Maybe it’s the boiling frog analogy. You start off happy, then there’s a few things that make you annoyed, angry sad, but nowhere near enough to even think of leaving.
You get used to the status quo, tell yourself no body’s perfect blah blah. You try and get a mindset where you just accept it or compartmentalise the issues. It gets a bit worse, you try talking, then maybe arguing. Then you try and live with it again.
You are feeling lack of respect from you partner, you briefly think what would it be like to leave, but money, housing, kids make you think it’s not worth it. You repeat these steps over and over again, until you get to the stage you know you want to leave, but the problems seem too great. Keep repeating the above stage. The sunken cost fallacy comes into play.
Then finally leaving is all you can think about. That pretty much sums it up for me, except my husband was an entitled bully with narcissistic traits, so there was quite a bit of fear involved. Sometimes there will be a final straw, or they will do something that is so outrageous that the scales fall from your eyes. Or like me they go to a therapist who tells you that you are not the problem, but they are.
I was talking to my therapist yesterday and asked if she thought he had narcissistic traits. She said, I’m thinking further than that. When I asked what she meant she replied, I’m thinking there’s some psychopathy there.
No one, but no one would think this of my fun, charismatic and charming husband. So there is a chance that these marriages where you don’t see control and abuse, there is in fact all sorts of abuse going on.
A very telling question to ask yourself in a relationship is ‘Do I feel like I am an equal partner in this marriage?” My answer was a big fat no.