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.

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.