How a Narcissist Uses Your Strengths Against You
When people try to work out how a capable man ends up in a marriage like this, they go looking for the weak spot that let it happen. There usually isn’t one, which is why the search never ends and why so many men come out of it thinking there must be something wrong with them they still haven’t found. Everything that made me good at my life is what kept me in that marriage. I had it backwards for years. I thought I stayed even though I was capable. I stayed because I was. The things involved are the ones you’d list if somebody asked what kind of man you are. I can handle it. I can fix it. I don’t quit. My family depends on me. Every one of those is a good thing everywhere else, and every one of them, in a house with somebody who has none of them, is what keeps you there.
I can handle it
This is the big one and it does the most damage because it’s the most reliable thing about a man like me. I’ve handled payroll when the money wasn’t there. I’ve cleared ground before anything could go on it. I’ve taken problems that would have flattened somebody else and just kept going, and that’s why people hire me. So when the marriage started getting heavy I did the one thing I know how to do with heavy things, which is pick them up. The trouble is that reflex has no top end and no off switch. There’s no point where a man like me sets something down and says this is more than I agreed to carry, because the whole way I see myself is built on never saying that. I widened my stance and took more. Every year I showed both of us I could take more than the year before, and that quietly set what the next year was allowed to ask for. A man who can’t carry much finds out early and gets out. I could carry almost anything, so I found out at the end.
I can fix this
The second one eats the years, and it’s what I’d warn a capable man about first. Show me something broken and I’ll fix it. That’s my whole working life and most of how I think about myself, and I’ve never once looked at a problem and figured somebody else should handle it. A marriage where you’re being taken apart slowly looks, to a man built this way, exactly like a broken thing. Which means it looks like work, not like danger. So I worked on it the way I work on anything hard, and I got the same thing back you get from any hard job. Some stretches genuinely got better. That’s what people miss when they assume the guy was fooling himself. Those better weeks were real. Something I did made an actual difference, which proved the thing could be fixed, which meant leaving would be quitting on something that had a solution. That’s how ten years go. Not to giving up. To a perfectly sensible belief that I was getting somewhere, topped up often enough to keep me at it.
I don’t quit, and my family depends on me
These two work together. I’ve never walked off a job or left something half finished because it got hard, and if you asked anybody I’ve worked with for one word about me it’d probably be that. In that house, not quitting meant staying, and there was no way to pull those apart, because I’d spent my whole life deciding that leaving and failing were the same thing and then applied that to my marriage without noticing I’d mixed up two different things. The fourth one is what she aimed at. Everything I built I built so my kids would have something, which isn’t unusual, that’s most fathers. But once that’s true and somebody knows it’s true, they’ve got a handle that works every single time, and it works better the better a father you are. Put staying on the side of what’s good for the kids and I’ll stay through things I’d never have put up with for myself, because my own comfort was never something I’d spend against theirs. What she used wasn’t a flaw in me. It was the best thing about me.
Why it takes longer with men who have more to lose
I’ve watched people walk out of relationships in eight months that I stayed in for ten years, and for a long time I read that as something being wrong with me. It isn’t. They got out sooner because they weren’t carrying what I was carrying. No business built with somebody. No house standing on ground I cleared myself. No promise I’d made to myself about being the kind of man who finishes what he starts. Everything that makes leaving expensive is something good about the man who can’t afford it. Loyalty, patience, taking responsibility, being willing to take the harder half, remembering who somebody used to be. Those aren’t why this happened to you. They’re why it took so long to end, and they’re why the men who stay ten years are usually the ones you’d want on your side of any other problem.
The question that replaced the one I was asking
I’m not going to tell you to stop being loyal or stop taking responsibility. That isn’t advice, you couldn’t do it anyway, and you shouldn’t want to. What changed things for me was swapping the question out. Can I handle this is worthless, because I always can, and the answer shows up before I’ve even thought about it. The question worth asking is what handling it is costing me, and whether she’s paying anything at all. If you’re the only one absorbing, you’re not in a hard marriage that needs patience. You’re in something that runs on your best qualities. Loyalty is supposed to be met with loyalty. If you take responsibility, so does the other person. When it only ever goes one direction, that isn’t commitment and calling it commitment is how men lose a decade. I stayed ten years because I was good at exactly the things that make a man stay. That’s harder to know than being told I was weak, because you can’t fix it by deciding to be tougher next time. Tough was never what mattered.
Continue Strong and Controlled: Why Do I Feel Guilty When They Cheated?
