I know cruelties—vicious and enduring—the kind that settle into a man’s posture. None more ruinous than being tethered to a love that dissolves the moment her will meets resistance.
And why should it?
She offered affection like currency—generous in my compliance, withheld when disagreement cost her comfort. In its place: scorn. Silence framed as fatigue. Distance posed as consequence.
Arranged. Measured. Deliberate.
And yet, before the unraveling, there were glimpses of something rare. A composed presence. Her voice—low, careful—carried restraint. Her eyes lingered in ways that suggested more was being registered than revealed. She held intelligence like a private possession. And her appearance—undeniably striking—hinted at something tranquil within.
I mistook it for depth beyond temperament.
I mistook it for the constancy that governs me.
But it wasn’t false.
That version of her was real. And when things were steady, she was luminous—undeniably so.
But something else moved her—something older than logic. When she felt exposed—when her image, authority, or sense of control was at risk—she adapted.
It wasn’t malice.
It was instinct.
And instinct has no conscience. It only knows how to keep itself intact—regardless of who is put in harm’s way.
I began to catch it in her eyes, then hear it in her voice, then see it in her writing—she believed it was her speaking.
When she raised her voice, it served only to lash out—reaching for whatever might cause injury. Imprecise, yet driven by urgency, like an addict scrambling for a fix.
Her most devastating blows were subtle—a glance too swift to name, a phrase crafted to disorient, an absence that looked like tiredness but felt like exile.
Some wounds were flagrant. Others arrived dressed in smallness. But all of it accumulated—each blow etching itself into what I became, a thousand incisions made by a blade she would never admit to hold.
And when the wound was open, the performance began: dishonest reasoning, logic twisted to protect her image, eyes wide with disbelief—as though my pain were theatrical, or the result of some flaw in my perception.
She struck, then sermonized. Desecrated, then preached. She spoke with the certainty of one who believes that cruelty, if reasoned, becomes justified.
Yet if those convictions were sincere—if her judgments were truth—why remain in my bed? Why consume my time, tenderness, and devotion? Why demand loyalty from a man she held in such low esteem?
She does not stab. She shaves slivers from my sense of self until the man I am begins to resemble the one she insists I’ve always been.
Still, I loved her with the naïve certainty that once given, love binds.
Eventually I saw it. Her grief was not remorse, but outrage—the tantrum of a will unmet. No sorrow for what she inflicted, only rage that it hadn’t reshaped me into what she imagined.
She lied—often. But mostly without awareness. And always with faith in the illusions she built to escape the weight of responsibility. She fashioned her reality and demanded I inhabit it.
I declined.
She called it betrayal.
Without saying the word, she spoke of honor as if it were inherited. But honor is never a given. It must be forged—in restraint, in adversity, in the gravity of accountability. And she has carried nothing heavier than her appetite.
Ask her about honor and she will describe a fiction. Not code nor discipline—but fantasy. Something imagined, never embodied.
She is not monstrous in the way legends define evil. She is far more familiar—and far more dangerous: a woman convinced of her virtue, even as she lays waste to the man who dares offer her reverence.
Her pain earns her praise. My endurance makes me suspect. She is celebrated for surviving. I am blamed for the collapse—as though love’s foundation rests solely on the man who volunteers for self-erasure and walks it to conclusion like a martyr.
This is what’s expected of us. And for what?
She continues her performance. I continue to bleed.
I gave her everything—freely, with no thought for what it might cost me. And she held it like a stage prop—displayed when useful, discarded when no longer fit for the story she wished to tell.
She shattered it. Not in rage—but in habit. As one breaks what they never learned to value. And when the fragments cut her, she held them out to me as evidence of my violence.
The implied question is always the same:
Did she mean to hurt you?
As though intention sanctifies injury.
As though ignorance is absolution.
But tell me—what poses the greater threat? The wolf you see coming, or the hand that strokes your face while bleeding you dry?
This is the violence rendered taboo—because it dismantles women’s self-proclaimed innocence and dissolves the socially conditioned idealism men are taught to carry about love and the feminine.
‘Tis the erosion of man’s interior—inflicted by she who counts herself infallible.
I cannot be certain of how we arrived here. But I know this: there are those who profit from collapse. Nothing brings a nation to its knees faster than the breakdown between men and women, the masculine and the feminine, the confusion of responsibility between the sexes.
Taught and shamed to endure, men take it all upon themselves—until they perish. Not in spectacle, but in dull repetition, vanishing by degree. And when they finally fall, it is her the world mourns.
I speak without apology.
My anguish was not madness, nor fragility. It was the wound a man carries when something sacred is entrusted to someone who knows it only as ornamental.
I will not call a dagger a rose—
not for softness,
nor sorrow,
and never again for love.