Nearly four years ago, at our home in Zadar, Croatia, during what had been no more than ordinary bickering, my husband yelled unimaginable words: “You’ve been abusing me for 20 years!”
The fight had started the previous night. He had snapped at our daughters for being their usual rambunctious selves as they were getting ready for bed. I had been working at my laptop, and his nervous tone tore through my focus, so I lashed right back at him, irked for having to concentrate again at that late hour.
We lay in bed afterward with our backs to each other, one of only a handful of times we had done that in our 20 years together. I was annoyed but not worried. It was a stupid fight; he’d been under some stress. Tomorrow, he would apologize, and we would move on as we always did.
He had been irritable for days because of an Enneagram personality test I’d sent him a link for. When he came out of our room with his results, his face was ablaze, furious, which was odd: My husband is the calmest, most easygoing person I know.
“I’m a Nine,” he said with disdain. “The Peacemaker.”
“That’s great,” I said, a bit envious. I was a Four, the Individualist, what seemed to me to be a frivolous and self-serving type compared to the altruism and kindness of a Peacemaker.
“I’m an official people-pleaser,” he said. “My personality is a doormat.”
That whole day he brooded over his results, and I found it hilarious. Who in their right mind gets upset about a pop-psychology personality test?
“That’s what I love the most about you,” I said. “That you are understanding, collaborative, considerate.”
But he shook his head as if I didn’t understand it, didn’t understand him. And in the following days, he grew increasingly irritable, bursting with annoyance when he had to take out the trash, or when the children didn’t line up like soldiers the moment he barked orders to “Brush teeth!” or “Go to bed!”
It culminated on the day of the fight, when he spewed those words at me, that I’d been abusing him.
When he said that, I laughed — the accusation was ludicrous. We were best friends, and throughout our relationship, we had been helping each other work through our respective childhood wounds and both strove to be the safe person for the other. Being accused of the very thing we had fought to overcome struck me like a bad joke.
But after I laughed off his accusation, he persisted, and after I pushed back, he insisted. What seemed like years of pent-up frustration gushed out of him.
“You’re so controlling,” he yelled. “I can never go anywhere without you guilt tripping me. You always give me the evil eye when I say I’m going for a run, or kite surfing. I can’t do anything for myself without you resenting it. Everything I do has to be in service of you or the kids.”
Some of that might have been true earlier in our relationship. But it had been years since I had worked through my insecurities. Now, I actually liked when he went kite surfing or running, because he was happier, more relaxed afterward. And I had no idea he begrudged all he was doing for our family. We were splitting the chores fairly, I thought. I cooked; he drove the children to activities. He took out the trash; I did the laundry. But now he was saying he felt like I was inflicting those chores on him, stripping him of his freedom.
An old fear reared its ugly head: What if this was how my husband had always felt about me and our marriage? What if all this time he had felt subdued and oppressed and was only now finding a way to voice it?
Dazed speechless by shock and fear, I took our car keys and left.
For the longest time, I paced the sea promenade in the westernmost part of our town, exasperated. From where I stood, I could see the boardwalk on the other side of the cove. Twenty years ago, while we were falling in love, we sat on that boardwalk as I told him about a fight I’d had with my parents. He listened but didn’t offer solace or commiseration, which I thought strange. And when I asked him what his parents were like, he said, “I’m lucky, my parents are great.”
Those words jarred. Not just because we were 18 and I had never met a teenager who liked their parents. But because there was something borderline insensitive about the eagerness with which he’d said it, given my own distress.
It took years for me to understand that he hadn’t been rude or insensitive. He had only been working hard to convince himself of his own words.
The truth about his parents slowly revealed itself to us over the first decade of our life together, often through their own words. His mother told me she hadn’t planned to have him. When she got pregnant, his older brother was 4 and his father was stationed away. She was struggling, so she made plans to abort.
His father intervened, but I sensed that a reserve remained — perhaps a part of her never fully accepted him?
Over the years, my husband told me stories from his childhood that he thought were normal but struck me as neglectful or that made him feel like a burden, like his mother not visiting him in the hospital when he was a toddler or acting as though his lunch money for school was a big expense.
My husband cut ties with his parents some years ago, but only after I grew upset at the way they treated me. I guess he hadn’t deemed himself worth fighting for.
He may have cut ties, but the feeling of being a burden remained. He was still censoring himself, making himself invisible by not asking for anything. It wasn’t that I was controlling. It was that he was preemptively trimming his own wings before even asking for what he wanted or needed — and then resenting me for it.
I came back home to find my husband sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. He looked at me, all the fight already drained from him. “I’m sorry I took it all out on you,” he said. “You weren’t abusing me. I can’t believe I said that. That damn Enneagram. It really got to my head.”
He had been doing some reckoning of his own while I was away, and he realized why the Enneagram had triggered him so much: It hadn’t shown him the person he was but the person his childhood experiences had conditioned him to be. And there was a deep chasm between those two versions. After the Enneagram held that mirror up to him, he couldn’t reconcile himself to it, but he also didn’t know what to do about it. It overwhelmed him completely.
“I thought that cutting ties was enough,” he said. “But there’s still work. So much work.”
“I know,” I said, and held him.
The next time the wind blew a constant 20 knots — the kind that’s perfect for kite surfing — my husband grew antsy as usual, wired like a tightly coiled spring. Only now I understood the friction consuming him, for wanting something, and trying to talk himself out of it at the same time. “The wind is great,” he said. “But it might rain today, and the kids would need a ride to school. If I take the car — ”
“We’ll make do,” I said. “You should go — if you want to go.”
I gave him a meaningful look, and he contemplated it for a moment, along with my emphasis on the word want.
“I want to go,” he said finally, the words coming out loaded, almost cathartic.
“Then go,” I said.
It was an awkward first-time choreography, a dance we would have to learn to perfect over time. But with practice, it became easier for him to put his foot in the right place, and for me to move where I was supposed to, out of his way.
I recently asked him to take the Enneagram test again. He was reluctant, worried he would be triggered the same way. But I insisted. It’s so easy to miss even the most monumental transformations when they’re made in baby steps, and something told me he wouldn’t be disappointed with his results this time around.
Later, he emerged with the widest smile and said, “I’m a Seven.”
I laughed. “It figures.” A Seven. The Enthusiast. Optimistic, fun-loving and extroverted.
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