My story starts quite a long time ago when I was very young, when my ever increasing hormones were rife and I still hadn’t gotten my ideas on life quite clear and even less did I have any idea of who was a good person and who was not, being so easily deceived by outward appearances.

I was 18 and wasn’t very happy with my home life, or rather I wasn’t very happy with my mother, and I suppose that what happened is that I jumped from the pan into the fire as the saying goes.

I had met my husband to be during a summer holiday and had decided that I was in love with him and the more that my parents tried to stop the relationship the more I wanted to continue with it. It was the first time that I felt that I had someone just for me and he seemed to be so confident and masculine even standing up to my parents for me – looking back know I realize how rude he was to them and how little respect he had for anyone but for himself although I suppose he must have loved me or else he wouldn’t have bothered fighting for me in the way that he did. I have to admit also that I was at fault as well because instead of feeling shocked by his attitude it encouraged me to feel that I was going to be protected by him and so even if I left home I would not be alone.

After months of fighting with my parents I eventually left home to go and live with him and soon after we arranged our wedding to which my mother didn’t even want to attend. My father, who I have always loved very much, did come as although he knew I was making a mistake he didn’t want to lose me and if he had gone against me that was probably what would have happened.

We had a small wedding and the next day we set off on honeymoon to Greece and I was so happy little knowing that only after the second night I was to spend the whole of it crying and wishing that I hadn’t got myself into this whole mess.

We were sitting in the lobby of the hotel and after lighting up a cigarette I saw that there was no ash tray on our table and so got up to go and get one from the next door table. Well his whole face changed into one of a maniac and I got so frightened when I saw it. He told me that how dare I get up without asking his permission, that I was his wife now and when I wanted to do something I had to ask him first, that I had showed him up in public and what were people going to think. I couldn’t believe it. As I said before I had jumped from the pan into the fire!!! I cried all that night and he didn’t even come near me to try and make it up and we were supposed to be on our honeymoon. I think that that is the day that I should have left him but I couldn’t admit to my parents that they were right and that I had made a mistake, I was just too proud and at the same time I wanted to be loved and at that time I still loved him.

The next day he made out that it was nothing serious and for me not to be so silly as to make a big thing out of it. We carried on for 8 days more without another incident until we got back to our flat in London where we both worked. He was a dentist and I was a secretary and the first thing that he decided was that as I was, according to him, useless at handling money, he would control my salary and out of it left me only 9 pounds sterling each week for me to buy my own personal things. I didn’t like the idea at all but he was so strong and determined in everything he did and said that I wasn’t really left with much choice, and as he repeated to me time and again that I was his wife I had to do what he said. When I used to try and have my say or disagree with any of his decisions it was impossible as he would always win and most often than not I would end up having a nose bleed as my blood pressure must have risen dramatically with the frustration that I had of not being able to get myself heard or understood.

I remember one incident that looking back now was just incredible and such a description of how he was. We had gone to bed and it was time to turn off the light switch which was by the door and I told him that he was nearer to it than I was but he insisted that I do it. At first I thought he was playing a game and that this was all a joke but it wasn’t at all. He was adamant that I should turn it off and if I didn’t it would stay on all night as he certainly was not going to do it. Well in the end I had to do it and that night I stayed huddled up in my side of the bed and wishing again that I hadn’t married him.

He didn’t like any of my friends to come and visit me in our flat and in all the twenty five years of our marriage he never once took me on holiday so I was virtually isolated from the outside world and when I finally did leave him at the age of 47 I was still a very naïve, albeit older, woman. I am sure you are now thinking how come she lasted so long with him but I will explain all that a bit later as it all comes in stages.

He had terrible moods and whenever he had them he would take it out on me. During the first years of our marriage I could never hit back because as I said before I still loved him and so I didn’t want to say nasty things back to him because in my mind if you loved someone how could you think of horrible things to say to the one you loved, although he surely could. I would just wait until he calmed down but I also never knew when that would happen. After a while I noticed that I was living in a state of nerves because for one I never knew when he would flare up for something and so I was always on edge waiting for it to happen and then when we made up I was never sure for how long it would last before the next flare up. I suffered from constant nose bleeds and then went on to develop a rash on my skin, a gasping for breath problem and finally fainting spells. He sent me to the doctor when I started having the fainting spells and it was discovered that the muscles around my neck were so tense that they were blocking my circulation and so hence the fainting.

I then began to take valium to see whether it would help with all my nervous problems, and it was easy for me to get hold of the pills with my husband being a dentist as he always had a supply for his patients and that seemed to help me get by a bit but in the end I realized that I was turning into a zombie and was leading my life as if in a trance which was good for avoiding my husband but I didn’t think it was good for me. So I then had to try and wean myself off by cutting the dose down by 10 mg to 5 mg and then cutting the pills in half and finally quarter and I was lucky that I was able to do it as I have seen how so many women don’t succeed and end up in a terrible state. I think that all along I am proud to say that deep down I knew that I was a worthwhile person, even though he tried hard to stop me from being one, and I had an instinct for survival which made me want to live and I was sure that there had to be a better life.

After about seven years my father rang me, as he often did, and the coincidence was that it was only an hour or two after another one other incident as I call them. I had made him his lunch and when I put the dish on the table, a lasagna, it wasn’t as hot as it should have been, and he got into such a rage that he went and through the whole lot into the dustbin saying that I was even useless at cooking. Although I tried to speak to my father as if everything was okay he heard my voice and knew that things were not right and eventually I blurted out crying that I didn’t think that I could take much more. My father said that I was going to go with them for a holiday, we were going to go for a cruise down the Rhine and he was going to send me the tickets. I told my husband and he suddenly changed his mood completely. He said he was going to miss me but that this would be very good for me and that when I came back I would see everything in a different light. He all of a sudden seemed so caring and so sensible I just couldn’t believe it.

Well I went on the cruise with my parents and they told me that I had to stick up for myself. I was a person in my own right and I should not allow him to abuse of me or my thoughts or my wishes. It was a good holiday and I felt free and very happy and even started to miss my husband – can you imagine! Well that was only until I arrived back at the airport to see him standing there waiting for me. There he was with his balding head, baggy Bermuda shorts, brown sandals and a baseball cap on his head and a stupid grin on his face. I will never forget my reaction in my mind when I saw him. I said to myself ‘Oh no, not him again!’ I no longer felt attracted to him and I only felt that I was returning to a duty, a duty of a wife as I had always believed that marriage had to last forever. That was a sure sign at last that my love for him had started to diminish.

I gave him a kiss on the cheek that was almost painful for me to do and then he proceeded to tell me that he had booked us into a luxury hotel for the week-end. Wow, the first time that I was going to have some sort of a holiday with him but I was so tense with him that I felt as if I was a prostitute. I don’t really know how a prostitute must feel but I can only imagine that to go to bed with someone that you don’t like or love must be a bit of a case of close your eyes and think of England!

We were by that time living in Gibraltar as he had accepted a post there of Consultant Dental Surgeon and he promised me then that he was going to build us a house in Spain which he knew I preferred so that we could be happy again. I tried to get into the part but I was no longer all there, by that time my mind and my thoughts would wander to other men that I would see and I would even end up dreaming about them at night. I was at last beginning to be unfaithful to him but only because I no longer loved him and I was looking for a real love from someone else. Someone that would really love me, appreciate me, feel proud of me and respect me. Can you imagine that I even felt guilty about these dreams and hoped that he couldn’t read into my thoughts.

Well we eventually ended up in our house in Spain which was really only a gilded cage and I ended up giving English lessons to an Argentinean polo player called Gonzalo. He was about 10 years younger than me but he was so nice, so charming, so handsome and I think after quite a few lessons in the dining room of our house we were starting to fall in love with each other. Every time his hand accidentally touched mine I felt a shiver right up me and when he looked at my eyes the same thing happened. I thought this can’t go on and so told him that I was sorry but that I didn’t have any time left to be able to carry on with the lessons. He seemed to be heart broken and pleaded with me not to finish but I was adamant and it all came to an end. I felt so guilty that I was about to have a love affair in the dining room of our house with my husband in the other room. Thinking back I wish that I hadn’t been so good and that I had carried on with him and had had the love affair that I was looking for, but alas that was how I was then – very loyal and very honest.

I saw him quite often on the polo fields and we both knew what we felt for each other but I wasn’t going to let it happen and as they say it takes two to tango and so nothing ever did happen. I now know that he is married and happy with a wife and children and I am very happy for him. He was a lovely sensitive man that adored and respected women.

After a few more years of living in Spain my husband told me that he hated his job and he would give anything to be able to leave it. He didn’t like working and just wanted to bum around at home. I tried to think of other jobs that he could do but he really wasn’t interested in any new ideas, he just wanted to quit work. Well soon after he started to have a few funny sensations in his body and decided to go for a check up where upon they suspected that he had multiple sclerosis. He then decided that he wanted to raise his insurance policy pretending that he knew nothing about this diagnosis but I insisted that he would be committing a fraud and that if anyone ever found out not only would he not have a raise in his income but that he risked having no income at all. It was probably one of the few times that he ever listened to me and he can thank me today because I am sure that if he had done things his way today he would be without work and without any income from the insurance as the insurance people are not stupid.

I then realized that I was stuck to him because how could I leave a sick man. He would need someone to look after him and he couldn’t be left alone. So I emerged myself into the part of a loving wife and nurse. I tried to cheer him up, tried to make him see the bright side of life and tried to make him laugh. None of it really worked as all he did was lash back at me. I had thought that maybe this might bring us close together as maybe he might have started to depend on me more but it didn’t really change anything. Yes he depended on me in that I had to do everything but yet anything and everything that I did was always all wrong. One day there was a problem with one of the cars and so I took it to the garage where supposedly they fixed it but when I came back he threw a fit of rage saying that it hadn’t been done right and how I was so stupid that I hadn’t realized.

He began to insist that his lunch and supper had to be served exactly on the minute of the hour that he wanted them because if not his stomach, because of his illness, would feel the consequences very badly and so of course there were many times when I would get an earful from him because meals cannot be calculated so methodically.

My only joy during all these years was my beloved horse that was with me during 18 years of my married life and he was my only salvation. When I was with him everything else in my life didn’t seem to matter. This animal gave me unconditional love and we had a fantastic relationship which amazed even the grooms at the stables. He had been a very wild polo pony from Argentina and he didn’t let anyone near him and was always trouble but with me he calmed down and we became the best of friends and for 18 years no one but me rode him. Only once my ex sister in law (sister to my husband) got on him as she was feeling very depressed and I thought that it might help her spiritually if she got up onto a horse as horses have a very calming effect but I had to tell her to get off quick because as I knew my horse so well I could see his rump rounding up and I knew that he was getting ready to throw her off.

Well I always used to ride him in the mornings and one day I spent a little more time than usual at the stables as an ex bull fighter had come to do a display in the riding arena of how to break in a horse. We were all there, the grooms, the owner of the stables and the friends that I had there when all of a sudden my husband arrived in a fowl mood and telling me in front of everyone there that I had to go home and make him his lunch earlier than usual as he was feeling hungry!!! Everyone was aghast including me but I was more than aghast wishing that the ground would open up beneath me and swallow me up. It was all such a humiliation and so degrading. When he did things like this I no longer felt like a person I just felt like a slave.

We carried on like this for quite a few years, always at home, never going out because he said that he was ill and it was too strenuous for him to go out but yet if there was ever an event concerning his family he seemed to find the strength for that. I ended up going to lots of social events on my own always giving the excuse that my husband was not feeling well and feeling embarrassed knowing that they all had seem him in a party of his family the week before dancing the night away. It was all very difficult and I was forever making excuses for him which I hated doing as I hate lying.

He then went into another phase of calling me old. I was now to him wrinkled, fat and ugly. He also said I was a useless person and what was I going to do if I ever left him. No one would look at me now. I was no longer attractive and what did I know how to do in life. How would I survive without him, I had no money of my own and so how would I mange on my own. I began to feel really trapped and even started to believe what he was saying to me. I would look at myself in the mirror and see the person that he was describing. I was only 47 but I felt old and ugly just as he said.

One day I was driving along the motorway and I remember saying to myself ‘God if you think it is my time just make me have an accident and take me away from this earth’. I was really so unhappy and I think that that is why when I looked at myself in the mirror that I saw such an old woman looking back at me.

We got to the point that he had began not only to humiliate me but also to push me about and one day when he told me that we were going to go back to live in Gibraltar which he knew that I hated. I told him that I wouldn’t be able to bear it to which he replied that he had the money and he would decide where we lived and I didn’t have any say in the matter. I told him that I wouldn’t go to which he pushed me against the wall bruising my arm. He called me a parasite and said that I was only there for his money and that I was as retarded as my really retarded younger sister.

From then on our rows became nastier and nastier and this time I also became nastier. One day I told him that I was going to leave him and he proceeded to throw himself down on the ground saying that he was ill and that if I left him what would everyone say about me. That I was a cruel woman who had left a sick man. I remember that I no longer cared about him at all and as he lay down on the ground I told him that for all I cared he could stay there on the floor for the rest of his lift because to me he was no longer anyone.

Very shortly after my father got ill with lung cancer and after struggling for four years he eventually died with me at his side. I clung onto his hand throughout his last hours wishing him to go because when you love someone so much you are no longer selfish and prefer to be without them than to see them suffer and at last at 4 o’clock in the morning he was at last taken from me. I think it was the moment that I had been dreading in the whole of my life. The only person that had loved me unconditionally had at last left me and I was completely on my own because the man that I had thought that would give me unconditional love had turned out to be a complete and utter mistake.

I had always thought that when my father died I wouldn’t be able to continue with my life but as is always the case, life has to go on and we all have to go on whether we have lost loved ones or not. The one thing I know is that when my father died I realized that if I could cope with his death I could cope with anything. Well maybe cope is not the right word but assimilate is a better word. I think that from up above he also gave me a lot of strength. I am not at all religious but I am spiritual and I felt that from the day he died I was receiving from him an extra strength that I never had had before.

And so shortly after he died my husband was shouting at me yet again because I had stained the dining room table with the turpentine that I had been using while working on an oil painting and I remember that I just sat there letting the abusive words that he was uttering enter through one ear and out through the other but not letting them bother me any more. I told him I was sorry but he said that that was not enough and carried on shouting at me. I suddenly got up from the table and went to my bedroom, as we were already sleeping in different rooms, and I cried the whole night long knowing that at last this was the end. If I was so useless and I would have to be out on the streets without anything then so be it, anywhere would be much better than where I was now.

The next morning he came into my room and told me not to be so stupid and forget everything (like he always did), but this time I told him that I was not going to forget anything and that this was it. He didn’t take me seriously and left the room laughing.

The next night I began packing what few belongings I had into plastic bags from the super markets because as we had never gone on any holidays I didn’t have any suitcases and so I hid them all underneath my bed. The plan, according to what a lawyer had told me, was that I was going to leave a note saying that I was leaving due to his cruel behavior to me and I needed a few days on my own to think things over. That night my right leg suddenly began getting a cramp and I started walking round the bedroom to try and ease the cramp to go away but suddenly the left leg went into cramp as well and I thought ‘damn it, my legs aren’t going to allow me to escape from this house!’ but although I was in pain at 6 o’clock in the morning I gathered up my plastic bags and left the house once and for all and that was it, I was at last free.

I admit that I was frightened. I still remember him telling me that I was a useless woman but deep down inside I was lucky to still know that no matter what he told me I was stronger than he thought I was. I knew that I had a big struggle up ahead of me but I was determined that I was going to overcome any obstacle and I am glad to say that I did it and I did it very well.

A friend of mine let me stay in her flat for a few months while I got myself together. I immediately began a course to learn computers because the last time I had worked in London they were still using golf ball typewriters. I passed the exams and went on to get a job as a secretary in an estate agents office. From them I was promoted to a sales girl and I at last progressed to opening an estate agents office of my own where I sold quite a few houses and apartments. Not bad for a useless, ugly, wrinkled old woman would you say!!!!!!!

Needless to say, having been married to such an arrogant and dominating man my divorce case lasted a whole four years as whatever the judges said my ex husband would never conform to their judgments and would always appeal, and so in the end they had to bring out to Gibraltar 3 very old and wise judges from England to finalize the case. My husband pleaded, while he came to the court with his leg bandaged up and a walking stick (he had been seen the night before dancing away in a discothèque!) that he was a sick man and needed all his money for himself to care for his illness. The judges decided that while they were very sorry for him that his ex wife had spent 25 years of her life looking after him without much reward and that there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t get ill one day herself and so she needed at least half the value of the matrimonial home, that she had tended to all these years, to be able to get on with her life. And that was what they awarded to me plus all the costs of the 4 year long court case being on the onus of my ex husband as they claimed that he had been complicated throughout the whole time and admitted that I must have had a tough time being married to someone with such a character.

I have survived it all and all my friends say that I am not bitter because I have decided to take it all as one of my many experiences in life. If I would have let my ex husband leave me as a bitter woman he would have won in his dominance over me, but instead I have just taken it all as another lesson in life. I know now very well and very clearly that in reality the strong one in our marriage was me and he was frightened of that and so that was why he was always trying to put me down in a way of keeping me under control.

I am like a cork. You can harm me and hurt me but because I like and love life I will always spring up again to enjoy what I know is my right. This is my life and I want to enjoy it my way and in the way I think is fit. I know that I will have to pass through bad moments, through which I have already passed, and now has come my time to enjoy everything - which I am doing to the utmost.

I am also pleased to tell you all that although this horrible man tried to break my spirit and control me he never really did. After it all I have sprung back like a cork with all the energy that I always had before and I am happier than I have ever been before. And luckily It hasn’t left much of a mark in me although it has left an experience but it is a good experience in that I will always be able to help other women who go through my same position.

Three years after I left I met and fell in love with a more than wonderful man. He is tender, he makes me laugh, he respects me, he thinks I am beautiful with my wrinkles and I adore him. I have now been with him six years and he has never once shouted at me, he only gives me tenderness and if I had to go through 25 years of agony to come to this it was all worth it!

Never give up on love it is always there but the luck is just to find it!

Good luck to all you women and never give up.

For more articles visit http://www.justforwomensite.com