I have never been a victim. I don’t believe in taking crap in relationships. I try not to loose my temper and loose control of myself, I consider myself evolved enough to agree to disagree. I know I can’t always be right and I know how to fight fair. At least that’s how it started. Living with someone who doesn’t follow the same rules made me feel like I was being denigrated. I stopped playing the rules and started stepping up to the plate and swinging hard when we got into verbal altercations. Slowly over time it became normal for him to call me names, get in my face and shout at me. I couldn’t let him keep winning by cheating. I hate being the underdog, I cant stand feeling like someone has got the better of me. So I had to lift my game in the argument stakes.
When I got called a named, I called him one in return. I slowly but surely lost all sense of what is normal and right and levelled back as much crap as I was given. But somewhere along the way I started hating the change I saw in myself. I felt mean and was disgusted with how I was treating my husband Daniel. I knew in my heart that my actions were wrong, but on the battlefield it was tit for tat. I still refused to let him get away with verbally abusing me or acting out. Daniel also started making accusations about me talking to other guys online. Horrible questions like ‘oh are you looking for a new boyfriend to replace me?’ became the norm. Over and over again I was accused of fooling around with other guys when I was online. Daniel had left the virtual community that we had met in and assumed that I must be seeing other people because I had remained there. When I asked him to come and spend time with me he replied with questions like ‘are you in love with my avatar and not me?’ I was shocked. He seemed to twist everything. Everything I did seemed to be used against me. The feeling that I couldn’t win soon set in and hasn’t left me. I assumed that when he came to Australia that we would be like dozens of other couples I knew online who spent time in virtual worlds together and seemed to thrive on the shared interest. This didn’t happen for us. Daniel says he wanted to focus on the real world, not a virtual one and he wanted to spend time with me, but when ever I spent time with him he was texting or gaming on his phone, building villages and waging wars. I really couldn’t see the difference between my virtual world and his war games. But he could and that’s all that mattered.
In my heart of hearts I felt abandoned. My online identity is very important to me. This is hard to explain but the interactions there help give me confidence, social interaction and make me happy. Daniel thought I was wasting my time and efforts and he thought I should be more focussed on my real life. He still doesn’t understand this facet of my life, even though we met there. We both had different expectations from our relationship in this matter , but unfortunately he still assumes that when I’m on the computer I’m talking to other guys. It doesn’t matter what I say or do, he just assumes that I’m fooling around. I started wondering what incentive I had to stay faithful if he firmly believes that I am not. I didn’t know what to do… I was being judged for something I hadn’t done and there was nothing I could do about it.