If you’re comfortable reading about the details of my divorce, click here to read this post.
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.
[ Wednesday, July 9th, 2025 — in Divorce, Observing the self — No comments ]
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