On this day 40 years ago, I got married at the tender age of 19. A personal reflection on healing after gaslighting, alcoholism and a 33-year marriage.
In truth, the marriage could probably have gone down as one of the shortest in history. His drunken behaviour on our wedding day caused me to walk out. That should perhaps have been a very clear warning sign, but instead I was frogmarched back by my parents and told, in the language of the time, that I had made my bed and I had better learn to lie in it. So I did. For 33 years.
I want to be honest about those years, because life is rarely entirely good or entirely bad. There were happy times. We had two gorgeous daughters who remain two of the greatest gifts of my life. We shared beautiful dogs over the years, each one bringing their own joy, comfort and companionship. There were holidays, laughter, family moments and memories I still value. But those good times were almost always lived in the shadow of something else.
Alcohol.
For a long time, I avoided using the word alcoholism. Perhaps because it felt too harsh, too definitive, too exposing. But that is what it was.
Alcohol had a way of taking over things that should have been happy: Christmases, birthdays, social gatherings and family occasions. So many events that began with hope or excitement ended in tension, embarrassment, arguments or fear. You learned never to relax completely because you never quite knew how the evening would end.
That unpredictability becomes a way of life. You become alert to tone of voice, body language and mood. You notice how much has been drunk. You wonder whether to say something or whether saying something will make things worse. You try to keep the peace, smooth things over and carry on as if everything is normal.
Alongside the alcohol came control, infidelities and years of being made to question myself.
At the time, I didn’t have words like gaslighting. I simply knew that somehow I always seemed to be wrong. I was too sensitive. I had remembered something incorrectly. I was overreacting. I had misunderstood. I was nagging. I was causing an argument. I was making a fuss.
When you hear those things often enough from someone you love, something begins to shift inside you. You stop trusting your own reactions. You begin to ask yourself whether perhaps you really are the problem.
You try harder.
You try harder to keep things calm. You try harder not to upset anyone. You try harder to look right, speak right, behave right, parent right and manage the home right. You become very good at reading the room and very bad at listening to yourself.
Gradually, without necessarily even noticing it, you become smaller.
It was only much later that I watched the old film Gaslight. Watching it was an extraordinary experience because, although the circumstances were very different, I recognised the feeling immediately. That creeping sense of, “Is it me?” “Am I imagining this?” “Am I going mad?”
When somebody repeatedly challenges your version of reality, eventually you stop needing them to do it for you. You begin doing it to yourself.
That, for me, has been one of the hardest things to recover from.
The marriage ended eight years ago, but leaving did not instantly undo 33 years of conditioning. There is a strange idea that once you leave a difficult relationship, you are free and everything suddenly becomes easier. Physically, perhaps. Emotionally, it can be very different. In fact it is only afterwards that you begin to realise how bad things really were.
You take yourself with you.
You take the self-doubt, the habit of second-guessing yourself, the fear of getting things wrong and the instinct to keep the peace. Sometimes you even take the other person’s voice with you, long after they are no longer there.
Eight years on, I am happy. I share my life now with a lovely man, who I love very much and the contrast has taught me a great deal about what love can look like when it does not require you to disappear. But I am still healing.
There are still reactions that surprise me. There are still moments when I question my own judgement. There are still times when I realise that something I once thought was simply part of my personality was actually something I learned in order to survive.
Healing, I have discovered, is not one grand moment. It is hundreds of small ones.
It is saying what you think without immediately wondering whether you should have kept quiet. It is making a decision and trusting yourself. It is recognising that someone else’s anger does not automatically mean you have done something wrong. It is rediscovering what you like, what you want and who you are when you are not constantly adjusting yourself around somebody else.
So today, on what would have been my 40th wedding anniversary, I don’t feel bitterness. I feel reflective.
I think about that 19-year-old girl who walked away on her wedding day and was told to go back. I wish someone had asked her why she had left. I wish someone had told her that marriage wasn’t something she simply had to endure because she had made a promise. I wish she had known that loving someone does not mean accepting everything they do.
But I also look at the woman she became.
She survived. She raised two wonderful daughters. She loved her dogs fiercely and she eventually found her voice. Although there are still scars, she is building a life that feels like her own.
Perhaps that is why I feel ready to start writing about it now. Not to point fingers or to reopen old wounds, but because there may be another woman somewhere quietly wondering whether she is imagining things, whether she is too sensitive, whether everything really is her fault.
And if sharing some of my story helps her trust herself just a little more, then perhaps those years can have meaning beyond the pain.
I see you. It’s not your fault.
This article is based on my own memories, experiences and personal perspective of my marriage. It reflects how I experienced events and how I understand them today. Some identifying details may be omitted or changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
