50. STORMY SEAS
We got married when I was 17 years old and he was 21. We were so young! He was shipping off to sea with the Navy, and I was escaping a bad home life.
When he came back after his deployment, he wasn’t the same person anymore. After about six months, he gained weight on purpose to fail his physicals so he’d get kicked out of the Navy.
Fast forward a year, I’m working full time, and he is sitting at home, watching TV and drinking during the day, and telling me that he “was applying to jobs.” I was applying to universities when my laptop stopped working.
I asked to use his laptop to finish an application, and while I was typing away a message popped up through his Facebook account. When I saw what it contained, my blood ran cold.
It was a provocative picture of my husband’s ex, from her. I was shocked and opened it to find that they’d been dating for a long time.
They started communicating again while he was at sea in the Navy. He would talk to her and never to me, saying that he never got the time to email.
I confronted him, and he made a bunch of pitiful excuses.
I had my friends come to the house that day and kick him out while I went to work. He then stalked me for the next few years, and made posts about how I was a coward, he sent emails and called from blocked numbers to tell me that “a restraining order is just a piece of paper” or that “our vows before God made me his property.”
I ended up talking to our friends, spreading conflicting information about where I was going, and moved out of state. I deleted all my personal social media accounts and lived in fear for years, watching him continually make memes about how he loved his wife and would do anything for her.
It took eight years for me to finally get the divorce from him.