When is it abuse?

Marie told me where to find some of the Harry Potter fan-fiction she has written, and I've been reading it. She writes well. The characters are sensitively drawn, they sound right, and her plots take the characters in interesting directions without violating what is "known" about them from the writings of J. K. Rowling herself. (The seven Potter books are described collectively as "the Canon".)

Sometimes "interesting" is a pallid understatement. For example, she raises the question whether it is possible to characterize James Potter (Harry's dad) as an abusive husband and Lily Potter as a battered wife, without violating anything about them that is known from the Canon. Then she writes a story which does exactly that; and in her comments on the finished narrative, she adds that it was disturbingly easy. I get the sense from her remarks that she thinks the "real James Potter" (if we can speak of such a person) probably was an abusive husband, even if Rowling claims in interviews that she thinks he's a great guy.

I was thinking about this story while out walking last night, and suddenly I found myself deep in an imagined conversation with Marie about my marriage ... an imagined conversation in which I was trying to defend myself against the charge that I systematically abused Wife, that I was (in fact) just as obvious an abuser as James Potter. It was not a pleasant conversation to be in.

(As an aside, ... am I the only one who does this? You'd think that if I were going to fantasize a conversation with somebody I hadn't seen in twenty-four years, I'd make it something that flattered my own ego. You'd think I would pretend that she had missed me all those years -- her plain remarks to the contrary notwithstanding. Or maybe I'd make a sexual fantasy out of it and then come home to masturbate. But no, I imagined an accusation -- one in which my explanations were peremptorily cut off as transparent excuses just like the ones all other abusive husbands use. "It wasn't my fault. She made me do it. Besides, I never hit her." It was really unsettling.)

In abbreviated form, the accusation was that a lot of the things I did to Wife were subtly abusive.

• I paid all the bills, which sounds fine until we add that I went over every expense (e.g., every credit card) line by line and asked her to justify each one. I fought with her over any expense I disagreed with. And at one point I took her wallet away, with all her credit cards, so that she could not buy anything.
   
• I asked how she spent her time. Where did she go? Who was she with? When she told me things that sounded like lies or didn't add up, I would cross-check the details. If I thought she was lying I would confront her and demand the truth.
   
• At night after she went to bed, I read her e-mails and her text messages without her knowledge or permission. Most of the time I did not have her password and therefore had to hunt around in the guts of our home computer until I found how to get what I wanted. (But I never installed a key-logging program.) I made copies of the messages that mattered to me, so I could retrieve them later.
   
• I almost never hit her. I remember that there were a couple of times that were line calls, and they were long enough ago that I don't actually remember the details of what happened. Therefore if I were asked in a court of law today whether I remember ever hitting her, I could honestly answer No under oath; if I were asked simply whether I ever hit her -- leaving out the qualifier about what I remember -- I couldn't honestly be certain.

Was this spousal abuse? Taken by themselves, these behaviors sound pretty bad. At best they mean treating a grown woman like a child, which is demeaning even if we talk about isolated cases. (And in truth I never treated either of our children this poorly.) To expect a grown woman, an educated professional with a master's degree from a great university, to put up with this treatment on a regular basis -- as a pattern, as a way of life -- sounds worse than demeaning. It sounds abusive. And this is how we lived, for years.

When I finally got a chance to defend myself (in this imagined conversation), my defense was that Wife was crazy.

This provoked another outburst from the imagined Marie. Of course! It was all the woman's fault! Isn't that what every abusive husband says? "My wife was crazy." Isn't that just like the lecherous husband in the 1950's telling his secretary "My wife doesn't understand me" just before he fucks her on the long table in the board room, after hours? Of course your wife was crazy! You can explain and excuse anything like that!

No. Really, she was crazy. And it was scary. If you can't believe me, that means you've never lived with somebody so crazy -- which is a good thing, I guess, except it means you have no bloody clue what I'm talking about.

• Take the bills, for example. I didn't want to have to pay them all. It was a pain in the ass, and for the first couple years of our marriage she paid them all. I was content to let her take charge of this. That lasted until one day we started bouncing checks, because when she paid the phone bill (we owed some $35 that month) she wrote a check for over $800. I accused the bank of making a mistake, and they produced the physical check itself, as proof. Wife could not account for what had happened. Where did that three-digit number starting with an "8" come from? It wasn't our account number, it wasn't a transposition of any of the digits in the real bill, it wasn't the amount we owed on any other bill she paid that day. The number just appeared out of the blue. That was the last time I let her pay our bills. I figured if this kind of thing could happen with no warning and no explanation, the only way to protect against it was for me to pay all the bills. If we had not been married -- if we had had separate checking accounts and separate credit ratings -- I would have let her continue to do as she pleased. But not with my money and my credit.
• I went over every expense because she bought things that made no sense.
• One night after I had gone to bed she stayed up late on e-Bay and bid on $700 worth of blue jeans because the boys needed some new jeans. Why so many? She figured she'd be outbid on some of them. And she was, so the final bill was only a little over $400. That's a lot of used blue jeans. They boys outgrew them before they could outwear so many.
• When we sold the house, we discovered boxes and boxes of things she had bought that we had to put straight into the trash, or give to charity. We had never opened them or used them ... but we owned them, because she got an idea one day and decided we "just had to have" something we never had any use for.
• There are a lot more stories in this vein -- a lot more! -- but I'm not going to tell them because it will just make me angry, even these many years later.
• I took away her wallet because ... well, I've already told you that story.
• I asked her where she went and what she did because she slept around so much and then lied about it. The sleeping around bugged me. The lying made me crazy. I even asked her, "If you are sleeping around just say so -- it's better than lying." But she wouldn't. I spent the first year of this blog complaining about this topic, so maybe I don't have to go into a lot more detail now.
• I read her e-mails and her text messages because I was genuinely afraid of what she might do online.
• When she got involved with Boyfriend 5 -- who, you will recall, never actually existed -- early on she texted him her social security number and her birthdate and her mother's maiden name, all to prove that she "trusted" him because he was "afraid" that she didn't.
• At another point she was all set to respond to an e-mail from somebody in Nigeria asking for her help because his little girl had cancer. "What?" I exploded. "Haven't you heard that this is the most common Internet scam in the world these days?" She looked at me in dead earnest and said, "But Hosea, what if there really is a little girl in Nigeria dying of cancer? Isn't it my job to help her any way I can?" I finally dissuaded her, but it wasn't easy.
• Then there was the time she was going to steal the children and fly internationally to go meet Boyfriend 5 and live there forever with him. I hid the children's passports so she couldn't take them; but I am convinced that -- had I not known to do so -- she would have gone. So there would have been no Boyfriend 5 abroad to meet her, and she would have taken the children to a foreign country with no money and no provisions made in advance (all because she expected a reception she couldn't get). If they ever got back alive I could have had her arrested and thrown in jail (I think), but it would have been a hell of a risk to run. Fortunately she couldn't take the first step, because she couldn't even get tickets without their passports. Good thing I read her e-mail that night!
• And as for hitting her ... all I can say is, you try living with her day and night for thirty years, and tell me if you never hit her! I'll bet my track record is better than yours, when all is said and done.

After all this my summary was that my actions didn't constitute classic abuse because I didn't want to exercise power over her but did it only for self-defense: now that we live in different places and have different bank accounts, I don't care any more what she does. On the other hand, I added, the evidence also shows that if I feel threatened I am capable of doing almost anything to defend myself.

In my fantasized conversation, Marie ended up unsure: unsure whether I abused Wife, and unsure whether she wanted to be my friend. After all, why would she be friends with a confessed wife-abuser? Again, since it was my fantasy you'd think I could have made it all work out so that she came round to my way of thinking at the end. But "unsure" was absolutely the best outcome I could get.

Maybe I just need to learn how to fantasize better. This particular fantasy was really depressing.