I encourage you to read my previous post about judgement and lack of support for my recovery from my mother, father, siblings and friends. This puts into context how painful the betrayal of my husband was.
When I approached my husband to tell him I was going into recovery from an ED we weren’t on the greatest terms. We had been fighting and bickering again about chores around the house. We didn’t agree on anything, the silent treatment was a regular thing and we had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for well over 5 years (we told our kids it was because of his snoring, but to be honest, I just didn’t want to be in the same bed anymore).
Let me preface this with some history. Telling this is probably the main reason why I’m choosing to stay anonymous. No one wants to tell about his or her failed marriage and relationship. It’s painful enough as it is to live it, let alone let the world know what an epic fail it was. I have been married almost 15 years. For the entirety of that relationship, I always felt something was “off”. I never knew what it was. Maybe it was because I grew up watching Disney princesses fall in love. Maybe it was watching romantic comedy’s about love and romance. Maybe it was watching the movie The Notebook and falling in love with the story. According to my husband, the reason why I always said we were “off” was because we both came from divorced parents, and that I was exactly like my mother, so it would make sense that my husband was always angry because I made him that way.
We had epic fights and battles over the years. I also dragged him to marriage counselor after marriage counselor. To date we saw 6 different counselors. Things would improve for 1-2 months and then we would go right back into the patterns that just didn’t seem right to me. I just felt it in my soul that something was off. I just didn’t know what.
I told my husband I was diagnosed with atypical anorexia and that I was perusing recovery from my eating disorder. I told him the process of going “all in” and not only eating fear foods but eating in general. I explained the medical process of what was going to happen and the timeline given to me by my ED team (typical recovery takes anywhere from 2-7 years). I told him I would gain weight, I didn’t know how much. I told him there would need to be “junk food” in the house and that my eating habits were going to change. I also told him I wasn’t interested in his opinion and that I had my ED team supporting me.
About 4 months after I started recovery I had gained all of my overshoot weight. If you want to know how much, please read the post with detailed numbers. For some reason, I felt that if a couple stopped having sex, it meant that their marriage was doomed. So, silly me, told myself that I would continue to have sex with my husband regardless of how our marriage was doing. Over the years our sex life would ebb and flow with pregnancies and young children, but we eventually settled on sex once a week on Saturday mornings. I HATED IT. I used to dread waking up Saturday mornings and drag myself to his bedroom to have sex “for the sake of my marriage”. I remember telling myself at the time that this wasn’t normal, but I pushed through determined to make sure not having sex wasn’t the reason things ended.
My husband has probably turned down sex less than 5 times in the 15 years we’ve been together. He used to always initiate, but when I became pregnant with our first child, he all of sudden stooped and announced to me that he would no longer initiate sex and that it was my responsibility to do so moving forward. So there I was, every Saturday for the past 10 years initiating and having sex with my husband. One Saturday he turned me down. I didn’t think anything of it and If I’m being honest, I was VERY self conscious about the size of my body and was no longer comfortable with certain positions where I could see my new fat and folds.
This Saturday led to another Saturday of him turning me down which then lead to almost 2 months of this. I finally had the courage to confront him and ask him why he was rejecting me. I didn’t want to ask him, I was perfectly ok with NOT having sex with him, but my belief that ‘no sex = failed marriage’ was at the back of my mind and I was scared of the relationship ending. At this point he unleashed on me. He told me that I my fat was repulsive. That I was disgusting and unattractive. That he no longer wanted me, my body or anything to do with it. He then went into attacking my ED team, criticizing their academic credentials and telling me that they had done my recovery all wrong. That I was believing all the crap they spouted to me. He said that my diagnosis of atypical anorexia was bullshit and that it was only created to give fat people an excuse. He told me from that point on that he would stop giving me any physical affection – certainly no more sex, but he also withdrew all hand holding, kissing, touching, hugging, etc. He told me he would forever see me as a disgusting fat slob and no longer wanted anything to do with me. He told me I should be grateful – telling me wasn’t going to leave me, saying that a husband “leaving their wife because she got fat” wasn’t something he would ever do, because that was mean. (like what!).
I’ll never forget what I said afterwards. It’s etched in my memory forever (I wish it wasn’t). I said “Can’t you find anything else to love about me besides me body? I have so many other redeeming qualities”. I sat there begging my husband to love me for something other than my body. He told me that nothing else mattered because what I looked like cancelled everything else out. It was at that moment that something snapped. It felt wrong to me – my husband had just admitted that his love (if you want to call it that) was 100% conditional based on my outward physical appearance. That I was not worthy of his love any longer because I did not the fit the ideal image in his mind of what I was allowed to look like. Can I just tell you, the moment when you find out your husband had never truly loved you for who you were and you had the PROOF of this, it’s earth shattering. Heartbreaking. I was dead inside. Broken beyond anything I had ever felt before.