Page 55 of Mad About You

‘What thing?’

You know ‘what thing’, your stupid jokes about how my job is easy, how dare you make me feel that small?

Scott worked as a sales rep for a drinks company. I’d made some throwaway remark about how you never had to work hard to over-serve Brits in a holiday mood. It wasn’t about Scott, it was a general chat about how none of us stayed within our recommended units.

He launched into a rant about how dismissive Lorna wasto him, how I always colluded, how trivialised he felt among my friends.

I was horrified I’d made him feel that way and grovelled my apologies. I would never do it again. It would never happen again. I would never let THEM make him feel that way again.

Next came the jealousies over other men. Never mind the fact that Scott was a champion flirt himself. It was as if the face of every woman he met was a mirror; he was constantly needing to see his attractiveness reflected and reaffirmed. Yet if there was a man around, I was under immediate suspicion of inviting undue attentions.

One night I walked in on him scrolling my phone’s camera roll. He had demanded the passcode in a fight, a week earlier.

There’s something fucked up going on if you don’t want your partner to have your passcode. If there’s nothing you wouldn’t mind me seeing, why refuse to give it to me?

It was easier to comply. Incredibly, I found his controlling nature proof we were passionate, at first. On my phone, he found photos of me in a shop changing room: I couldn’t decide whether to buy a dress and wanted to ponder it later.

Who did you send this to?

I explained: no one.

Bullshit, that’s for a bloke, look at the stupid face you’re pulling with that much cleavage out. Even if you didn’t send it, you were planning to. How do you expect me to feel when you constantly fucking lie, Harriet? Do you know how shit that makes me feel? Do you even CARE?

He didn’t speak to me for twenty-four hours.

The next night, after several tins, he played the Lennonversion of ‘Jealous Guy’ and conceded selfies weren’t necessarily proof of infidelity. He said, sloppy-drunk and amorous:You know this overreaction is because I’m obsessed with you, don’t you?I threw my arms around his neck and promised him he had nothing to worry about. If he was insecure, I would fix him with my faithfulness.

When you’re so grateful to get a reprieve – from the only person with the power to grant it, the only one who can make you feel better – you never question your good fortune. I craved his approval like a drug, and I never knew when he’d throw me into sudden withdrawal.

Under this onslaught of hatchet job reviews of my behaviour, the vicious hyper-scrutiny, I started to change. Adapt to survive. I became withdrawn, tense, on edge. I lost a stone and a half. Out of nerves, and because he’d mentioned how much he liked skinny girls. He said:You, you’re well covered though, aren’t you? No, I don’t mean it in a bad way. You like your food a bit too much, but so do loads of us.

I stopped liking food so much.

He laughingly reported his friend said I looked:like a cartoon chipmunk. You would, but you don’t know if you should.

Mortified, I objected.

Haha, I obviously don’t mind, do I! You’re my girl! He clearly thinks you’re punching, but I don’t.

‘Punching?’ I said, aghast.

Oh God, Harriet,Scott said, pinching the bridge of his nose, in great exhaustion.Please don’t kick off. Not again. I thought you’d laugh it off, it’s nothing.

After that, Scott often relayed put-downs by third parties, insisting he’d leapt to my defence. I was always alarmed and upset they were, bafflingly, from people I thought I got on fine with. In retrospect, I can see such lying is an exercise in power. Making you mistrust everyone else but them, is power.

I turned down most social invitations, and when we were in company, I stayed quiet for fear of saying the wrong thing. Scott’s friends would joke with me and I would grit-smile, respond in monosyllables, worried that I would be accused of inappropriate reactions, or saying something that could be taken to embarrass Scott. None of this had to be ex-plicitly demanded by him, anymore – I had learned to treat the earth as if it was full of landmines, and pick my way gingerly through it.

Scott drew the circle I had to live inside smaller and smaller. The harder he made me strive, the more I was absolutely determined to pass the test, to show him I was worthy of his love. To get back to where we were in those early months. It had been perfect, and somehow, I had ruined it.

Our lives were ruled by his moods. The devil-may-care, wisecracking lad-about-town I’d started seeing had been replaced by a miserable snipe, given to volcanic eruptions of fury.

It became a theme, a definitive characterisation – I was casually cruel, I had no respect for his feelings,bull in a fucking china shop, you are.He said losing both my parents young had left me with deep problems and because I’d not been to therapy, my unresolved issues were being taken outmercilessly on him.You really need to see someone,he’d say, after he’d forgiven me another of my trespasses.

Even as I write this, I find it hard to accept: he turned the death of my parents into another weapon.

Now we call it gaslighting, but at the time I had no terminology, no map for this upside-down place I’d stumbled into where I was the aggressor, and my dependence on him had made me prisoner. If someone who loved me this much, and seen me at my most vulnerable, thought my soul was disfigured and ugly, then it must be.

Increasingly broken, and unsure of him, I cried, wheedled, begged and manipulated to get him to show affection. I played games. In a sordid, unhealthy relationship, you become sordid and unhealthy too. People who tell you to Just Leave, as if it’s clean and simple, right and wrong, they don’t understand. They don’t understand you’ve become accomplice as well as victim.

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