It is a painful feeling, to have given somebody your entire heart and soul, and to have it thrown back in your face with such contempt and resentment. To be made, day in and day out, to feel guilty for reasons you can’t even make sense of anymore. There was a time that I knew, that I could list off the reasons one by one for all the guilt and shame that consumed me. I mean, how could I not? He told me every single day just what it was that had led him to not care anymore….to not want me the way that I wanted him.
Now? Well, now all I can do is say that I feel the guilt, I feel the shame, but for the life of me I cannot list the reasons why. Perhaps I have just been trained to feel these things? The end result of fifteen years of constant spite and bitterness cast my way. Perhaps it has simply become easier to feel this way? Easier to remain in this constant state of agony rather than build myself back up only to fall so damn hard all over again.
To be honest, I don’t know and there are days, like today, where I sit here telling myself that the love we once knew is dead and gone. Deep in my heart, I know this is true. I know that no amount of work, no amount of therapy and no amount of “I’m sorry” is going to fix what has been broken. It is done. It is over. That passionate, heated romance that once existed between us has turned to a cold bitter wasteland of hurt and devastation.
So why is it that we continue to say “I love you” every morning…every night…every time we get off the phone. We both know its ended, that there will never be that spark that once brought us together in a world that tried so hard to tear us apart. Still, like robots set on repeat, we say the words and we make the little familiar gestures that we have grown so used to making. Pet names. Jokes that have lasted for the entirety of our marriage, the ones that only we get. We do it all, and we present an image to the outside world that everything is fine…that our love is as strong as it ever was.
Don’t get me wrong, there is love…and there always will be. After fifteen years it is impossible to erase all the feelings that once held us together. He is the Father of my children, something I will eternally be grateful for and he has helped me through a lot of hard times that I couldn’t have gotten through on my own. No matter the damage he has caused, no matter the pain he has filled my heart with time and time again, I will always love him. Just…not in the way that a wife should love a husband.
Do I feel bad about this? Of course I do. I want nothing more than to sit here and say that I love him with every fiber of my being and that my heart belongs to him and him alone. But I can’t. Just like he can no longer say those things about me. We are stuck in a loveless love, both of us for different reasons, and we continue this charade like its the way life is supposed to be.
For awhile, I was okay with this. I mean, sure, there is pain and a lot of tears. There is degradation and humiliation from time to time, and whatever self esteem I had left has been completely shattered. However, after so many years, the pain has become comfortable….familiar even. I know its going to happen and I know how its going to go. Every fight, no matter how bad, will play out the same in the end, as if we are reading from a script, and though I know he will hurt me, I know he will also apologize and pretend to love me all over again once its done.
Now though….as the days grow darker and the cloud of my emotions grows heavy, I find that I am withering without the chance to love…to show passion and want….to show need in the way that my heart truly desires. I want so badly to be loved, this is true….to have somebody care about me, in their own special way, and to have that love be true…real. But more than anything, I want to give…I want to experience the pleasure of witnessing the happiness that I can bring to a person with my quirky little shows of affection…with my strange and unique ways of being. Most of all…I don’t want to hurt anymore. I want to experience a relationship, whatever type it may be, where the main goal is not to break me down until I am nothing.
I never thought such a thing as a loveless love could exist, but now I wake up every single day faced with it and face with yet another day of pretending. Pretending to be something I am not. Pretending that the damage he caused to me in the past is just that…in the past…That today he won’t come home and run me into the ground the way he seems to love to do.
I just want to wake up one day, knowing that when I say the words “I love you” they will be heard and they will be felt like they are supposed to be….that they will be real.
I don’t think that is too much to ask is it? To want to feel and give a love that is real, not masked in a world of make believe? To have somebody brush my hair from my face…cup my cheek…kiss me with desire and passion? I don’t think so. But then, maybe I am just asking too much. I guess I will just have to wait and see.