Why didn't he leave when I was being cruel to him?

[From my diary]January, 13th 2023“Why didn’t you go?”Why didn’t he leave me, when I was so cruel, day after day, snapping at him and giving him hateful looks, drilling into each small “mistake” and inventing mistakes of his?Why did he actually stay? Was it love? Pity? Habit? A casual belief all would turn fine?I wanted him to go, to save me the guilt for ruining our marriage. Later, after I eventually left him, I tried to get him back, futilely, but it gave me an excuse to feel myself betrayed and abandoned.Not sure, why I needed it, but I did.When one partner becomes intermittently cruel inside a marriage — snapping, criticizing, withdrawing affection, inventing small failures in the other — the cruelty is often not really about the partner who receives it. It is the visible surface of an internal collapse the cruel partner cannot yet name. The non-cruel partner sometimes stays through this not out of weakness or codependence, but because they are doing exactly what the cruel partner has not yet learned to do: keep the marriage alive in the hope that the storm will pass. The painful afterthought, years later, is often the question of why they did, and what it cost the partner who could not stop being cruel that they did not leave.What cruelty in a marriage often isThe first thing worth saying is that intermittent cruelty inside a marriage — the snapping, the cold looks, the hunting for small failures — is rarely about the partner who receives it. Researchers studying marital deterioration have observed for decades that one of the most common patterns in failing marriages is the projection of internal collapse onto the partner. A spouse who is becoming unhappy in the marriage, but cannot yet face what that unhappiness is asking of them, often expresses it as low-grade hostility toward the other person. Each small criticism functions, internally, as a partial admission: something is wrong here, and if it is your fault, then I do not have to be the one to act.The cruelty is, in this sense, a substitute for the decision the cruel partner cannot yet make. As long as the relationship can be framed as the other partner’s failure, the cruel partner does not have to confront the larger question of whether to leave. The hostility produces a steady supply of small grievances that justify the ongoing unhappiness, and the unhappiness justifies the hostility. The loop is self-perpetuating and exhausting, and it often goes on for years.What makes it so painful in retrospect is the recognition that the partner being treated cruelly was rarely the actual cause of any of it. The mistakes were small, or invented, or significant only inside the frame the cruel partner had constructed. The looks of hate were often produced by something internal that had nothing to do with what the other partner had just done or said. The marriage was deteriorating, but the deterioration was being attributed to the wrong source.A different reading of what the cruelty might have beenThere is another way to read the behaviour I described in that entry, and it is one I have only begun to take seriously in retrospect.Illustration generated by Supportive StrangerIt is possible that the cruelty was not really aimed at him at all. That it was aimed, in a confused and indirect way, at no one in particular — or at me. What I was doing was not punishing my husband for things he had or had not done, but signalling, in the only way I had available, that something was wrong with me and I did not know how to say so.Researchers studying adult attachment have a term for this kind of behaviour: protest behaviour. It describes the disorganized, sometimes destructive outward action a person produces when they are in distress, do not understand what they are in distress about, and have not learned to ask for help directly. The behaviour does not match the situation. It is not really a response to what the partner is doing. It is the surface eruption of something the person carrying it cannot yet name, and the partner happens to be the closest available target.Seen this way, the snapping and the hateful looks were not really about him. They were a sustained, low-volume cry for someone to notice that I was not okay. Notice me. Notice that something is wrong. Ask me what is happening. Do something. Anything. I could not say this directly — I did not know it myself, in those terms, at the time. So I produced behaviour that made it visible the only way I could, even if the form it took looked like an attack on him.This reading does not erase the cruelty. He still received it. The damage to him was still real. But it shifts the question of what the cruelty was for. It was not punishment. It was not contempt, exactly. It was, possibly, a request — for attention, for rescue, for someone to interrupt the state I was in. The fact that I made the request in a form that drove him further away rather than closer is part of what made my situation so impossible. The way I was asking made the asking impossible to hear.If this reading is true, then one of the most painful facts about the marriage is that the help I was indirectly asking for was the help he was least equipped to give. He responded by staying patient, by absorbing the cruelty, by waiting for it to pass. What I needed — and could not name — was for someone to stop me, sit me down, and ask what was actually happening. Neither of us knew how to bring that about. So the signalling continued, in the only register I had, until the marriage itself ended.Why the other partner does not leaveThere are several reasons a partner stays through a long period of being treated this way, and most of them are not the ones the cruel partner imagines in retrospect.The first is that the cruelty, however constant it feels from the inside, is often less visible from the outside than the cruel partner thinks. Periods of snapping and coldness are usually interleaved with periods of normality, even tenderness. The partner being treated cruelly does not experience it as a continuous campaign — they experience it as a difficult phase punctuated by moments when things still feel like the marriage they signed up for. The pattern is harder to see from inside the marriage than from any retrospective distance.The second is that many people who marry someone they love operate under an implicit commitment to waiting out hard periods. This is not codependence or weakness — it is one of the things marriage is. In a long marriage, this can mean weathering one difficult phase among many. In a shorter marriage, it often means something subtly different: the belief that the real marriage has not yet begun, that the difficulty is a teething period, that the partner one married is still coming into view. A partner who stays through cruelty in the early years of a marriage is sometimes not waiting for a difficult phase to end so much as waiting for the marriage itself to properly start.Illustration generated by Supportive StrangerThe third is that the non-cruel partner may sense, correctly, that the cruelty is not really about them. They may be quietly waiting for the cruel partner to come out the other side of whatever internal process is producing the behavior. This is sometimes a kind of patience, sometimes a kind of denial, sometimes both. The non-cruel partner is doing, in effect, the holding work that the cruel partner cannot do.The fourth is the simplest and possibly the most painful: love. People who love their spouses through difficult periods do so not because they are saints or fools but because love is the thing that keeps the marriage alive when neither logic nor pleasure is doing the work. The love was real. The fact that it was being met with cruelty did not change what it was on his side.The fifth is the quietest, and worth naming even when the marriage was not a long one: habit. Even a few years is enough to produce shared routines that exert real gravitational pull. The same kitchen each morning. The dog who has to be walked. The shared calendar of obligations to families and friends who expect both of you. The Sunday rhythms, the worn-in choreography of two people who know each other’s small accommodations. In a long marriage, this becomes immense — the marriage and the daily life become almost inseparable. In a shorter marriage, it is smaller but still real. Habit is not the heaviest reason a partner stays in a two-year marriage, but it is part of why leaving is harder than it sounds, even early on.What it doesn’t meanIt would be tempting, now, to read this entry as evidence that I was simply the destructive partner in a marriage that was otherwise fine. That reading is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters.The cruelty was real. I am not interested in softening that. But cruelty inside a marriage does not arise from one person. It arises from the specific friction between two people, and the friction in our marriage was not something I produced on my own. There were patterns on his side that I was responding to — quiet withdrawals, things he could not say either, his own ways of holding the marriage at arm’s length while remaining physically present. These do not excuse what I did. They are simply part of what was happening, and any honest account of the marriage has to hold them alongside my own behaviour.For the partner who behaved more visibly badly, the temptation in retrospect — contrary to the time when the marriage still existed — is to take the entire weight of the marriage’s collapse onto themselves. This looks like accountability, but it is something else. It is a final act of the same dynamic I had been performing all along — the inability to share the responsibility for the marriage with him. If I had not been able to share the responsibility for ending it while we were inside it, then taking the whole weight of the failure now, alone, is just the same maneuver in reverse. It still does not let him be a participant. It still does not let him be a person whose actions also contributed to what we became together.Real accountability for a marriage that ended this way is not the same as self-condemnation. It is closer to a refusal of the easy stories. The story where I was a monster and he was a saint is easy. The story where he drove me to cruelty is also easy. The harder thing, and the one this entry is gesturing toward without quite reaching, is to hold both at once: I did what I did, he did what he did, and both sets of actions were happening in the same marriage, in response to each other, over a relatively short period of time.What this entry does mean — and what is genuinely worth taking away from it — is that the wish for the other partner to leave first is more common than it is comfortable to admit, and that recognizing it years later is not a confession of monstrosity but a beginning of seeing the marriage clearly. This is true even, and perhaps especially, when the marriage was short. The shorter the marriage, the more tempting it is to read its failure as a single person’s fault — usually the cruel one’s. But even short marriages are made by two people. The brevity does not change that. It only makes the work of seeing it harder.The research grounding. The relevant body of work, in case you want to add a further-reading section over time:* John Gottman, again — his work on the Four Horsemen of marital dissolution (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) is the central source on how cruelty inside marriage works. Criticism and contempt as described in Gottman’s research map almost exactly onto the behaviors named in the drabble.* Steve Duck, Relationship Dissolution (1982) and later work, on the stages of breakup and the asymmetries between initiator and non-initiator.* Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Therapy) and her writing on protest behaviors and pursue-withdraw dynamics in couples — the framework that helps explain why cruelty often coexists with a deep unconscious wish for the partner to do something.* The shame literature, particularly Brené Brown’s and June Tangney’s work, for the dynamic of converting guilt-of-action into the more bearable feeling of having-been-rejected.I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments.Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. 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