Every major disagreement between Eric and me concluded with him saying, paraphrased and simplified, “it’s your fault because you are so negative and critical”.

How am I negative, I asked. I obviously didn’t want to be a negative person, so I wanted to understand what I needed to work on. A general “you are negative” is not particularly concrete or actionable. The answer boiled down to “you just are” and “it’s your whole way of being”, and I couldn’t get anything more useful out of him.

Many years of questioning and fishing and talking uncovered that he could interpret just about anything I did as negativity. Leaving the room at the wrong moment was seen as negative. Me not liking the book that he really liked was a sign of me being negative.

He could even find negativity in how I chose sofa fabrics. We were at a furniture store once, trying to pick one fabric from a set of about thirty. I found the choice overwhelming, so I did a binary comparison of the fabric swatches, like a tournament between them – compared two swatches and, from those, picked one to keep for further comparison and one to discard. Eric told me that this was yet another sign of my negativity: “see, you’re focusing on the ones you don’t like instead of the ones you do”.

The whole thing baffled me for years, because I just could not see the negativity. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Still, I assumed there must be a kernel of truth in what he says, even though each individual example made no sense, and worked at being better.

One day last summer it finally struck me that he is the only person who sees me as negative. I get spontaneous compliments from my colleagues and co-workers telling me that I am positive, supportive, easy-going, a joy to work with. That’s before they even mention anything about my technical skills and experience. It was a true lightbulb moment: I am not actually a negative person.

Why did he see me differently, then? I finally figured out that Eric saw me as negative because his default interpretation of everything I did was to assume negativity. And of course if that’s your mindset then literally the most innocent thing can be twisted into looking negative.

How do I know that that was his thinking? He actually said so at one point, straight out, about 20 years ago. He said that, given no other information, he assumed there is a negative feeling behind what I’m doing or saying. I took it as a joke or hyperbole, an exaggeration triggered by an emotional moment, because it seemed so absurd. Like, what kind of person does that? Why would you want to live your life like that? Why would you stay in a relationship if that’s how you view your partner? How could anyone possibly find this kind of world-view normal and not do everything in their power (like intense soul-searching and therapy) to stop thinking like that? It couldn’t possibly be the actual truth, I thought, and put it out of my mind.

So basically he saw me as negative because he had decided in advance that I was negative, in a weird case of circular reasoning. And then he spent twenty years putting me down, because of his skewed world-view.

I can’t make him change his mind. If he has been thinking like this for literal decades and he still hasn’t grown past that kind of mindset, then there is nothing I can do to about it.

I also couldn’t overlook this, now that I had seen it. I couldn’t accept being treated that way – being told over and over again that I am, fundamentally and inherently, bad and defective.

All I could do was leave.

I did not want to stay in that kind of situation, and I could not see any scenario in which we would actually repair things and get into a good place. The only thing left, then, was to end it.

We had a good relationship for many years – at least as far as I could see at the time. We were in love, we had fun together, we cared about each other, we respected each other. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I wonder if it ever was as good as it seemed. Some of the fracture lines must have been there from the start – it just took time and pressure for them to grow large enough to reach the surface.

Eric was never a bad husband in absolute terms. He did his share of chores at home, never did any of the things that a typical “bad husband” might do. No yelling, no hitting, no snide remarks or anything.

But (in recent years) he was not a good husband for me. And if you asked him, I am pretty sure he’d say that I was not a good wife for him. We couldn’t give each other what the other needed.

He didn’t love me, for my definition of love. He didn’t trust me, and by the end I’m not sure if he even liked me at all.

I, conversely, couldn’t love him either, for his definition of love.

We did try counselling some years ago, when we realised that our relationship wasn’t entirely healthy. It didn’t work out for us, so we stopped. Went on for a few years, but obviously nothing magically got better by itself. We first discussed divorce early last summer, but decided to give counselling another chance first. I did a lot of thinking ahead of that, to prepare myself and to make sure we would get the most out of it.

During all of that thinking I realised that there was nothing between us to build a healthy relationship upon. The essentials of trust, respect and openness weren’t there. Given that, I couldn’t see any point in doing more counselling, and said I wanted divorce instead. So that’s where we ended up.

I will dig into all of that in more detail in coming posts.