April 6th

I hate this date. Today would have been our 27th wedding anniversary. (Sigh.) The date April 6th has brought a gamut of emotions for me since 1991.

In the months leading up to that first April 6th, there was so much hope and anticipation. I believed there were great things ahead for us and that life was going to go in a different direction for me. I dreamed there would be happiness, camaraderie, and that we would work together to build our future. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Only seven months after we were married, my husband staged a “robbery” where he was “stabbed five times by one of the assailants”. None of it ever made sense to me and two-and-a-half years later he finally admitted that it had been a suicide attempt. Not even a year into our marriage, he went to some major extremes trying to find a way out of not only our marriage, but his life.

And that’s where I believed the drama began. However, after reading the journals I kept over the years, the drama started well before we were married. He told me repeatedly, after he began experiencing major consequences because of something he’d done, that he’d hated himself since he was 12. Evidently, his self-loathing took him further and further into bad decisions. He just kept making things worse and, even though he knew he was continually taking his life down a very bad path, he didn’t seek help. He knew he was continually making choices to make his life worse, but he also saw the damage he was doing to me and didn’t do anything to make it better.

This year I am feeling that lack of love. I feel humiliated most of all. I feel he married me on April 6th knowing that his love for me was not there. He never loved me. I have no idea why he even bothered to marry me. Since he kept dating throughout our marriage, a commitment was not what he was looking for. Instead, I believe he did it for a cover story for the way he really wanted to live. Since he professed to be Christian, dating and sleeping with multiple women at a time would go against that persona. He wanted to keep up good appearances. I also think he believed it was what was expected of him since we’d been friends and then dated for so long. He married me with no thought of what it meant for me.

There was never any love. There was always something missing. The husband of one of my friends told her he could see that my husband never held any love for me. I wish I had been able to see the same thing. I think we had been friends and had a lot of fun together, but love evidently played no part in the relationship on his end. I was merely an object to be used and manipulated to meet whatever need he was trying to fill by our marriage  regardless of how warped or damaging it was.

I’ve never known what true human love was supposed to look or feel like. His always being there and seemingly wanting to be around me felt different enough for me to confuse it for love. His words also didn’t sound like other abusers in my life. I had no idea. In so many ways, I still don’t, definitely not where romantic love is concerned.

This year, April 6th has me feeling the full effects of the lack of love I experienced throughout my marriage – really throughout my life. It’s a dark, empty place I’m way too familiar with and I’m not sure how to crawl out of it. Way too often, I wonder if I ever will. But I won’t give up in the pursuit. I want peace and freedom and the ability to freely give and receive love with those in my life.

~ Joanna Lynn