by Journey
One thing I struggle with, as I painfully write some of the facts of my QF Patriarchal Marriage, is that the abuse wasn’t as obvious as you might think. I’d venture to say that 99.9% of the people we were around had no clue. I always get a kick out of how most patriarchy supporters speak up so quickly about how they are “opposed to abuse.” Are they really? Abuse always seems so stark, so obviously abusive, when you *read* about it, but in real life? Generally, not so much. For example, Mark’s abusive and strange behaviors are crystal clear, the way I’ve written the story for NLQ, but in real life, it wasn’t as easy as all that. I think that, in real life, it’s never like that.
In the story version, you get the play by play of abusive or flat-out weird behaviors, divorced from the people involved, divorced from all the nice moments, the normal-seeming times, the kind gestures and relational dynamics. In the real life version, the abusive behaviors are often experienced as tiny (usually completely private) bits of what seems to be an otherwise fairly normal life.
Are they small or tiny? No, not at all. They are earth-shattering, cataclysmic events that shape who you are in the relationship, and yet part of what makes them so confusing, part of what makes it so difficult to see them for what they are, is that they happen in the midst of many good things, and the earth-shattering parts happen in the deepest places of who you are, the kind of metaphorical bruises and broken bones that you can’t see, that you don’t even realize are there.
