I learned about the self-expansion model of relationships from Ingrid’s high school psychology course materials. (I haven’t read up any more on it since then, so this is an extremely simplified version.) Very briefly, this model says that we seek out relationships with other people so that we can expand our own selves, through acquiring new experiences, capabilities and knowledge. This model immediately struck me as very relevant to my life.

I want to experience new things. I want to see new places, or old places in new ways. I want to experience new music, art, food, nature. I want to try new things within my hobbies. I’m not an extreme novelty-seeker, and the new experiences don’t need to be exotic or extreme, but it is important to me to experience the world.

He and I used to do so many things together, especially before the kids – concerts, movies, museums, walks, road trips. Then he stopped.

I took all the initiative, and even then he rarely joined. I did more and more on my own. Concerts, walks, restaurants. His life was work + home + screens.

I want to experience the world for real, not just read about it on screens. I want my relationships to enrich my life. Not only that, of course, but that is an important part of relationships.

I want to share experiences, to experience things together, and then later remember them together.

If I’m doing everything on my own anyway, and he only expresses polite interest afterwards, what is the point? Do we even have a relationship, or do we just happen to exist near each other?

I wonder if he even liked me. It was pretty clear that towards the end he didn’t like spending time with me. Whenever I asked if he wanted to join me for [whatever] the answer was almost invariably “no”.

We used to have fun together, ages ago. I naïvely lived in the dream that we could still have that if we made a bit of an effort.

I remember our 12th (?) wedding anniversary. I’m not sure about the exact year, but Adrian could speak clearly enough that he could be understood by others than us, and could thus be left with others. I had arranged for my mum to babysit, so we could have a date night. Eric came home after work and I told him that we could go out, just the two of us, thinking that it would be a positive surprise. He said something like “unless you have an actual plan, I’d rather not”.

I covered up my hurt. “Of course I have a plan,” I told him, because I did. I had a restaurant booking and everything. Looking back after the fact, I couldn’t help thinking that his response showed how much he valued spending time with me. I didn’t make any more attempts at an obvious date night after that.

It was always me buying flowers for our anniversaries. It was always me finding things for us to do together. Ballet evenings were the exception, he made those happen. But for him the ballet was the important part and I was also there, rather than the opposite. When we did go out for a concert or something, he switched to reading his work email as soon as we got on the train home. I was just… also there, in the background.

When the kids were old enough to be safely left to their own devices for longer stretches of time, I suggested a few times that we could set aside a regular time for just us. Something low-key, like a Sunday afternoon fika, to just talk. He wasn’t interested at all.

When we were discussing divorce, he claimed that we never focused on our relationship and the kids were always the focus. Well, speak for yourself.

Our relationship was unequal from the start.

When we met, I was 19 and he was 27. He had about ten times more experience of adult life than I did.

I was mature for my age, taking more responsibility than most people my age, and was generally not impressed by boys my age. I liked that he was more mature than them.

(Looking back, I can’t help but wonder what he saw from his side. What could a twenty-seven-year-old see in a teenager?)

He took on the role of “the authority”, and at the time that worked out well for both of us. It was nice to live with someone who had all kinds of life skills that I hadn’t had time to acquire yet.

Over time, though, it became an unhealthy dynamic. Or maybe it was unhealthy from the start? In any case, this initial dynamic set the tone for our relationship forever. Him expecting to be the authority, whom I am expected to look up to.

The thing is, I have learned and I have grown. Grown past him in some areas. I no longer want to be the subordinate partner.

I’m guessing that this is why our relationship worked in the past but no longer does: that unbalanced relationship fit his needs, and it doesn’t fit mine. Hasn’t done so for years now.

I don’t want to make myself small to fit into the relationship.

I wrote earlier that he didn’t love me based on my definition of love. I also couldn’t love him based on his definition of love.

For him, I’ve concluded after years of observation, love means validation: me telling him and showing him how great he is.

In particular, he wanted to be validated as the authority. He needed to be told and shown that he is clever/wise/well-informed/knowledgeable/intelligent.

His role was to be the authority. My role was to be the “dispenser of validation”. His participation in our conversations often seemed to focus on saying things that would lead to me validating his contributions. Pull lever, get validation.

I didn’t have room to be an equal partner in conversations. I had to make myself smaller and stupider than I am, in order for him to be happy. He was happiest when my thoughts didn’t take too much place, and when I instead focused on validating his thoughts. His role in a conversation was to say interesting things; my role was to say “how interesting” and “I hadn’t thought of that”.

It became especially obvious when he shared things he found online. If my reaction wasn’t 100% enthusiastically positive, if I questioned anything about the thing, then I was being negative. It was as if anything he shared became a part of his identity, and any response that wasn’t mainly made up of admiration was a blow to his ego.

I can do that with cute cat photos – don’t think, just say “wow that’s cute!” – but he didn’t share cat photos. He shared stuff that I was supposed to be intellectually impressed by, but not engage with for real. I found that kind of fake engagement very difficult, and often failed.

It was a confusing contrast. He shared links to in-depth articles, informative graphs, videos analysing some aspect of current affairs, much of which I was truly interested in. But I had to watch out and not actually engage with the content for real or start having my own thoughts about it. So on the one hand he shared things that would make him be perceived as an intellectual authority. But my response needed to NOT be on an intellectual level. I needed to be uncritically positive, like a mum responding to a five-year-old: “look at that, how pretty, did you draw this all by yourself”. If I didn’t, he was immediately hurt. Except unlike the five-year-old’s drawings, this wasn’t stuff he made, just links he found – which he then identified with to such an extent that questioning any part of them was a rejection of all of him.

One time I was reading an article about orcas, and decades-long observations of them pushing dead salmon around. I read some bit out loud to Eric, since I found it fascinating. He said something like “seems difficult to control a dead salmon through water with just your head”. I replied something like “Yeah, I wonder what orcas would think about us if they could see us: it seems difficult to carry things around, what with all that gravity.”

He didn’t like that. “I meant that there is water resistance,” he huffed. I’m like… yes? I got that? and I replied to your thought? The problem was, I realised, that that was not what was expected to do. I should simply have said “oh, I hadn’t thought of that”. My role was not to participate in the conversation, to have my own thoughts – I was expected to just admire his.

I’ve been doing my best to cater to his fragile sense of self. I’ve been consciously standing aside in family conversations whenever I thought the topic was something he knew about, to let him shine. It’s gotten to the point where Adrian thinks I don’t know anything about anything, because I stay quiet and don’t participate.

I finally got tired of making myself small so that he can feel great.

He never cared about some things that were really, really important to me. That hurt, and I never got over those hurts.

He didn’t like me speaking Estonian with the children when he was around. He found it too hard to learn so he gave up and mostly forgot the bits he had once learned. It was uncomfortable for him to hear a conversation and only understand half of it. For his sake, I stopped speaking Estonian when he was present. But it hurt. Language is important to me. Sure, I can express myself in Swedish and English equally well, but Estonian is the language of my heart. If I’m talking to Ingrid or Adrian about some emotional topic, then doing that in Swedish feels very impersonal. It felt like I was not talking to them for real, but like I was on a stage, acting a part.

(Why am I writing all this in English, you might wonder. Surely this is an emotional topic? Yes, it absolutely is. English gives me distance, and in this case, it’s a good thing. It takes some of the emotion out of the topic and lets me view it more dispassionately. Also, to be quite honest, I am better at writing in English than in Estonian. When I talk to Ingrid and Adrian in Estonian – which I can now do all the time! – I often throw in Swedish or English terms when I just don’t have the vocabulary in Estonian.)

He was not interested in my friends and family. He came with me to Estonia when Adrian was so small that it was difficult for me to manage both kids on my own, but as soon as we were past that, he stopped. And I do realise that it was not a lot of fun for him to be there – not the best he could do with his vacation days. He always felt like an outsider, not knowing the language, and of course the trip there isn’t short.

He hasn’t seen my father and his wife in many years. They’re getting old and won’t be around forever, and he hasn’t found it worth a few days’ effort to come and see them. I wouldn’t even need him to come with us every year, or stay the full time that we do. But, like, once, for a day or two? To signal that he cares at least a little bit?

He never read or even looked at my blog. This has my primary creative outlet for decades. It’s not like he doesn’t read other things online… just that mine wasn’t important to him. Again, I didn’t even need him to subscribe or look at it weekly or interact in any way. But, again, like, maybe take a look once a month and say something politely positive?

Finally, the snoring. It seemss petty, in a way, and definitely wasn’t as deeply emotionally hurtful as the other points above. But it’s still significant. He knew that he snores. He knew that it bothered me. I sometimes literally had to sleep “upside down” with my head next to his feet because the snoring was so loud that my earplugs weren’t enough, so there’s no way he wasn’t aware. My daily (nightly) comfort was just not worth even the smallest effort.