Part of feeling like I belong somewhere is feeling like I'm accepted by the person/people there. It's only when I feel accepted that I feel like I can let loose and truly be me. So the struggle now is how to make sense of a realization that he silently wasn't accepting me in so many ways. My feeling of belonging was based on false representations by him.
There's a moment about five or six years into our marriage that keeps running through my head as I struggle with this. But let me back up even further to give some context. When we were dating, we attended colleges that were four hours apart. We would get together as often as we could on the weekends. Some of those weekends, we would meet at a campground. I even proposed to him during a weekend camping trip.
When it came time to register for our wedding, we registered for so much camping equipment. I really thought this was a shared hobby. And with how involved he was in our wedding registry, I thought it was safe to assume that.
So five or six years in, after quite a few camping trips, it came out how much he hated camping and had always dreaded our camping trips. So we adjusted. I did some solo camping. I didn't pressure him to come on our annual June family camping trip although he did come some years and left early at least one year. We talked about him staying in a hotel like my mom always did and joining me during the day although I don't think he ever took me up on that offer.
Over the years, I would laugh it off when it crossed my mind how silly it seemed he would register for something he hated but maybe that should have been my first clue that he didn't truly accept me enough to be honest with me. That he would rather let resentment build up as he dreads each camping trip than have a conversation with me. Maybe it should have been a clue that I didn't really know the man I had married.
And in hindsight that was far from the only thing he silently didn't accept about me. He didn't like that I wasn't closer to his mom. He hated that I needed to understand the why behind decisions or that I asked questions instead of blindly accepting opinions and statements as facts.
He wished I had played video games with him (despite the fact that he had never asked me to) and he wanted more of a social life (despite that he never attempted to create one or communicate to me he wanted that). And if he could save money by not buying the toothpaste or lip chap he knew was my favorite, he would without saying a word to me.
And I suspect he resented that I joined a church when we moved south despite the fact that I never asked him to join or pressured him to come with me.
If I had known all this in the moment, I never would have felt that sense of belonging so I did I ever truly belong? There's that huge disconnect between what I felt in the moment and all that I enjoyed in my life with him vs the false reality it was all built on (and a lot of uncertainty as to how deep that false reality went - my ex may very well have had some sincere feelings that mixed in with the false representations).
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