Escape Plan Step 82: Talk About Your Marriage

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]After work, I came upstairs and my ex was waiting for me on the couch. I sat down and for the first time in years, we had what felt like a real conversation.

[00:00:07]And he was kind and calm and apologetic and it was awful. For years now, as things were getting worse, I kept trying to get him to sit down and talk about what was going on and he wouldn't. He would get defensive or angry or abusive or just shut down. And now here he was, sitting on our couch wanting to have a conversation about our marriage. And he was doing a really good impression of everything we're told a good partner should do. He was listening and taking accountability and opening himself up emotionally. But, this is really important. Even while it was happening, I was still afraid of pushing him too far. Because when you're in an abusive relationship, you know there's always a line and they can be kind and supportive and loving right up until you cross it.

[00:00:44]And then suddenly you have an abusive partner. So, even in the middle of this very emotional conversation, I still couldn't tell him the truth. Now, obviously I wasn't about to tell him that I was planning my escape, but even outside of that there were things I felt like I couldn't say. How scared I'd been after the knife incident last fall, how much his cheating had totally destroyed me, and how controlled and intimidated he made me feel day-to-day. He kept telling me he wanted honesty, but I still had to manage his reactions. And that's the takeaway here. Because it turns out that healthy relationships don't require you to constantly calculate whether or not it's safe to be honest. And if you're doing that, that's not a real connection and that's not real love. That's abuse. But, at the time this conversation gave me a lot of hope and I wondered whether or not I should actually leave.