I’M NOT SURE if what I have to say is a confession about how love can make a fool out of you or if it is an admission of my stupidity, but you can decide.
What I want to talk about is how you could love someone so much that though they disrespect you, physically abuse you and embarrass you publicly, you still hang in that relationship with them hoping they would change back into the loving person you first fell in love with.
Call me stupid – it doesn’t matter, most people have done so when I related my story to them – but I believed that when I got married, it was for better or worse.
As far as I was concerned, I was going to stick with my husband through the best or worst of times because too many women throw in the towel at the slightest problem in their relationship only to regret it later.
I feel that if something is worth it, you have to work hard to get it, and even harder to maintain it. A relationship is the same thing. You have got to take the ups with the downs. Every day is not the same and there’s bound to be friction even at the best of times. But you persevere because you believe in the relationship.
I believed in all of these things when I got married. Now, to be honest, I’m not so sure these things are worth it if the man you have does not believe in them too.
Hate men
Worst of all, given what I have been through, I feel if somebody nice came along right now that I might hurt them the way my husband hurt me. I hate men that much now.
I feel this way because after about nine months of a pretty happy marriage, my husband seemed to change. First he started with another woman and when I told him about my suspicions the blows started. He used to beat me at the slightest thing. I literally used to be his punching bag.
The other thing he used to do was to have rough sex with me. I don’t know where the gentle man I married disappeared. It was as if he became possessed.
Even worse than that was the unnatural sex acts he used to force me to do. Though I used to cry in pain from his doing it, he used to force it on me and when I resisted, he would beat me.
Things got so bad that after a beating one night I decided I had enough and called the police. He was charged and later placed on a bond to keep the peace after I explained everything to the magistrate.
That night he got charged I moved into the spare room and stopped dealing with him. Between that time and when the bond was placed on him, he threatened me every day because I told him if he touched me again I was going to call the police.
As he knew he could get time in prison if he touched me again, all he did was talk and told me to get out of his house. He got so nasty that he used to talk my name with the neighbours and gave everybody the impression that I had men on him and that is why he used to beat me.
He even said that I had one of the policemen who came to the house and it was that man who advised me to move into a bedroom in the house, and not to move out.
He said the policeman told me to provoke him so that he would get angry and hit me and get locked up, then I would have the house.
The truth is, I had nowhere else to live.
If I did, I would have moved out. I was at home when he met me, but my mother’s house was really crowded. Given the wages I made, I couldn’t afford to rent anywhere, so I was stuck.
My husband knew this and I suspected this was one of the reasons he treated me so badly after I found out about his woman.
Believe me, I went through sheer hell for those days before he was placed on a bond, so much so that about a week later I could not take it anymore and ran back to my mother’s house. I will never forget how I lived in fear of my life in that house with him for that time.
I dared not put drinks in the refrigerator because I feared he would poison them. I tried to use the bathroom when he was asleep or out, because I feared he would break down the door and rape me. He had done that before. I couldn’t watch television as he put that in his room.
I couldn’t cook because he would lock the gas bottle in his room after he was finished using it with the stove. I had to depend on the electric kettle for tea on mornings and buy lunch otherwise. I got so depressed that I had to leave.
I nearly went out of my mind. When I sit down and study the hurtful things my husband told me, I just cry and cry.
But would you believe, after about four months he came and begged me to come back. He was having problems and took them out on me, he said, and he was sorry for what he did. He said that he had a house but not a home, and wanted me to come back as things would be different. But how could I return to a person I loved who used that against me and treated me like a doormat?
(NA)
