My Husband Was a Self-centered Prick. I’m Glad.

“You self-centered prick!”

My voice was low and soft as I said the words, masking the rage and resignation coiled in my gut. It was session number three of couples therapy and we hadn’t yet progressed to the heart wrenching, soul crushing work that can change relationships. Our earlier meetings had simply been discovery. The ugly download of drunkenness and betrayal.

I shouldn’t have been in the session. Knew any emotionally stable woman would have been greedily stuffing hundred-dollar bills into a divorce attorney’s pockets like he was a stripper in a G-string at a drunken bachelorette party the minute she learned that nothing in her marriage had been real.

But not me.

In my numb shock and horror over what I had learned of his secret sex life as he abandoned alcohol, I’d agreed to my husband’s pleading request that we seek counseling. Agreed to give him the chance to try to right his wrongs now that booze no longer controlled his brain. Agreed that our love was still present and worth fighting for.

But as I sat in that sterile room pulsing with pain, I heard not words of promise or guilt or regret but a reminder that I’d been considered irrelevant as he sought to fill his emotional void.

Our therapist opened the session with the standard, “Has anything come up this week?” and I jumped in, afraid I’d disappear into a wave of pain if I didn’t speak immediately. I turned to him and without waiver, asked why he’d ignored my repeated references to STD testing? My testing, not his. The therapist got there first. “I assumed you’d dealt with that already,” she said, not hiding her, “Are you efffing kidding me?” tone. I sat silent, ignoring her, my eyes drilling into my husband.

After a pause, he said, “Well, you’re still sleeping with me so there can’t be a problem.”

I suppose you could say I’d ambushed him. I’d come into the meeting knowing I would ask the question and anticipated a response that protected his ego over everything else. I’d known it would be the moment I could no longer shove the truth of our marriage into one of the pretty little boxes I’d created to protect my fragile emotions or the love I desperately wanted to preserve.

He could have saved our marriage that day. He could have shown the compassion or the tenderness that had been present in our marriage—the qualities that buried his corrosive secrets—instead the self-centered prick version of him spoke. His ego spoke.

I uttered my condemnation and abruptly left the session.

Self-centeredness isn’t the trait we long for while shaping our important relationships. In theory, it’s the opposite of everything we’ve all come to define as love and partnership. But once revealed, can it serve a purpose?

Women have been expected to step ourselves back, prioritizing the need of everyone else, always. Child-rearing and misogyny are forms of others saying, “I want it now! You aren’t as important.” We know the cultural expectations of women. At work our contributions are minimized when measured against a male peer. In romantic relationships, practicality informs us that our male partners higher-paying job gives him the last word. We scuttle our wants and needs, minimizing them because others needs are more important. That’s the slow drip of reality women live in.

“Others before self.” “They need it more.” “My time will come.” And it isn’t always wrong.

After all, women are the glue of life. And we’re damn good at that. Someone must assume the role of project manager in families, whether that’s herding children or home care or elderly parents. Someone must organize the doing of the doing of life and work and home. Someone must assume responsibility for emotional project management.

Add an alcoholic partner to the mix, and I didn’t stand a chance of coming out unscathed. My needs had to be secondary.

Yet, as I eventually processed his indifference to the health risk he’d imposed on me, anger dissipated. Because I realized it was the best thing my now-former husband could have said.

Because it forced me to change.

With those words he held a mirror boldly up to the part of him hidden under his illness and it bit me in the ass. It was personality number two coming out, the one that could be viewed as career success and which minimized as his addiction. Personality number two was arrogance.

My empathic, I-love-this-man-he-has-a-disease, rationalization and emotional processing—that is also part of femaleness—needed to see clearly. The blindfold had been yanked from my eyes, and I saw not only the harsh reality of him, but also the harsh reality of me.

I saw the me that had set herself aside for the sake of her husband’s addiction. The me who had put family first, hiding daddy’s illness so it wouldn’t touch the kids. The me racked with guilt over the idea of leaving him to the consequences of his illness. The me who now held pain infused into every cell of her body with no outlet.

The me who couldn’t see herself anymore until that ugly mirror was held up.

The underlying assumption we have as women, whether conscious or assumed, is that when we set our needs aside for others, our turn will come, someday. We’ll need help and those that have received our gifts will be first in line to offer their shoulders when we need it. This isn’t something we typically negotiate in our relationships. We assume it to be part of our definition of love. But is that true and real?

Or are we as women simply including the assumption of emotional reciprocation in the long list of justifications we invent to accept our role in society? Does “our time” ever come in a full and equal way?

I can’t answer that for anyone else, but my now-former husband showed me that he couldn’t put my needs first even when it was the one thing I needed from him. He showed me that it was up to me to put myself first because no one else could do it for me.

In hindsight, his self-centered-prickishness was his most important gift.