In the first part of this post I began describing the various ways in which Zoe presented herself to me as a victim, and the effect that had on me, focusing on her change in profession and living situation. But her escape from home, family, friends, and her old career was driven by much more than mere grad-school ennui.
After a very short time I realized that I had been hearing Zoe make references to her mother, but not to her father. Gritting my teeth because I already guessed the answer, I asked the question and heard what I expected: her parents were divorced and she had no relationship at all with her dad.
She told me that he had come from a very sick background. She told me he had been emotionally abusive to her. She told me that he had serially cheated on her mother. She told me that at some point in her twenties the family had confronted him with an intervention, which hadn't worked, and that her mother divorced him soon after this last attempt. Zoe had then cut him out of her life entirely, to the point of fleeing if she encountered him on the street. She told me that he had been fiercely jealous of her academic success and had sabotaged one of her graduation celebrations by persuading much of her family to leave; but of all the stories she told me this still remains the only clear example of abusive behavior.
Although it's now difficult to trust anything I heard from her at all, I still believe that her father really was consistently abusive. For one, the personality-disordered apple doesn't fall far from the personality-disordered tree; something happened to Zoe that made her this way, and her mother seems like the opposite of an abuser: a co-dependent rescuer and enabler (her brother seems to have taken after their mother in this respect). Although I haven't heard her rather private mother directly say that her husband had been abusive, she didn't object to Zoe saying things of that sort, and it was obvious they had divorced in an unfriendly way.
Of course I didn't blame Zoe for what she had been through; her stories, told openly and with what I imagined was courage, only drew me closer to her and added fuel to my fiery desire to save her and protect her from everything that had gone undeservedly wrong in her life. But if she bears no responsibility for what was done to her as a child, her relationship history, as it was told to me in these early months, was already another matter entirely.
Zoe had been engaged once before, at a too-young age, but had broken the engagement when she realized she had become depressed and couldn't possibly continue. Alarmingly she told me her family acted as though this result had been expected all along. She told me that she never had any contact with this ex-fiancee or indeed, with any of her exes, because why would she want to speak to someone that turned out not to want her? (Sounds healthy, right? It isn't.) She told me that it was fortunate we hadn't met earlier, because less-mature Zoe "would have destroyed you". Most alarming of all, she told me that, at the age of 34, she had never been in a relationship lasting longer than a year.
I didn't break that record either.
Zoe began to say things that revealed what she really thought about men in general:
- How lucky she was to have met me, which I wouldn't be able to understand because I didn't know "what's out there"
- How if not for me she would have given up serious relationships all together
- That "all men are liars", excepting, naturally, myself and her brother
If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to pay attention to these beliefs, to the stories she told me about her father and about other men. I have since learned that the personality-disordered will eventually find ways to fit you into their system of beliefs, no matter how far from reality they may be. You are only really important to them as an object, as the latest man or woman to play the role in their continuously-running psychodramas. If her father was an abuser, she will find a way to convince herself that you are one too. If she believes all men are liars, she will eventually believe that you are a liar. If she believes that all men have problems with anger, she will do whatever it takes to make you angry to prove it to herself.
Negative beliefs about men are a psychological necessity for her; she cannot allow herself to let these go without feeling her emotional survival is at stake. If she did she would have to face the possibility that her failures in relationships, coming as they have with remarkable regularity, have more to do with her than with her partners. If she wasn't able to eventually include me in that system of beliefs she would have to confront this reality: she discarded, for no reason, a basically decent man who loved her dearly, offered her exactly what she wanted, tried very hard to support her and make her happy, whose only "crime" was taking some measures to protect himself instead of handing over all control of his life wholly to her and her madness. She would have to understand that she did tremendous psychological damage to me, dealt me wounds that are not even close to healing today.
But in those early months, I understood none of this. I thought I was doing great.
At this time my career had reached a new height; I had negotiated a raise and was working on promising new projects; my family was well; I had rewarding relationships with my friends, fun hobbies, exciting travel plans; I was renovating a portion of my house. The contrast between my own life and hers must have looked intimidating, and she expressed it to me. I didn't see things that way, so I comforted her. In those months I had a feeling, probably for the first time ever, that I was incredibly lucky. I told her often how lucky I was. Although my life had always looked pretty damn good on paper, I had never really enjoyed it like I was able to with her. Being with her was finally illuminating how good everything else was.
Obviously I have some serious issues myself, some issues that make me very susceptible to what Zoe was presenting as herself. Disordered personalities don't usually get away with abusing the healthiest people, I expect, and anyway, enjoying as I do a relatively successful and stable and put-together life, why is it that ten months with an emotionally damaged woman skating the edge of psychosis counts as the happiest I've ever been?
It didn't take long for me to understand that Zoe was feeling inadequate. She started verbalizing things like "you're kinder and wiser and cleverer than I am" and "I'm a bad girlfriend". She wondered aloud if she could contribute as much as I could to our relationship. Feeling generally pretty great about my life and about us as a couple, I tried to tell her not to worry about any of that; I understood that she was in a transitional state and that it would take some time before she was fully on her own feet again. I told her I was investing in the future, that one day, inevitably, I'd fall on hard times, I'd be suffering or poor or unhealthy and then, when I needed her most, she'd be there for me.
I've never been more wrong.
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