the tuna incident
I did a quick perusal of one-bedroom apartment prices on Capitol Hill on Craigslist this morning. I only did it for a couple of minutes, just to get a general sense. For me, in my position, it's not a particularly pretty picture, at least not compared to what I have in terms of housing for the price at the current time.
What it comes down to, for me in moments like this, is a cost-benefit analysis comparing the dramatic life disruption of finding my own place versus continuing in my current, far more comfortable living situation than I could possibly find anywhere else, but staying in that while continuing to endure my husband's increasingly intolerable behavior.
I think Shobhit is generally unhappy with me right now. In some ways his feelings are justified, in some ways they are not. What I can say unequivocally, is that his behavior as an expression of those feelings are, without exception, not at all justified or excusable.
He went ballistic last night because I purchased what he felt was the wrong flavor of cat treat. Maybe go ahead and read that sentence again. He had me get out of the car to cross the street into Mud Bay so he would not have to backtrack to get into its parking lot and go straight to Bartell Drugs, where we were headed. Apparently I was "supposed" to get two bags of treats, one the salmon and one the chicken. I could not remember which is the one he always harps as the one we should buy (a harping which itself is never necessary, mind you), and I took a chance and just got the tuna and the salmon. And when we got back in the car, he flipped his shit. I even tried to disengage and not yell back at him in the car. I was patient for a very long time, during which he would pause, a minute would go by, and he would start yelling about my supposedly terrible decisions again. This happened not once, but twice -- meaning I got not one, not two, but three waves of his verbal diatribe in the car, over the course of seven blocks of driving.
Did I mention this was over cat treats? "Give them some of the tuna when we get home and if they don't eat it, throw it away!" he said.
I did exactly that. The cats came up and smelled the treats, hesitated for a moment, almost certainly giving Shobhit hope that he would feel entirely vindicated (which is not possible with this kind of behavior), but within moments they both ate all of the several bits of tuna flavored treats I gave them. Both Shanti and Guru, each of them ate several.
Shobhit's response? "It's because they were hungry." As in, I had not yet fed them dinner. Never mind that I then did give them their dinner food, and they both wandered away lazily after taking just a couple of bites -- they were clearly not hungry, at all.
But so what if they hadn't eaten the treats? Is that really worth all this drama? Apparently Shobhit thinks so. In all likelihood there is something else going on with him and this is just how it's manifesting itself, and so he lashes out -- although he behaves this way no matter what, if I do not do precisely what he wants in exactly the meticulous way it should be done, particularly as it pertains to the cats, as though he knows better than I do how best to take care of them, and he does not. Either way, he has an anger problem. It has been a problem the entire time we've been together, where he reaches a certain point where a switch gets flipped in his brain, and all rational thinking flies out the window. He's fully away of it, and he's adopted a new attitude about it recently: basically, I know I'm an asshole, and you just have to live with it. Actually, no I do not. This is an extremely dangerous position for him to take, one which leaves me feeling taken for granted more than ever.
Quite selfishly on my part, if I weren't so enamored with the quality of life that I enjoy most of the time, this would be a no brainer for me. I'd have long ago said "Fuck this, I'm done." And yes, it's true, I am far from perfect. I make mistakes. I can act like a raging asshole too. But there is a crucial, key difference here. If I am behaving badly and Shobhit tells me so in a constructive, illuminating way, even in the midst of it, I can recognize it. I can say, "You're right, that was wrong of me, I'm sorry." This does not ever happen with Shobhit. I cannot ever reach him in that way when he's flying off the fucking rails, and I am seriously terrified that one day it's going to make me snap and I'll start throwing dishes against the walls. Because there is no other way to reach him. Yesterday, in the car, it really felt like he didn't get even the slightest amount of satisfaction until I started yelling in the car as much as he did. He would not stop asking why I can't do these things right, over and over, and I suddenly shouted, "Why am I not perfect! Why am I not perfect! Why this, why that, why why why! Why can't you just LET. SHIT. GO!"
Only then did he shut up. But it was absolutely clear that he was poised and waiting to lay into me again if only he could find an excuse to, and he was convinced that moment would come when I tested the cats' taste for the tuna flavored treats. Which, of course, they liked just fine. And still he refused to concede.
All over fucking cat treats. It's probably not about the cat treats; it's almost certainly about something far deeper. Nevertheless, this is the kind of awful, petty behavior you see abusive husbands and boyfriends doing on TV shows to illustrate what pieces of shit they are. And his response to the cats actually eating the treats? Suddenly saying it was because they were hungry, clearly to convince himself he was still in the right? There's an actual name for that: moving the goal posts, a known tactic of emotional abusers. There's no way I can win these arguments because he is always changing the rules in order to avoid losing.
The truth is, I think I spend too much time just letting him bully me into doing things his way. I do it because it's exhausting, and so I give up, taking the path of least resistance. It may very well be that I need to start pushing back more. Even with little things. I'm going to buy the fucking tuna flavored cat treats and he's going to have to live with it. God knows the cats have learned to. Shobhit was desperate in this case to make it about the cats, and it was never about the cats at all. It was about his micromanagement of my life, my everyday decisions.
And it would be one thing if this were more of an isolated incident. Technically it's never been especially "isolated" as there have been conflicts of this nature between us every once in a while since we first got together. Usually there aren't this many, to this degree, so close together. We had a very similar incident just last Saturday night, when he flew off the handle because I thought there was a yoga mat in the storage room in the garage, and when it turned out there wasn't, he literally accused me of being a liar: "So you lied to me!" Jesus fuck. Again, that was actually about something else, something deeper and something for which I had to take some responsibility. But as always, it never, ever excused this kind of behavior.
Shobhit was very apologetic about that outburst a while later, and even again on Sunday morning, but again, that is beside the point. Being sorry doesn't solve the problem. Taking action to engage in better, more constructive behaviors solves the problem. And Shobhit's years-long refusal to see any kind of couples therapist, which I really believe would make a difference, clearly doesn't help. But if he is quite openly not interested in being a better person, what am I supposed to do?
I need to be clear: I have not made any decision to leave. That's not happening, not right now and almost certainly not any time soon. But, to assume that day will never come is definitely a mistake. Because every time shit like this happens, I sure find myself thinking about it a lot. One day I might just stop thinking and actually do something.
And, as always, things quieted down between us after a while last night. We watched last Friday's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, and Sunday night's episode of Succession, and then Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which he laid out an impressive picture of how difficult even the "legal immigration" conservatives supposedly support is, even though those same people -- but particularly President Fuckwit -- go out of their way to make even legal immigration far more difficult. Lots of fucked up stuff covered in all three of those shows, but we still got a few laughs out of it.
And that basically characterized the rest of the evening.
Upon further reflection, I have made the decision to post today's DLU privately -- for now, anyway. In all likelihood, I will switch it to public sometime in the future when this is a distant memory buried in archives. This is a first for this blog, since I have moved my writing away from LiveJournal, where I had the option of posting "friends only" entries visible only to people on my "friends list," which does not exist here. Even if it did, doing that would be little different from posting something "friends only" on Facebook. Sharing what I have in this post in that way would still be an attention-grabbing act of sensationalizing what is really a private matter.
It's not like I need to share this publicly today in order to get support. I have close friends I can confide in, and I already have. So I already have the emotional support I need, in what is actually a far more appropriate way. Shobhit may ask why he can't find a post today, and I'll be honest and tell him. I'll even share this with him directly if he so desires. But I do think that keeping this private, for now, is the right thing to do, if I want any hope of peace this week without doing anything more on my own to fan the flames of our issues.
[posted 12:24 pm]