem. He became a totally different person when he drank. And he was a mean drunk—downright vicious sometimes.

  And then a phone call came that gave me some hope: Justin got offered a job in Phoenix.

  We were both ecstatic. It meant a bigger market, better money . . . and more important in my mind, the new beginning we desperately needed. While I still hadn’t been able to convince Justin to go to counseling, I was seeing a more intentional attempt on his part to control his anger. I had renewed hope that this move would give us a fresh start.

  Some friends threw us a good-bye party. We were surrounded by wonderful people in Boise I’d come to cherish, and I knew it would be hard to part ways. Little did I expect, however, that the emotional part of that evening would not be leaving our friends.

  I was standing outside with several people when Justin walked out to the corner of the garage and got sick. He’d clearly had too much to drink. When he was done throwing up, we watched him walk back in the house. Through the window we could see him grab another drink.

  I started shaking.

  By now, whenever I saw that Justin was drinking too much, my body started reacting involuntarily. I tried to hide my shaking hands, but I couldn’t keep it from my friends.

  “What do you want to do, Christi?” one girl asked me.

  I took a breath. “I want to go home,” I said. “I want to leave him here.”

  I was afraid to be alone with him. It didn’t dawn on me until later that I was telling these people something that was already quite clear to them.

  We all went inside to get my coat and tried to figure out a way to get me to my car without Justin noticing. I was sitting on a bench when another friend of ours, Denise, came up to me and said with a laugh, “Christi, you’ve got to get your husband out of here. I just walked up to him and said, ‘Justin, I’m going to miss you guys!’ He told me, ‘Well, why don’t you take me downstairs and show me how much you’re going to miss me?’” She was trying to laugh it off, but her words felt like a fist to my gut.

  We decided to employ Denise to distract Justin while I left. We watched from another room as she walked up to him and asked him to go downstairs with her. This was a revealing moment because prior to this, two other people had tried to get Justin downstairs and he’d refused. But when Denise asked, he immediately followed her down the stairs like a puppy going for a treat. My friends looked at me. I could see the sympathy in their eyes, and I knew they could see the humiliation in mine.

  I he
ld it together until I got outside and saw several of my friends standing there just looking at me. “Christi, you don’t deserve this,” they said. “I’m so sorry.”

  That’s when I broke. I bowed my head in my hands, and the tears came in waves.

  “I’m so sorry!” I tried to catch my breath. “You’ve thrown this wonderful party, and I appreciate your support so much. I feel humiliated!”

  There was no use denying it now.

  That night a girlfriend stayed with me as I cried and tried to sort through all that had happened.

  Had Justin cheated on me with Denise? No . . . I didn’t think so. But I was pretty sure that was only because Denise wouldn’t open that door for him. But Justin? The churning in my gut told me that if given the chance, yes, he would.

  Of all the fears I had about Justin, unfaithfulness had never been one of them—until that moment.

  Never in my life did I think I’d be the kind of girl who sat up all night with a girlfriend, sobbing and trying to figure out whether to stay with a man who treated me with such disrespect. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was the kind of woman who would leave—if this was a man I was simply dating. But because I was married to him, I felt I couldn’t abandon that commitment.

  And now I found that shame was the cloak I was wearing. It made no sense, really. He was the one who got so drunk he stumbled his way through the house. He was the one who made a fool of himself in front of his friends, drinking until he got sick. He was the one whose actions made people question his faithfulness to me. Yet I was the one feeling the shame.

  It took me years to get this, but the problem was that I was interpreting Justin’s treatment of me as my worth. It’s one thing to sustain a verbal lashing from someone who doesn’t really know you or care about you. But it’s a complete mind game when that kind of abuse is coming from the one person you’re supposed to be able to trust most. At that moment, I didn’t know how to separate his treatment of me from my view of myself.

  I wondered how much of what I was living was real . . . and how much was a lie.

  As I walked around our apartment alone that next morning, I studied this home I’d tried to create for us. The couch and chairs, positioned just right for conversation and connection. Sterling-framed pictures of our wedding. The crystal bowl we’d received as a wedding gift, full of candy to grab whenever someone passed by. The antique dining set that had belonged to my parents when they got married. The crystal wine glasses in the cabinet alongside the china place settings. These were things that meant so much to me when we received them because they would be part of our home. I’d hoped that moving all of it with us to a new city would help us start over and settle into a new beginning.

  But at the end of the day, it was just stuff.

  I was surrounded by all these beautiful possessions, but I was living an incredibly ugly life.

  “The most important things in life aren’t things.” I’d read the quote years ago, and it was ringing in my head as I scanned the room, taking in our lovely things. Things I’d tried to fill my life with. Things I’d used to try to distract me from the worthlessness that had settled in. But as I was finding out, the distraction was merely temporary.

  I knew right then that I’d trade all of it just to make things right.

  No expensive gift could erase the emotional bruises or diffuse my feelings of betrayal. No material possession could fill the void in this marriage or create the stability I craved.

  Trust was deteriorating with every tick of the beautiful china clock on the shelf.

  A short time later Justin called from our friend’s house, where I’d left him.

  “What happened?” he asked. “I woke up in a chair facing the corner in the basement! Where did you go?”

  “I came home,” I told him. “And you can stay there.”

  “What do you mean, honey?” His voice wasn’t convincing. He might not have known exactly what had happened, but he certainly knew it wasn’t good.

  When I told him how sick he got, how he followed Denise down the stairs, how humiliated I was, he immediately apologized. He blamed it all on the alcohol.

  I said, “I’ve got a few things to do. I’ll come get you in a little bit.” And I hung up.

  I knew I’d have to face this—and him. The reality was, I couldn’t just leave him there.

  We were married. This was his home too.

  But I was, for the first time, really considering not going with him to Phoenix. Yes—this could be my out.

  But again, that nagging voice in my head hammered on: You’ve only been married a year—are you going to give up already?

  And the truth was, as much pain as I’d experienced in that year, marriage was sacred to me.

  I’d stood in that church, in front of everyone who mattered to me, and pledged before God my faithfulness, love, and loyalty to this man. I had made my choice. And now, I figured, I was stuck with it.

  I walked out to the deck and stared at the streaks of sunlight splashing against the mountains. The lake was as smooth as glass, and the reflection of the mountains made a perfect mirror image in the water. There I was, living amid this strikingly gorgeous view of the world God had created, and I felt like I was in prison. I might as well have been sitting in a tiny, windowless, concrete cell.

  “God, where are you?” I asked.

  I took a deep breath and buried my head in my hands. “What do I do, God? Do I stay or do I go?”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d asked the question, and it wasn’t the first time I thought I heard, “Go.”

  What? I thought. That can’t be right! Surely God would never tell me to abandon my marriage or this man who obviously needed love and support. No. God wouldn’t tell me to leave. I figured I was just translating the yearning in my heart into my head. It must have been my own voice I was hearing. Not God’s.

  But somewhere deep inside me, I knew. There was a part of me that was even afraid to pray anymore because I was scared of the answer I’d get: that I needed to leave. That answer contradicted everything I’d always believed about marriage.

  Then again, so did my husband’s behavior.

  When I picked Justin up at our friends’ house, I couldn’t conceal my anger. I said, “You know, you might have cheated on me last night.”

  “Oh, Christi, I’d never do that!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t know that I can be sure of that anymore. There’s a lot of trust that needs to be healed here. And it’s going to take a lot from you to do it. I’m seriously wondering if I should just let you go to Phoenix yourself.”

  “What are you talking about? You have to come with me! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt you! I’d never cheat on you!”

  Blah blah blah blah blah.

  “You did a lot of damage last night, Justin. I can’t just forget this. What you did is not okay.”

  “I promise what happened last night will never happen again. You’re my wife, and I love you,” he whispered as he wrapped his arms around me.

  But I wasn’t nearly as certain of that as he seemed to be.

  Chapter 5

  People Can Say Something in a Second That Takes Years to Heal

  We got off to a good start in Phoenix, and I felt more hopeful than I had in a long time. I moved to the city jobless, but after several months of freelancing for the ABC affiliate, KNXV, they offered me a full-time contract. In the middle of the contract negotiations, however, something unexpected happened.

  My friend Rachel in Chicago had a connection with someone who knew the assistant news director at KTVK, another station in Phoenix. She told him about me, and the next thing I knew I had a phone call from Dennis O’Neill saying, “Hey, I know you’re in town. Why don’t you come in and we can talk?” He’d seen me on the ABC affiliate as a fill-in anchor and weathercaster.

  I chuckle as I write this, because I, my friends, am no trained weathercaster.

  When KNXV hired me on a freelance basis, I had to g
et a crash course from Ed Phillips, the prime-time meteorologist. He schooled me on how to render the maps, stack a weather segment, and work the computers. The only thing I knew going into this weather gig was that low pressure meant bad weather and high pressure meant good weather. So much for my college education!

  One of the producers had boosted my confidence, though, when she told me she’d overheard Ed tell the news director, “Christi is no dumb blonde. This lady knows what she’s doing!” For that, I can only give thanks that I’ve always been surrounded by people who are good at what they do and are willing to share their knowledge.

  That said, I went in and met with O’Neill at the other station. He showed me the newsroom and talked about their news philosophy, and we had some great conversations. I was sitting in his office when he called in his fellow news director Phil Alvidrez. Phil had someone with him and was heading out the door, so we exchanged a quick “Hi, nice to meet you,” and he was gone.

  Years later, O’Neill spilled the rest of the story to me. Apparently, the day after my interview, Phil was in his office watching the monitors during the noon shows, and he saw me doing the weather at KNXV. He bolted into O’Neill’s office, pointed at the monitor, and said, “Who is that, and why isn’t she working for us?”

  O’Neill basically said, “Hey, bonehead, you met her yesterday right here in this office!”

  So much for my first impressions, huh?

  I was grateful, though, because I needed someone to believe in me right then. With the tumult of my home life in the past year, my self-image was at an all-time low. Both stations started upping the ante on their offers, and I eventually went to KTVK. I had a lot of admiration for the people I worked with at KNXV, but I went with my gut. And it paid off. The people at KTVK were like no other bunch I’d worked with before—it was truly a family atmosphere. I was blessed by this job and these people, and I knew it from the get-go.