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.

As I’ve described from several angles now, a core problem in our relationship was him labelling me “negative” in a very general way. That was problematic in and of itself, but it was also a sign of our differing world views, which bothered me more and more as time went by.

I generally think well of people, especially those whom I love. Eric is much more inclined to, for lack of a better word, think badly of people.

If someone behaves in a way that I don’t like, I make an effort to assume the best. Their behaviour can usually be explained by a combination of circumstances: the situation, the person’s knowledge and skills, etc. Perhaps they were tired, or had a bad day. Maybe they didn’t realize how they sounded, or (especially in the case of children) maybe they didn’t have the skills yet to behave better or express themselves better.

Meanwhile, when Eric sees behaviour he doesn’t like, he tends to generalize that to “this person is [negative adjective]”. He assigns labels to people, and then lets those colour his future interactions with them.

I find my philosophy both more useful and more respectful. A label sticks forever, and none of the involved parties can do anything about it other than be annoyed by it. Whereas a situational approach empowers you to prevent the problem from reoccurring, or to alleviate it. I really didn’t like hearing his negative labels about the children, like s/he “doesn’t care about others”, or how s/he is “messy”, “lazy”, “distractible”, and much preferred making an effort to understand, prevent, explain, teach.

I’ve since learned that this is a whole debate in psychology, known as “person vs situation” or “trait vs state”.

One big problem in our relationship in recent years was that we both felt that we were not allowed to make mistakes.

He said he couldn’t make mistakes because I would immediately correct him.

I felt I couldn’t make mistakes (express myself in a less than perfect way) because I was then immediately labelled as “negative” and “the cause of all problems”.

That naturally felt bad for both of us.

Maybe I’m just finding excuses here, but to me, there’s a fundamental qualitative difference between these two.

One is being told “you were wrong about this”.
The other is being told “you are a bad person”.

One you can agree or disagree with, accept or reject.
The other is an attack on your whole being.

A big part of what Eric perceived and described as my “negativity” was me correcting him.

I know I used to correct him (and others) when I knew they were wrong, more often than they liked. I worked on it, trained myself out of the habit. It was not enough.

I let him be as wrong as he wanted without saying anything. He can call plants by the wrong name, and I say nothing. He can order “hot cold milk” from a menu written in Italian, and I say nothing. He can say we’re walking east when we’re going north. Whatever. It’s never worth saying anything.

If I still corrected him EVER then I could see him immediately shut down and get quietly furious. And I did correct him, in two specific kinds of scenarios.

One was when the discussion topic was specifically about facts, for example if Adrian asked about how something works. I mostly let Eric have center stage in those conversation (see later post) and only added my bits when he had had time to shine. The only time I stepped in and corrected when he was unequivocally wrong about some essential part, and I didn’t want Adrian to walk away with entirely wrong information. I made very sure to express myself very politely and diplomatically, wrapping the correction in soft phrases. None of that was acceptable. He just could not accept me correcting him.

The other scenario is in particularly stressful situations. Factual errors stress me out when I’m already anxious in a stressful situation. If we’re navigating public transport in a foreign city, or we’re barely on time for some important-ish appointment and someone calls a street by the wrong name. I know it doesn’t matter at all, but it just makes my anxiety worse. Correcting people in that situation is a reflexive action, not even intentional – it’s almost like batting away a wasp hovering in my face. It’s rare, literally happens no more than a handful of times per year. (I have grown to be hyper aware of each time this happens.) But even that was too much, and Eric reacted strongly every time.

Maybe it is all my fault. Maybe my behaviour twenty years ago traumatised him to the extent that even the slightest criticism now is unbearable. I don’t know, but I accept that it is possible. If that’s the case, then we’re in an untenable situation – if he can’t forgive me (for lack of a better word) then we’ll never get past this. The only thing to do then is to accept that and for both us to move on.

Someone once said that love is an action verb. That resonates with me.

Loving someone means more than feeling warm feelings. Loving means saying loving things, behaving in loving ways, but also seeing the other with loving eyes.

To love is to interpret the beloved’s actions with extra love, grace, and forgiveness. In my mind, if you love someone, then you make an effort to interpret their words and deeds in the most positive way that you can.

Eric’s view and behaviour towards me has turned into the opposite. He is unable to love me, for my definition of love.

“Love thy neighbour as thyself.” I’m not a fan of the Bible, but that guideline is a good one. I am pretty sure that I love a random stranger in the street – in the sense that I look at them with more forgiving eyes – than Eric looks/looked at me.

Eric had a thoroughly negative view of me. Everything I did could be interpreted negatively. And if there was no way to interpret it negatively, then he assumed I didn’t mean it. This could happen with even the most positive things.

I asked him how his day was. He dodged the question because he didn’t believe that I was interested for real.

I asked about a difficulty I knew he was having. He turned my question into a joke.

I asked for a hug. I got a stiff, perfunctory one, because he didn’t think I meant it. How do I know? I asked, and he said so himself.

This last one was actually the final trigger that made me realise that our relationship was dead in the water. I was so hurt. Here was my most heartfelt offer of and request for intimacy, and he just rejected it with “nah that’s fake”.

I felt not just completely unloved, but also not even respected as a true and honest person, which I felt was so incredibly undeserved. I have done nothing to deserve that kind of distrust. Honesty is a cornerstone of everything I believe in. I even struggle to tell white lies to not hurt others’ feelings.

Understanding just how little Eric trusted me, how little he thought of me, broke things irrevocably. If there is no trust, then there is no foundation for any kind of relationship. There is no point in us talking to each other if he doesn’t believe I am telling the truth. There is no point in attending counselling if he can’t trust what he hears.

You might argue that I should have worked to rebuild his trust. But I never did anything to destroy it. It’s not like I had done something dishonest to deserve his distrust, and then needed to work my way back. If decades of honesty and truth has not been enough to prove myself, then there is nothing more I can do.

Not only did he kill my belief in our relationship, he also lost my trust entirely in that moment. Because if that’s the kind of assumptions he makes about me – that I could be faking everything at any time, and that what I say can’t be trusted – then how can I expect him to be different? If this is the way he thinks people are, then this is his “normal”.

Over time, hearing Eric’s very consistent opinion about me made me doubt my own judgement. He kept telling me I am negative, and while I could sometimes agree with him, in many cases I couldn’t see anything negative in what I had done.

One aspect of the negativity he perceived in me was that he kept assuming that I was irritated, or annoyed, or didn’t like this or that. He kept interpreting perfectly innocent behaviours as signs of irritation, specifically that I was supposedly irritated with him.

I left the kitchen when he was emptying the dishwasher, because I am sensitive to loud noises – he took that as me being irritated with him. I moved his bicycle in the garage a step to the left so that I could fit mine in next to it – he took that as me being irritated with him.

For me, that was just a neutral way of solving a minor problem. There was no irritation involved, because why would there be any? These were just small things.

I could assure him that there was absolutely no irritation involved, but he didn’t believe me. In the end I started doubting my own emotions. Perhaps I acted in an irritated manner, without being aware of it? Perhaps I could have expressed myself even more gently? Perhaps I really was irritated, how could I not notice it?

I was often in a constant state of low-level anxiety when he was around – about how I was acting, how I was talking, how he was perceiving me. It was stressful, to say the least. Towards the end of our relationship, I was relieved when he was not around, because I could stop second-guessing every single thing I did or said.

He must have felt something similar, if he thought I was always irritated, no matter what he did.

The difference between our situations was that he “owned” the problem. He could have asked me when he felt unsure about my feelings about something, and he could have trusted my answer. Whereas I had no power over the situation at all.

Over the years, Eric repeatedly told me that I was negative as a person, and too critical, and I took it to heart. If someone I love and respect points out my flaws, then I work on fixing them.

I was definitely less diplomatic and more “things must be done the right way” 15–20 years ago – I am well aware of that. If something was clearly incorrect then clearly it needed to be corrected. And I usually went about it in a straight and no-nonsense way, without much thought for diplomacy.

I was also anxious as a parent when Ingrid and Adrian were small. I felt very responsible for everything that happened or could possibly happen to the children, so I double-checked things that Eric had done, which of course came across as me being critical of his way of doing things.

I learned. I understood that that was an unsustainable approach. I polished away all my edges, and then some.

I hold back from correcting other people. If other people are obviously wrong about things, however egregiously, I mostly say nothing. I accept all kinds of mistakes these days, and don’t let them bother me.

I learned to express myself carefully. If I do suggest something or correct someone, I couch everything in soft words.

That wasn’t enough, and Eric still saw me as negative, so I kept at it. I became cautious about even just disagreeing with anyone, and my instinctive reaction now is to support every idea and proposal. In a discussion about opinions, I mostly don’t even bother to voice mine unless it’s really important, or someone specifically asks me. Even then I make sure to tone down my dissenting opinions. Just go with what everyone else likes. Because I have been “trained” to view everything else as “negativity”.

None of it made a difference. I still got to hear that I am negative, as much as before. I felt like Eric wasn’t seeing me, the real me, at all, and was stuck in an opinion he formed when I was literally a teenager. Now I was being “punished” for being immature decades years ago. Eric’s view of me remained unchanged, no matter how much I changed myself.

I realised that I was in a hopeless situation. He is fixed in his opinion in that I am a negative person, so this is what he continues to see. And in this context, he has all the power. There is absolutely nothing I can do. I can’t convince him, I can’t prove a negative (haha). So I gave up.

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.