I Never Cried Until the Day I Got Married

It took someone pointing it out to get my attention

“Colleen,” says my sister. “You’re not a crier. Only one person in your life makes you cry.”

I hear my sister’s words.

She’s right.

A part of me wonders how it’s taken me this long to realize that. Or maybe why she is only now speaking those words. But I know the answer. We’ve both given my husband too many benefits of the doubt.

My focus has been less on me.

And more on him.

Instead of recognizing this is unnatural for me.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out the unnatural side of him. The bully who will induce tears and then worse, feel nothing as they cascade down my face.

I feel as though he’s tricked me.

How could we date for nearly six years without incident?

How could my mother say she’s never seen two people who got along so well? How could a bully hide that well? Until he put a ring on my finger. Until he got a commitment out of me.

Crying is a submissive action.

It isn’t confrontational.

It only underscores the brutality of the man I’ve married.

We don’t yet have the diagnosis of my husband lacking empathy and having narcissistic personality disorder on the severe end of the spectrum. I alternate between the confusion a covert narcissist or any narcissist induces.

He is tall, handsome, funny, and charming for months at a time.

And then his cold cruelty comes out to play.

When I ask him what happened to the man I dated all those years, he just laughs and says, “Oh, I was in camouflage then.”

Truer words were never spoken.

At least, out of the mouth of a narcissist.

But this story isn’t necessarily about narcissism even though I write extensively on the subject. I’ve spent more than a decade in the counseling and research of narcissism.

It’s cruel, confusing, and crushing.

But I didn’t need a diagnosis of narcissism to understand my truth.

I wasn’t a crier.

Only one person in my life was making me cry.

I was a happy girl. A big joy of life girl. I was positive. I was optimistic. I smiled. I laughed. My sister was correct. I didn’t cry, sans the occasional movie or well-played commercial.

No man and no woman should repeatedly reduce an individual to tears.

I say repeatedly because relationships are complicated.

All types of emotion can be expended, including tears. There can be misunderstandings, hurt feelings, disappointments, and more. Life and love are complicated.

But inducing tears shouldn’t be a sport.

Crying is a submissive action, it’s not combative.

A man shouldn’t inflict it on a woman.

If he does, he shouldn’t walk away callously. He shouldn’t coldly ignore emotions so deep they are forced to exit your body in the form of flowing water.

A tangible witness to the pain inside of you.

Instead of focusing on my newly adopted physical reaction, I focused less on me, and more on my husband. I wanted to understand where the man I dated went.

I wanted to make sense of two men who lived within one.

But someone who loves you won’t bear to see you cry.

Narcissist or no narcissist.

A man who loves a woman well — won’t be able to witness it.

It’s taken me ten years to exercise myself from the man who induced my tears. And an overly abusive and elongated divorce only induced more of them.

These days I smile. I laugh. I’m happy. I’m a big joy of life girl again. I’m positive. I’m optimistic. I feel like myself.

It’s a relief to no longer dodge the brutality of forced saltwater streaming down my face.

But it’s not without its growing pains.

The trauma I experienced escaping a man has made me more emotional.

I found this out while I was dating someone.

Tears can find me more easily than they once did. But these growing pains aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They are the last purging of trauma. They are a cleansing.

It’s letting go of my past.

It’s releasing the last remnants of a man who never deserved me.

But how could I have known?

He was in camouflage.