Trigger Warning: Domestic Abuse, Child abuse, Bereavement, Sexual Content.

I have been pondering with interest recently DVUK’s wristband appeal, Love Doesn’t Hurt http://domesticviolenceuk.org
I not only find it incredible that I have found myself even looking at a domestic violence support website, but have found myself readily sharing their advice and links on my Twitter feed, purchasing and wearing their merchandise (with pride, no less) and generally empathising with the cause. So why does someone who was apparently happily married for eighteen and a half years until their husband died, suddenly have such affinity with women (and men) who have suffered so brutally at the hands of an abusive partner? And why has the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie left me feeling so rattled? I confess I never read the book. I guess it kind of passed me by as ‘just not my sort of thing’ but it is only recently, having seen excerpts of some of the text, that alarm bells have started ringing. What a couple consent to, behind closed doors, frankly is their business, but if coercion is used, that is not consent. I have become familiar via various media sources of a portion of text where Ana is begging Christian to stop what he is doing, and trying to kick him off. His response is to threaten to bind her feet and gag her if she doesn’t comply. Hey, hang on a minute! Doesn’t sound much like consent to me. Sounds a lot like assault. If a woman’s says no, at any point, that is rape. End of.
Anyhow, I digress. Love Doesn’t Hurt. When my husband died in 2008, I thought it impossible to feel any more broken. We had stuck together through some really trying times, his ongoing disability and illness, my first breakdown, and all the usual ups and downs that happen when two people from very different backgrounds decide to make a life together ‘for better or for worse’. And some. We both made big mistakes along the way. But we met at the youth group of our church, were married, in our church, and attended church together, well you get the picture. And in church the pressure was on to stick together, pray about any difficulties in the relationship, trusting God to intervene and to remain faithful to each other ‘until death us do part’. It was a wonderful ideal. It was a shame our marriage rarely lived up to the ideal.
Take me, at 17, when I met Andrew. Attending sixth form, studying for A Levels, and hoping to train to become a teacher at a local Catholic college. I’m not Catholic, but had fallen in love with the wonderful spiritual atmosphere of the place and the breathtaking architecture. Not to mention it ran the course I wanted to do, primary teaching with French, and, get this, it was on my Dad’s way to work. Perfect.
I was quite new to the Christian faith, had lots of quirky throwbacks to my very troubled early teen years, dressed almost exclusively in black, argued with anybody, was incredibly feisty and sometimes outspoken and was very definitely anti-men. I was fiercely independent and determined, yet inwardly, about as screwed up as a girl could be.
Andrew appeared confident and super cool on the outside. Three years older than me, he would zoom up to the church in his sporty little hatchback, park on a double-yellow, pop up his orange badge and saunter, leisurely-like into the building. Often sporting a smart suit and shades, he had an air of self-assurance about him. Anti-men or not, he certainly caught my eye. Twenty-seven years on, I can tell you about a very different side to the man I married.
But to cut a long story, slightly shorter, we fell in love, were engaged within months, and had our wedding planned for two years after we started dating. We wanted it that way, because at the time I asked Andrew out, he had just suffered a major health relapse, narrowly escaped death and had been given a prognosis of 6 months – 2 years. Aged 17, discovering not only that you are properly in love for the first time, but that the person you are in love with is terminally ill is a bit of a bitch.
We, being the young devout Christian people that we were, made the decision not to sleep together until we were married. With hindsight, that makes me chuckle a little. I was always the one saying, “But if we’re going to get married and be together anyway, does it really matter?”. Andrew always took a slightly superior attitude at this point, but the truth was, we were so crazily into each other at that point, although we hadn’t actually had full sex by the time we were married, there was not much besides that we hadn’t discovered!
There was a part of me that wanted to wait, anyway. The whole beautiful picture again, of sex being God’s wedding present to us, to unwrap and enjoy as a married couple together, it had such a lovely old-fashioned romance about it. And besides, older, wiser folk in the church told us how it was worth the wait (usually with a wink!)
So imagine my dismay, having waited those two years, to find the fiancé who had been so into me, turned into the husband who wasn’t, on our wedding night. Bitterly disappointed and utterly rejected, I tried to accept his reason, but I soon learnt not to question it. I learnt there was no point. Whatever the reason, or lack of one, Andrew would not discuss our sexual relationship, and that was it. He would angrily close down on me, as I questioned myself over and over as to what the hell was wrong with me. Before marriage he wanted me, now we were together it was as if he stopped making any effort whatsoever. I can only guess that he assumed now I ‘was his’ he could do want he wanted, even if that meant neglecting his bewildered young bride.
I should have taken the hint and run for the hills that first night. Or at least the next morning when the only thing on his mind was breakfast. But still the hopeful optimist back then, I just presumed that once all the excitement of the wedding had died down and we settled into a routine together, that things were bound to improve. They didn’t. On the odd occasion that he would finally give in to my requests for intimacy it was certainly not the fairytale wedding present I’d dreamt of. It was as if he didn’t really want to be there. He would refuse to take the lead and just lay there, waiting for me to do what I did, so long as it was something he approved of, and the moment he was done, he would skulk off to the bathroom to ‘deal with the mess’. I would curl up alone in the darkness berating myself for causing his disapproval again, and questioning how God could repay me for waiting, with, well, this.
Was it all my fault? With hindsight, I understand it probably wasn’t, but as Andrew kept reminding me, I was the one who had come to the marriage with the history of abuse. So it must be my fault, right? I was just too screwed up to have a relationship, obviously. The fact that I had just completed eighteen months of intensive psychodynamic counselling to get my head sorted before our marriage didn’t count for a thing when the chips were down.
It wasn’t just in the bedroom things were going downhill either. He wouldn’t permit me to share the sofa with him in the lounge. Before marriage, we had cuddled up together in front of the TV at his parents’ house, or mine, night after night, but the minute we were married he didn’t even want me to sit near him. Again I soon learnt not to question.
My going to work made him happy, my doing the cooking or the cleaning made him happy (I remember once suggesting that we should make love and his response was, “I can’t be doing with that, the housework needs doing.”) I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even know that men existed who preferred housework to sex. I learnt then that it was no laughing matter.
My refusal to wear ‘pretty, flowery dresses’ displeased him. I really wasn’t a pretty, flowery dress sort of girl. But I even gave that a go for a while to see if it made him happier, made him want me. I gave up again and went back to clothes I liked. I grew my hair to please him. I hated it. I still never met with his approval. Nothing I did was ever right. He knew I wanted to get my ears pierced, he said he wouldn’t permit it. Aged 26 I did it anyway. He sulked and refused to speak to me. He lost the plot any time I mentioned changing from my natural hair colour. It seemed such trivial little things. He despised me trying to lose weight, even though I was way bigger than was healthy. Many of these things came down to just one of his big insecurities, “Who are you doing that for?” Whether it was a smart outfit for an occasion, sexy undies, a touch of subtle make up, new perfume, you name it, in his mind it was because I was trying to impress another man. Couldn’t get it through his head that it was him I wanted, and maybe, if I even knew he still wouldn’t want me, doing those things made me feel good about myself.
I became used to being talked down to, to being ordered around, being controlled. Over the course of first few years of our marriage it just seemed to become normal. He would put me down in front of others, but in an apparently humorous way, yell at me in public, and give me the cold shoulder behind closed doors. But in front of the people who mattered he was the perfect gentleman.
Before I was sent home from my nursing training because I was depressed, I had made the mistake of confiding in the acting charge nurse on the ward where I was working. He had spotted I was unhappy weeks before, and wore me down with shoulder massages, cups of tea, a listening ear and offers of cigarettes and cheese! In the end I admitted to him how unhappy I was in my marriage.
Then when a meeting was arranged to send me home to get well, he and Andrew did a right job on me. Andrew needed me in work, because we needed the income. He also wanted to be seen as the concerned husband. So he phoned the A/CN and asked if he should come with me to the meeting. The A/CN said no. Then when I arrived alone, before the Head of Nursing turned up, the A/CN laid into me, basically calling me a liar for saying my husband wasn’t bothered about me. He also accused me of leading him on. I didn’t even care what anyone thought anymore. What was the point? My nursing career ended that day.
Andrew always denied that he wasn’t attracted to me. He always claimed that he loved only me. But in honesty, I don’t think that he even began to know what it was to love a woman. Not as a friend, a mother, a sister or housekeeper, but as his wife, his lover, his soulmate. I believe in his own way that he did love me, or at the very least, he thought that it was love, but love doesn’t hurt. Or at least it shouldn’t.
I really loved him. But we were always more like best friends than a couple. We enjoyed each other’s company and laughed long and hard together. After a serious dose of radical acceptance on my part, we were amazing parents together. We just weren’t sexually compatible, mainly due to his insecurities and fed by mine. I nursed him until his death.
It took me five years after his death to realise that Andrew had been emotionally and verbally abusive to me. It took me a further year to admit that, verbally, to another person.
That’s how I found myself sporting a Love Doesn’t Hurt T-shirt and supporting the work of DVUK. Don’t suffer alone. Love doesn’t hurt.

Angel x

Thanks for reading.