I Thought I Was Marrying a Man Confident Enough to Love Me

It turns out he was even confident enough to divorce me.

I met my husband in college. He was charming, funny, extroverted, and the life of the party. He had all the markings, or so I thought, of confidence. Once he graduated, he took the working world by storm. Again, he carried himself with healthy self-esteem

I graduated a year later and began working for a large corporation.

This is where things became dicey.

He began to demonstrate some jealousy.

Honestly, I dismissed it. He had never shown signs of this while we were in school. I thought (and I can’t believe I’m going to say this) it was sweet maybe even a little funny, only because it didn’t seem like him. I thought it was an isolated time in our lives. We had dated for three years.

It wasn’t constant but for the first time, he didn’t seem as confident in our relationship. I attributed it to all the new people he didn’t know in my life.

In college, we had always hung out with the same crowd.

But it did begin to nag at me. It made me recall a comment he made in the infancy of dating. It struck me as funny at the time. I thought it was an odd thing to say.

“I can’t believe I got a girl like you,” he said.

It wasn’t the words he used that gave me pause. Because alone they could be interpreted as a compliment. But the comment wasn’t directed at me. It was something he seemed to be saying under his breath to himself.

I remember thinking, “That’s odd, doesn’t he think he’s all that too?”

Ultimately, I ignored my instincts even when he asked me to quit my job a few years later to help build a business with him. At this point, we were engaged. I thought I was doing something that was best for us as a team. In reality, it had been predicated by him not being comfortable with me having an outside job and world. He didn’t like wondering if men were paying attention to me. He said as much. Again, it wasn’t constant or obvious so it didn’t come across as the warning signal it should have been.

It felt more like he needed my help growing a business.

Less than the lack of confidence and manipulation that it was.

A few years into our marriage I was frustrated by something I was working on. My husband never indulged in my side projects. As a marketer, I had product ideas and as a writer, I had book ideas. He was never supportive, interested, or willing to help me the way I had helped him build a business.

“He’s afraid you’re going to outshine him,” says my sister.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“If you outshine him,” she says. “It will be harder to hold onto you.”

Older sisters have a way of being right.

My husband was afraid I would outshine him. It was another self-esteem-lacking red flag. I mistook it for a self-employed man who didn’t have enough hours in the day.

When my first article was published in Washingtonian Magazine he embarrassed himself. He sat in a corner staring at his phone the entire night while friends celebrated my achievement. And it was an achievement. Washington, D.C. is one of the top ten media markets in the country. It’s extremely competitive and it was before the days of online writing. There were only a limited number of publications making journalism even more competitive.

I thought I was marrying a man confident enough to love me.

But I hadn’t

Even though my husband still projected confidence.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. He outwardly appeared self-assured but internally his self-esteem was fragile. It had taken me years and a loss of my ability to shine to accurately see this. I left my husband.

Divorce made his lack of confidence come out to play with a vengeance.

He wouldn’t let me go.

He wouldn’t divorce me.

He wouldn’t do the right thing. He was extreme and unrelenting. He was emotionally and financially abusive. He was damaging and destructive. His ego couldn’t take a woman leaving him.

People who are inherently insecure lack the foundation to acknowledge divorce isn’t an attack on their person. It’s the unfortunate result of exhausting all of our options. It’s a relationship that has met an unfortunate outcome.

We’ve been breaking up with people since we were 16 years old.

It’s sad, it’s heartbreak, and it’s never pretty. But confident people make it less ugly. They have the self-esteem to do the right thing. They have the emotional center to acknowledge their feelings but behave like mature adults.

They can nurture their wounds without inflicting continual damage on another.

I thought I was marrying a man confident enough to love me.

It turns out he wasn’t even confident enough to divorce me.

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