Soul Code – Episode 2: Growing Around the Absence

Following on from Soul Code – Episode 1: The Silent Menace

Opening Scene – The Familiar Isn’t Always Safe

My husband was gorgeous and absolutely my “type”: hairy, stocky, and older than me by ten years.

He was also in AA.

I thought to myself “this man will never cause me to re-enact my parents’ marriage: he’s as unlike my dad as I can get”.

And, for a couple of years things were different from my parents’ marriage. Until he hit a stumbling block that AA could not solve. Then the wheels came off and things slowly got worse and worse.

To start with, I just expected him to get back on the wagon, after all it was a wobble. But it wasn’t a wobble and things deteriorated slowly over many years.

There’s a story about frogs in boiling water. The story goes that if you put a frog in hot water, it will straight away jump out. But if you put a frog in cold water and slowly heat the water, the frog adjusts to the changing temperature. This actually isn’t true of frogs: it seems that they are actually more intelligent than some humans (including me) (and please don’t try this at home kids).

Had I gone straight into an alcoholic relationship, I would certainly have got straight out of it – but it didn’t start that way and every tiny increment it was “reasonable” for me to adapt to. One night drinking doesn’t hurt. One abusive episode is only one. One night becomes two nights, then three, then a week. I adapted.

I had seen it done before – in my parents’ marriage.

This was a known pattern and I “knew” how to react to it. When my appeals to reason were rebutted, I moved to shame and the silent treatment.

The absence of that safe demonstration of love that I’d grown up with receded into the distance – and I didn’t notice as I moved from one crisis to the next.

In the end, I didn’t choose silence – I simply moved into a silence shaped exactly like the one I grew up in.

The Courtship: Love in Half-Light

At the beginning, he was warm but not effusive. He hadn’t grown up with any safe or healthy demonstrations of love.

He was so vulnerable as a result. He shared things with me about his past – even then I knew that this was a deep and precious kind of trust. I cried at some of the things he told me that he’d been through – and he said “when you cry I feel that I have to stop talking because I am upsetting you and it becomes about you.”

So I stopped crying.

A major way that I could express understanding of another’s grief was walled up. I wasn’t making it about me – I was showing him that I felt something deep about what he was sharing with me.

This was in the early stages of our relationship.

I had assumed that proper love was full of safe embraces and warm words, yet the tentative start of our time together turned emotionally dry.

The Vanishing Language of Love

As time went on, I moved from loving, loved, and in-love partner, to put-upon, beleaguered, and occasionally battered partner.

He went from loving, loved, and in-love partner, to manipulated and berated partner.

The words “I love you” I said less often maybe than at first. He hadn’t said them much at all – and went to never saying them.

I continued to be interested in older guys – which meant him!

He continued to be interested in younger guys – which didn’t mean me!

I was always worried about how he felt about himself because I was told that low self-esteem contributed to his depression, so I gave him many positive comments about how he looked.

Until he started shaving his chest. I love hairy dudes! For me it means masculine and manly. I am afraid I was very childish about it. I did get over it in the end: I loved him more than any body hair he might or might not have.

He gave me none that I can remember.

Neither of us were good at articulating our emotional states. I couldn’t healthily express my hurt and anger. He couldn’t express his warmer emotions.

But this was normal and what I expected from men because of how I grew up.

“You can grow used to anything if you start young enough — even hunger.”

Carrying the Emotional Load for Two

Friends were important to me not just for their own sake and companionship, but for the validation and affection that I was missing from my husband.

Within the marriage, I was predominantly the one initiating affection. My natural lack of assertiveness seemed to enable me to soothe over conflicts. What it actually did was allow me to suppress them – and a conflict suppressed isn’t avoided, it is deferred.

I was incapable of fully reading the room – I seem to have a colour-blindness for certain emotions that makes a difficult situation even harder. What I did try to do was interpret and anticipate his needs.

Many of my own needs (such as the need for affection) were tucked away in little mental corners.

I evolved to read micro-cues, attempting to predict moods, to head-off issues that might escalate into a downturn for him. I adapted – not always without complaint, but my complaints were treated as unreasonable.

I tried to become easy and low maintenance by minimising my own emotional needs.

Desire that Became a Whisper

The more I think about it, the more that the not feeling desired became louder in my heart. I knew that I wasn’t my husband’s type any more. That hurt.

He was considerate in the gifts he would give me, some of which addressed my sexual fantasies and caused him some discomfort to think about them. These were acts of love, but not of desire and not of attraction.

So I felt lonely because my body felt unseen and unwanted, and it ate at my self-confidence … and possibly fed my dysphoria.

I buried these feelings – all of them for as long as I could.

But whereas in my childhood I didn’t know what I was missing, in my adulthood I knew exactly what I was missing. And it stung.

When Shifts Become the Story

And slowly, so slowly that none could mark its movement, like continental drift, the emotional gulf between us widened over time. Both of us became casualties of unexpressed and unrealised needs.

We both tried to adapt to the slow changes in our shared reality over a quarter of a century … until we no longer had a shared reality.

If I did try to share parts of myself, it was met with discomfort or withdrawal, which felt like rejection.

And the massive hidden strata to my psyche – my gender, sexual, and identity – complicated the divide.

And yet I still tried to adapt and cope.

The Moment I Realised It Wasn’t Just Me

My kinks and gender identity exploded onto the scene and blew my poor husband’s mind. He never expected anything so fundamental to change.

I went into therapy to try to understand who I was – and find the means to communicate it to others.

There I realised that I was somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and that a neurodivergent mind could explain so much of my world. This was a “eureka!” moment.

Yet, the more I dug into the “who am I question?”, the more I loved discovering myself!

I used to think the fault was in my hunger. Now I know it was in the diet.

The Quiet Ending Before the Ending

My emotional contraction had stopped before I’d come out as non-binary with a eunuch gender identity. There were a few months of tension before the expansion began: I could not have shrunk any more, suppressing and masking my needs

And the need to be seen and live an authentic life became just as pressing as the need to realise my gender identity – and my sexuality before that.

I began to feel excited for life … and my husband started to grieve that he could come with me on my journey.

For most of my life I had not experienced secure attachment – I had no idea what that was nor how it would feel. But then I started meeting people who were generous with their love – and I felt a secure type of attachment from them.

And I began to experience people who restored me rather than exhausted me.

And I started to remember what safety felt like…