I Should’ve Caught This Red Flag While Dating My Husband
It was the sign of an extremely controlling man.
Peopleimages.com - YuriArcurs | Canva I was a few years out of college when my boyfriend said he wanted to marry me. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to get married. Scratch that. I was terrified. I couldn’t imagine attaching myself to someone for life.
He persisted. I expressed my fears.
What happened next would become a whisper of what was to come in my life. It was a gigantic hint of the personality of the man I would ultimately marry. Talk about foreshadowing. It was a clue of what my divorce would be like.
“I’m afraid to get married,” I say.
“It’s time,” says my then-boyfriend.
He’s checking off the boxes in his life. He tells me this. He feels that he’s been working for a few years, doing well, and it’s time to get married, buy a house, and have kids. We go back and forth a few times.
I panic. I’m the child of a single mother. I have no illusion of marriage. I understand it doesn’t necessarily work out for everyone. I grasp the heartache that can transpire between two people. I’ve never been that girl dreaming of a white dress.
I’m also a dreamer. A girl who can romanticize a situation. If I am going to go against my fears, I have to believe this man is the love of my life. Not to mention, Catholic school may have told me it better be. I have to be certain.
“I want to take a break,” I say. “I want some time to do my own thing. I need to make sure I am ready to get engaged.”
At first, my then-boyfriend rejects the idea. I press for it. “Fine,” he says.
“We can take a break but only during the week. On the weekends we still see each other.” He’s reluctantly agreed.
I’m living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. He’s living in Baltimore. It’s a little over an hour's drive to see one another. Hence, his desire to see me on weekends. It’s been our routine. To me, it feels like a relief.
I feel free.
It’s taken me a while to achieve even this pseudo goal. I no longer have a man pressing me to commit. A commitment I’m not ready for. I can enjoy my single life. I spend the next couple of months going on a few dates.
The guys that I go out with are good guys. They understand my situation. They realize I don’t know what I want. They don’t pressure me. They just spend time with me. We laugh and have fun. It’s lighthearted. It’s exactly what I need.
Age is a funny thing. It clarifies nearly everything. I didn’t need to spend more than a decade in the counseling, and research of love, relationships, divorce, and narcissism to retroactively identify an extremely controlling man. But my young 20-something self didn’t have that vision.
I thought he was being somewhat reasonable. It sounds crazy to say now. But it’s true.
We had been dating since college. It didn’t seem unreasonable that my then-boyfriend wanted to get married after five years together. I actually thought he was the norm. I thought I was the exception. I was the one girl who didn’t want to get married. In an odd ‘young brain’ kind of way, I thought he was expressing a degree of confidence. I thought he was letting me go, long enough to not lose me. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
He wasn’t willing to let me go. He wouldn’t ‘allow’ me to break up with him. That was a huge red flag.
I could only do what I wanted to do under his conditions. I wasn’t making my own decision. He was making it for me. He was telling me what I could, and couldn’t do. This would become a theme throughout our marriage.
My husband wasn’t controlling, he was abusively controlling. He knew how to get what he wanted, and he ensured that he did. He was passive-aggressively controlling. It’s the only reason I tolerated it for as long as I did. Our daily lives were calm as long as we were living under his worldview.
Ultimately, he was diagnosed by a psychologist as lacking empathy and having narcissistic personality disorder on the extreme end of the spectrum. But you don’t have to be a narcissist to be controlling. And a controlling personality is not by itself, indicative of a narcissist.
Plenty of average, everyday people are controlling, and even extremely controlling. A diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder involves far more than this one quality.
I couldn’t break up with my boyfriend. It foreshadowed my divorce. I couldn’t free myself from him.
He wouldn’t let me go. It took five years of an overly long, and abusive divorce to break away from a man. Worse, when I finally believed I was free, he turned my life upside down again. He tied me up the sixth year in contempt of the divorce order. He refused to make the first payment or sell our house. Obviously, these were things we had agreed upon in our divorce decree. It didn’t matter. He fought me on everything. People still ask me why I waited so long to date.
In many ways, I don’t think I really did. All in all, my divorce took six years. The next year I finally felt like I could breathe again. But I was exhausted. I was worn down. I was unrecognizable.
I felt weak, despite having been strong enough to withstand him. I limped along. The next year, the pandemic hit. The world shut down for two years. By the time we all re-emerged, it had been eight years since I had originally initiated my divorce.
Did older me know my husband was controlling? Yes.
Did younger me understand this? No.
When one of my boys was a teenager he was dating someone. I walked into his room, and he seemed upset. I knew he had broken up with a girl he no longer wanted to see.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“She won’t let me break up with her,” he said.
“That’s not normal,” I said. “Do not let someone do that to you. It’s a sign of not only control but an unusually controlling individual.”
It is. It’s not someone who’s heartbroken. It’s not someone who’s hoping you might return to them. It’s someone who has insecurely made you the one they wish to control.
If you think you may be experiencing depression or anxiety as a result of ongoing emotional abuse at the hands of a narcissist, you are not alone.
Domestic abuse can happen to anyone and is not a reflection of who you are or anything you've done wrong. If you feel as though you may be in danger, there is support available 24/7/365 through the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-7233. If you’re unable to speak safely, text LOVEIS to 1-866-331-9474.
Colleen Sheehy Orme is a national relationship columnist, journalist, and former business columnist. She writes about love, life, relationships, family, parenting, divorce, and narcissism.