I Almost Went Back to My Abusive Ex

[00:00:00]Eight weeks after my escape, I sent my ex an email asking if he wanted to get back together. Here's how that happened.

[00:00:06]It was a holiday weekend and I'd met my friend John for brunch. John and his wife Jane had been friends with me and my ex for a lot of years and John was still talking to him. Over a plate of waffles, John told me that my ex wasn't doing well. John said that he'd started therapy and was still faithfully attending all of his domestic violence classes, but that he was depressed and he was struggling. John said he was trying. And before anyone comes for John, please know that he did not volunteer that information. I asked. I wanted to know. That was my mistake.

[00:00:37]Because eight weeks earlier, hearing that my ex wasn't doing well wouldn't have bothered me. He was struggling.

[00:00:42]Great. So was I. He was trying. Fine.

[00:00:45]Let him try for someone else. But 8 weeks after my escape, things felt a little different. Because by then, all of the adrenaline that had carried me through my escape was long gone. And that wasn't the only thing that was gone. So was literally every aspect of life that I had shared with my ex-husband. All of our routines and our habits, all of the places we went, the rhythm of our day, all gone. I didn't know it at the time, but I was grieving an entire way of life that I had lost by leaving my ex.

[00:01:17]And I hadn't built anything to replace it yet. So when John told me my ex was struggling, I listened. And John was very careful. He didn't ever tell me to go back. He didn't pressure me or guilt trip me. He just told me the reality of what he knew. But unfortunately, it had the same effect. That afternoon, when I got back to my apartment, I opened my email and there was a new message from my ex. Now, listen, I did already have an active PO against my ex, but I had chosen to continue allowing email correspondence because we were getting a divorce and we still owned a house together. I kind of thought that having email as an option to communicate would make that process easier. If I could go back now, I might make a different choice. And most of his email was exactly what you would expect. House, money, assets. But at the very end, he had added one line. It said, "I hope you're doing okay. If you ever want to talk on the phone again, let me know."

[00:02:10]I read that sentence and then inexplicably I started to cry because after everything we'd gone through 10 years of abuse, my escape, the PO, I couldn't figure out why seeing one kind sentence with him would have this kind of an effect on me. Because it did. Of course it did. I missed him. That was the horrible truth at this point. I missed him. I wanted to talk to him again. That's what I'd wanted for weeks.

[00:02:35]And feeling that way made me so angry because every single day it felt like I was discovering another way that he'd hurt heard or controlled or manipulated me. And every single day I was gathering more evidence that leaving him had been the right choice for me, the only choice for me. And every day I missed him anyway. I wanted therapy to work for him. I wanted the domestic violence classes to work for him. I wanted his apologies to be real and for him to be the man I always wanted him to be because I wanted to go home. I wanted to drive across the state, knock on the door of our house and throw my arms around him when he answered and never let go. I wanted him to hug me back and tell me that he was sorry and that he was going to change and have all of that be the truth, which of course it wouldn't be. But that's what I wanted.

[00:03:21]And you know what? I hated myself for wanting that. I felt like I was a kicked dog. Like no matter how many times you hurt me, I'd just come running right back thinking this time will be different. because it felt like no matter how many times he hurt me, I couldn't stop imagining going back. I made myself go into my bathroom, look myself in the eye in my mirror, and promise from the bottom of my heart not to go back. I said out loud, "We have worked too hard for too long to get out of that situation. Do not throw it away by going back to him." I made myself promise. And I wish I could tell you I believed that promise, but I didn't. What confused me the most was that out of all of the manipulation and guilt trips that my ex had been sending to me in his other emails about the divorce, I couldn't figure out why this one had struck such an emotional nerve. And then when I did figure it out, it was very sad because this was the first kindness he had shown me in weeks, the first interest in my well-being. And just to answer him here very belatedly, no, I am not doing okay.

[00:04:23]I cried about us on a daily basis. And sometimes it was because of all of the ways I realized that he was hurt, manipulating, and controlling me. And sometimes it was because I missed him so much. I felt physically sick. I missed what I thought he and I had. I missed the future I thought we'd have. He and I were planning our 10th wedding anniversary that year. We would have gone to Europe. It would have been great. And to be honest, probably would have resulted in more that was abuse moments. I knew why I left. I knew that wasn't a good relationship. But I wished it was different. I wished I still trusted him. I wished I were willing to give him yet another chance. All day long after I got that email, I kept repeating the same phrase to myself over and over in my head. I know I can't go back. I know I can't go back. Like a demented little engine that could. And then at the end of the day, I did the one thing I'd been spending all day trying not to do. I opened my email and sent him a message. Do you want to talk tomorrow night? The next evening, he facetimed me. And this was actually the first time I had seen his face since I moved out. All of the other times when we talked on the phone, I told him I wasn't ready. And it turns out I wasn't ready this time either because as soon as I saw his face on the screen, I fell apart. I started crying. And he started crying, too. For a while, we didn't really say anything. We just kind of looked at each other. I was sitting alone on the couch in my new apartment.

[00:05:47]And he was sitting alone outside on the deck at our house. our deck, the one that we had spent so many nights together, sitting outside watching the birds, talking and laughing. For a second on that FaceTime call, I could almost forget what had happened. I could almost convince myself it was normal.

[00:06:07]Forget that we were facetiming from different sides of the state, that I had a PO. Forget for just a second. He and I talked for more than two hours that night about us, about the future, both individual and maybe shared. I was honest. I told him I'd been missing him. I told him that I thought I still loved him. But I also said that I didn't know if missing him was going to be enough to keep us together. And to be completely honest, I didn't even know if that's what I wanted. But after that conversation, I knew it was what I wanted right now than I had at any other point in the last year. Because if therapy really could work, if the domestic violence classes really could work, if he really could change and he really wanted to still be with this stronger version of me who wouldn't tolerate abuse, and most importantly, if I could maintain this stronger version of me while still being with him, then maybe there was a way.

[00:07:01]Looking back, I knew that hope was going to be the thing that would break me.

[00:07:05]because hope makes you imagine futures that don't exist and can't exist. But once you start imagining them, it's really hard to stop. And to be honest, after we hung up, all I wanted to do was keep talking to him. I wished I were sitting with him out on the deck that night. I wished we were about to go inside and play Mario Party together, which is something we did all the time.

[00:07:24]We had literally thousands of hours of game time in Mario Party. After that call, I was just really struggling to picture any kind of future without him.

[00:07:32]He just felt inevitable to me. And before anyone watching this thinks, Ruth, what the hell are you doing? I just watched you escape this relationship over seven months.

[00:07:42]This is exactly what it is like to have physically left an abusive relationship, but not yet emotionally have left it.

[00:07:49]This is exactly what it's like. I had two different versions of myself fighting all day long in my head. One of them was imagining playing Mario Party with him, and the other one was screaming, "Is that even what you want?"

[00:08:02]Because since I'd escaped, I no longer had to just be stuck at home with him every night. I was going out and seeing friends I hadn't seen in a long time. I was picking up hobbies I'd forgotten I liked. I was sleeping better and breathing easier. And that part of me just kept asking, "Why would you want to go back to that?" And the irritating answer was because I loved him. Both voices were real. Both voices were right in a way.

[00:08:27]Both voices were mine. And listen, I also knew that having these thoughts did not necessarily mean I had to act on them. Missing him didn't automatically mean I needed to go back. Loving him didn't automatically mean he was a safe partner. He definitely wasn't. But I couldn't stop hoping. So the next morning, I emailed him again. I told him I enjoyed our conversation yesterday, that I'd been thinking about him a lot, and was wondering if there was any way we might be able to move forward together. And I told him that if we did, it could not be the marriage that we'd had for the last year. That marriage had become a very unsafe place for mentally, emotionally, physically. I wasn't doing it. I told him our marriage was dead and over.

[00:09:11]But there might be a possibility to build something new. So to that end, I gave him my conditions. First, we still had to get divorced. Non-negotiable.

[00:09:22]Because if we could choose each other again, it had to be an intentional choice. It couldn't just be convenient because we were already married. Second, the divorce process itself had to stay amicable and respectful. There couldn't be any manipulation or deception or gaslighting or guilt trips. No games.

[00:09:39]Third, I told him he must continue both therapy and his domestic violence classes and continue them for the foreseeable future, not just for a couple weeks, not just till he thought he was done. And finally, the abuse could never happen again, not ever.

[00:09:56]Including, but not limited to sarcasm, yelling, throwing things, intimidation, insults disguised as jokes, cheating, violence, none of it. I told him that any break in any of those conditions would result in an immediate termination of the relationship with no third chances. And then I ended my email by saying, "I really don't know if there is a way forward for us given everything that's happened, but I want to try."

[00:10:21]About 30 minutes later, he responded.

[00:10:24]All in capital letters, he said, "I am in zero hesitation, and it's embarrassing to admit now how happy that made me feel." I kept a screenshot of the email. He said he completely understood and accepted everything I'd written and was looking forward to what came next. I was so excited. So excited that I grabbed my computer and opened a new Google document. I called it new relationship plan and into it I put everything that we had talked about the day before and everything I'd written in my email to him that morning, everything we could possibly need as we started to think about how to build a new relationship together. But before I could send it to him, something caught my eye. Down near the bottom of my Google Drive, there was a document, a 5-year-old document I had shared with my ex called Our Relationship Plan.

[00:11:11]Honestly, I didn't even remember writing it, but I opened it and then I couldn't believe what I was reading. The document was three and a half pages long. I'd written it after one of our fights. In that document, I'd written everything.

[00:11:24]how I was feeling, what was going on in our relationship, what was working, what wasn't, and how I hoped we could fix it.

[00:11:30]And this was not a journal entry, although I had lots of journal entries.

[00:11:33]This was a collaborative document that I had emailed to my ex. And he'd read it.

[00:11:38]He'd replied, there were comments from him within the document. And as I started reading through this document, I could feel myself getting very, very angry because in that document, I saw myself explaining calmly, clearly, and exactly how unsafe I felt with him 5 years ago. I wrote that when he was angry, it felt like he said things for no other reason than just to hurt me.

[00:12:02]Like when he called me names or questioned my intelligence. I told him I wasn't sure what I could do to help fix things anymore. I wrote about an incident I'd completely forgotten about where when I could sense a fight was escalating, I went and got a conflict resolutions worksheet that I had printed out from the internet earlier that day.

[00:12:19]My ex ripped it up in front of me. I read my own words, begging him to help me understand how I could communicate with him better. I talked about reading articles on relationships and communication strategies, different methods we could try. I just kept asking, "What do you need from me?" And he couldn't answer. Now, at the time, I would have said this document was a very good analysis of our communication difficulties, but that's not what it was. That was an analysis of what it's like to be in an abusive relationship when you don't know you're in an abusive relationship. And it was sad. By the time I finished reading, I was so angry, like apocalyptically angry, because for weeks, ever since I'd moved out, my ex had been telling me that I hadn't given him enough of a chance to change, that I'd never clearly communicated how I was feeling or told him what he could be doing differently to make me feel better. He said I hadn't done that, and I had started to believe him because this is how abuse works. It makes you doubt yourself when you know you're right. I had legitimately been thinking, "I messed up. I moved out too soon before I really gave him the opportunity to change." And now, now I had proof three and a half pages in black and white shared with him five years earlier that his arguments were that I had told him. He already knew. He already knew and he didn't care. He already knew and nothing had changed.

[00:13:42]Nothing changed then and I knew nothing would change now. I looked back at that document. I just created our new relationship plan from that morning.

[00:13:52]I deleted it. And then I sent my ex a very different email than the one I expected to send to him that day. I told him I'd found the document from 5 years earlier. It was attached to the email and I was pissed. I told him that after reading the document, I didn't think that any more communication from me was going to help us. I told him if there was going to be any kind of future for us, I needed to see this kind of effort from him instead. I hit send a little bit before noon and then I went for a very long, very angry run. And the longer I ran, the angrier I got because it hurt. It hurt so much to realize the amount of communication I had done so many years ago. Especially because he'd been saying more and more I was the one who left too quickly and had never given him the chance to change. And now I just spent the morning reading three and a half pages proving that wasn't true. And this was just one document. But I knew I had told him over and over again. I told him exactly how I felt. And it was maddening because one day before I'd been sitting there planning a future for us, thinking that this time would be different. I felt stupid. I knew why I left. I knew that was not a safe relationship. And I knew he wasn't going to change. So, why couldn't I just let this go? As I ran that day, I just kept imagining what his reply was going to look like. In an ideal world, he would say something like, "You are 100% right.

[00:15:17]You have already done the communicating.

[00:15:19]It is my turn to step up. I'm going to show you, not just tell you that things are different now. I'm going to work on that document and I look forward to your feedback." I knew I wasn't going to get that. So then in my not so ideal world, I knew he could respond with arguments about why I was wrong, irritation that I brought something up from 5 years ago or complaints that I was putting the emotional burden on him.

[00:15:41]Any of those would have been dealreakers and it would have made my life really easy. That's not what I got either.

[00:15:47]Instead, when I got home, there was another email from him that was somewhere in the middle. The very first thing he said was that I had sent the email to his secondary account instead of his primary account by mistake. Not a huge deal, but a very odd place to start his reply. He also told me that my email had come through right before a very stressful work meeting. And I remember sitting there thinking, "How's that my fault?" At the very beginning of the email, I'd actually added a sentence that said, "This is not urgent. Please take your time to reply." I had also sent it right before noon, knowing that's when he normally took a lunch break. I had spent time thinking about how to make receiving my email easier on my ex. And somehow his emotional experience was still my responsibility.

[00:16:33]I was sick of it. And then something else hit me. As I was reading through his response, I realized this was exactly the kind of email I never would have sent him. Not ever. When I emailed my ex, I spent time thinking about how he would experience every single sentence. I would constantly be asking myself, could this be misunderstood?

[00:16:54]Does this sound too critical? Could this upset him? I spent literally hours crafting those emails.

[00:17:01]And he never did the same for me. And for the first time, I was seeing how unfair this situation already was. Now, his email did have some positives. He told me that even though we were separated, I was still his number one priority. and he was going to do whatever it took to make this work. He said he understood what I'd written and that he would put something together in the next day or so, but don't expect it to be perfect. Now, if you'd asked me to rate his email, it wasn't a disaster, but given that we were less than 48 hours into maybe rebuilding our marriage, it wasn't really inspiring either. The day before, I'd been imagining a future with him. Now, I felt like I'd fallen off a cliff. It was emotional whiplash. And I already knew logically that I could survive whether or not we got back together. That wasn't really the issue. The issue was grief.

[00:17:48]Grieving the future that I'd built in my head not even 24 hours before.

[00:17:53]And that grief hit me hard. I took the rest of the day off work, sat on the couch with my cat just fuming. I was angry and disappointed and embarrassed.

[00:18:03]And I couldn't tell if that was with him or with myself. I felt really hopeless, like I wanted to crawl into a dark hole and go to sleep and just never wake up.

[00:18:12]Now, the day before, I had also gone grocery shopping back when I was hopeful, and I bought everything I needed to make burrito bowls for dinner that night. That didn't happen. Instead, I sat on the couch and ate Fritos out of the bag, plus carrots cuz I'm healthy, plus wine because I'm sad. And late that night, he emailed me one more time. He said that he actually wouldn't be able to work on the document right away because he was about to go on a camping trip with a couple friends, including John. And my instant reaction when I read that email was, "Camping? You don't even like camping." But that wasn't actually what was bothering me. What was bothering me was that if I was really his number one priority, why wasn't this why wasn't rebuilding our relationship something he could clear his schedule for? Why wasn't this the thing that couldn't wait? especially when it takes like an hour to put this kind of a Google doc together. And this was the moment I realized that once again, my ex was going to disappoint me.

[00:19:08]I had spent the majority of the last 8 weeks seriously wondering if I had left him too soon. And then over the course of just a few days, I'd watched myself become very hopeful and then watched that hope get strangled by the reality of who he was. And it was interesting because that disappointment hadn't come because of one large explosive, violent, or abusive incident. No, it had come through something much more common in abuse. A dozen small moments of disappointment. A forgotten Google document. An email that held me responsible for his feelings. A camping trip that was apparently more important than rebuilding our marriage. Looking back, I don't think this week proved that my ex couldn't change. I don't know what would have happened if things had gone differently, but it did prove to me this. I couldn't spend the rest of my life making decisions about who I hoped that person would become. I couldn't wait around for him. I had to make decisions based on the reality of who I knew him to be. And once I started trusting my memories about who that person was, there really wasn't much of a choice left to make.