‘I stayed in a toxic marriage for 20 years. This was the moment I finally handed my ring back.’
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Sienna* had been with her husband for 10 years before she started to realise who she had really married.
By that time, they shared three teenage children together and their lives were so intertwined.
Their relationship was slow to unravel.
A drip-feed of small changes and compromises that, on their own, didn’t seem alarming, but over time reshaped the entire dynamic of their marriage.
They would stay together for another decade before Sienna fully grasped the extent of the control, manipulation, and betrayal that had defined their relationship from the start.
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“It’s the analogy about putting a frog in boiling water. You know, if you put it in cold water and turn it up you don’t really realise?” Sienna told Mamamia.
“There was toxic behaviour around financial control, coercive control, and psychological control that really crept in from about 10 years. It would be things like gradually taking control of the finances to the point where I had to present a receipt for everything that I purchased. That wasn’t there at the beginning, but by the end it was, and you just think, ‘How the hell did that become a normal practice?'”
There were other signs too, like isolating Sienna from her family.
“At the start [of the relationship] he would say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t go to that birthday party. We’re busy that weekend’. By the end it would be, ‘We’re not spending any time with your family because I don’t like them’. It just creeps in so gradually, in a way that you don’t kind of realise it’s happening.
“It almost becomes your norm until you look back, and you go, ‘Well, hang on a second. That’s actually not normal. That’s actually not okay.'”
Throughout their marriage, Sienna says, there were also multiple instances of infidelity.
“There were certainly examples of infidelity right from the beginning, even before we got married,” she said.
Each time, she would confront her husband about the affairs, but he would turn it back on his wife.
“It’s the typical narcissist. If it happened, ‘No, it didn’t happen’ but if it did, ‘It’s your fault,'” Sienna said.
“It would start with, ‘You’re overreacting, it’s just a bit of fun. Everyone does this’. And then, as the years went on, it would be, ‘Take a look at yourself, you’re nothing to look at. There’s the door. If you want to go, if you don’t want to put up with this, no one else is going to love you. Just walk out the door.'”
Eventually, right before COVID-19, the family decided they needed a fresh start. So, they packed up their bags and moved interstate.
“We wanted to challenge ourselves and our family for a clean slate,” Sienna said.
She had changed careers, and their kids had changed schools. But Sienna was hopeful things would be different this time.
Then, she found messages on her husband’s phone.
“When he continued to cheat after I had moved our family, changed careers to support him, I just went, ‘This is never going to stop. Even a lockdown is not going to make you stop.'”
In that moment, as she held the phone, Sienna knew it was over for good.
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“I handed back my wedding ring. I said, ‘I’m out, I’m done’. So I was just really clear, I handed the rings back and said, ‘that’s the end of it. I’m moving into the spare bedroom.'”
Sienna collected her things from their shared room and relocated down the hall that same day, unable to leave the house due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
“There was such a clarity with which that decision was made. I never wavered a single day after that,” she said.
Her husband was stunned.
“I think that he was really quite startled with the unwavering approach and my refusal to get any further counselling.”
For two months, he tried to find a solution. But Sienna was adamant.
“It didn’t matter how much he pleaded or argued. I just went, ‘No, decision is made.’ I think probably I had already grieved the relationship and was almost waiting for the opportunity to go.
Eventually, Sienna’s husband stopped trying to bargain with her and turned to the blame game.
Content retrieved from: https://www.mamamia.com.au/divorce-moment-marriage-ended/.
