Sleeping with the Enemy

I’m about to do something that no one will understand. I am going to give my husband one last chance. I am going to give this man, whom I have tried to escape from, who has made me miserable at times, who has abused me, manipulated me, and toyed with my emotions, one more chance. Now I know, this isn’t comprehensible to anyone. I mean, I finally made my escape, and now I’m happy right? Why on earth would I want to go back and give this person one more chance? I know how predictable and stupid it may sound. Believe me. I never thought I would do this. I thought it was over. I thought that no matter what, I would never take him back. Because it would be a mistake. People don’t change. I have tricked myself into believing he has changed a million times, and forgiven him, and stayed with him, and things always got bad again. I have finally gotten out of the cycle, why would I want to take the chance of getting back into that cycle? Why would I choose to trust him after he has been so untrustworthy? You will read this and think this is definitely a mistake. If you were here now, you would tell me not to do it, to run far away and never look back. I know. It seems like the typical abused woman still finding herself codependent on her abuser and taking him back, only to pick up right where things left off.

But here’s the thing. No one has been here through it all with us. Sure people have an outsider’s perspective and think they can see what is going on, and yes, everyone has their opinion about it. And their opinion on what I should do does not match what I am about to do. I see where they are coming from. But after being apart for 20 days, after being pretty much unable to communicate for 20 days, after thinking and believing it was over for 20 days, we have both changed. But people don’t change right? So why do I believe we have changed? Because we actually changed 5 years ago. Both of us actually turned into completely different people right after we got married. I mean we never really changed. That isn’t the right word. We forgot who we were. We got so wrapped up in the whirlwind of accidentally getting pregnant when we were young, before either of us had even decided if we ever even wanted kids at all. Then we got married. And thinking back, we didn’t get married just because I was pregnant. We really were crazy about each other. We loved each other, we smiled and laughed, and had fun with each other. We were crazy in love. But like I said, we got married and suddenly everything got so real all at once, suddenly we had all these responsibilities all at once, we forgot to be ourselves. We lived the next five years being who we thought we should be. The people we thought other people expected us to be.

Suddenly reality was so stressful. We were scared. We didn’t know what to do. So we both created diversions from the real world. He started smoking pot, which soon became an all day, every day habit. I had different diversions going on at different times in my life, ranging from completely throwing myself into schoolwork, to spending all my time on social networking sites all day every day, and forgetting to have a real life, to even getting caught up in fantasy romances over the internet. We didn’t connect anymore, but we put on happy faces in public, and around family. We were great at acting like a happy family. I think at times we even tricked ourselves into believing it. But the truth was, we hadn’t really been connecting throughout our entire marriage. Because we both quit being ourselves. We both distanced ourselves from each other, and from reality in general. We were both acting our way through life. And we didn’t like the person that the other person was acting like. We both had fallen in love with completely different people.

So now after 20 days. After feeling single again, independent from each other again, after getting attention from the opposite sex, but not really wanting it, we remembered who we were before the marriage. We remembered how to be the people that we fell in love with to begin with. We found our personalities again. We’ve gotten rid of our diversions. He has given up pot. I have given up the internet. We are going to be ourselves and live in reality again. We are going to live the life we have imagined.