As I set here looking at my screen, I wait for the words to flow through my fingertips and onto the screen before me.  I feel frozen in a ready position knowing that this is what I am suppose to do and reminding myself that it will help someone.  Still, it takes a lot for me to share the raw story of what I went through. It is not that I have never shared my story because I have.  I just have not shared it this raw and never public in this way.

I will start by saying that no one ever believes that this could happen to them.  Before this experience, if you asked me if I would ever allow this to happen to me, I would be very confident that there is no way that I would.  I was wrong and that is why I am here right now!

In January of 2010 I met the man that would forever change my life.  Most who know me, know his name, but for those who do not I will call him Ron.  At this time in my life I had been divorced for almost 6 years and for most of that I chose not to date. In the months before I met Ron, I had dated two people, each for six weeks.  I ended these two relationships because of the behaviors that were happening that I, ironically, was not going to allow in my life.

It had been less than a month since I lost my best friend, my sister, Sue.  I was deeply grieving her loss.  I was feeling pretty tired of being alone.   Ron and I hit it off and began dating.  He was like no one I had ever dated and some how I allowed that to lesson the strict guidelines I had set for myself and that had kept me sensible for so long.

The big one, I only wanted to date a man of God.  What you run into is, you will be told they are a christian and they believe in God but that is the extent of it.  Lip service is what I will call that.  Even the devil believes in God.  With a christian comes certain standards, such as how you treat people, how you talk, your character, etc.  I didn’t want to be with someone that drank all the time either.  I don’t have a problem with drinking but I didn’t want it to be a major part of their life.

To this day, I will not be able to explain to anyone, not even myself why I chose to get involved with Ron.  There were so many things about Ron that normally would turn me away from a person.  I think back and God must have wanted to beat me upside the head, wait, maybe he was and I was not paying attention. 

Ron drank a lot, not a little, a lot!  Before, I wouldn’t have dated anyone that drank as much as he did.  Ron was another one of those non active Christians.  He was different though.  For many years he was all out for God, there was quite a story there.  I was intrigued and felt compelled to learn more.  Ron had some things happen in his life and he chose to turn away from God.  He didn’t just turn away, he went far away. 

That was not all, Ron was different.  He was different than anyone I had ever met before.  It is not like I didn’t have the voices screaming in my head, God probably!  I knew I should run and I didn’t.  I would have these conversations with myself a lot.  I didn’t have a clue that Ron was the kind of man I would encounter down the road.  The issues I had with getting involved with Ron mainly had to do with the things I have mentioned.  A man far away from God, well, at least running away from God, is a man I should have been running away from.  I didn’t though, I kept hanging in there. 

I could make a list of qualities that I would like in a man.  Ron had several of those qualities.  He was sweet, loving, kind, funny, and passionate.  We had a connection that I couldn’t explain, that I had not experienced before.    

The flip side is, if I made a list of qualities I didn’t want in a man, Ron had many of those.  Those are the things I had many conversations with myself about.  At first, it was very unsettling to me.  The drinking, the things he would say, things he would do.  The way he would talk about people.  Not just people either but life in general.  He was angry, angry at the world.  He was not angry with me, but I am not an angry person and had a hard time listening to his harsh words. 

The thing is something in me knew he was a broken man.  A man that had been hurt, betrayed by the mother of his children and he just never healed.  (At least that is what I believed at the time based on what he had told me).  He didn’t give God a chance to help him heal, he just ran. So, I made excuses to myself on why it was ok for me to overlook the bad stuff. God must have put me in his life for a reason.  He needed someone that was kind, patient, loving, that would never lie to him or cheat on him, someone that could get him to stop running from God. 

So, looking back, I guess I was trying to play God because I sure was not letting God have the control while I was making these choices.  If I were letting God be in control I would have never been in Ron’s life to begin with.   So, you could say I made the choice to choose Ron over God. 

That really stings to have to admit but that is really what it came down to.  I guess I was so tired of being alone.  I wanted to have someone to love me, that I could love and I could care for.  I guess that because Ron had a lot of things in him that were what I wanted from a man, I held on to those.  That, and the lies I told myself. 

Ron would play games, not good games, bad games.  We would be getting along great, than one day he would began blowing me off.  It would be a Friday and I would barely get to talk to him all weekend.  Of course, he would tell me there was nothing going on even though it was obvious.  I wouldn’t understand this at all.  One minute he wanted in this relationship and the next he didn’t act like he did.  I would tell myself I was not going to set around waiting on him and if he called I was not going to answer or go see him.  That was all talk because as soon as he would call, I would come running.  I would get so frustrated with myself.  I hated his games, but I would make the excuse that he had a hard time getting committed because of what happened to him.  What a bunch of bull I was telling myself.  Worse, I believed it.  The problem was, when he was past acting like that, he would be the most wonderful man.  He would say all the right things and be so sweet that it made all the other stuff go away.

I broke it off with him two or three times.  The last time I was very firm about it especially after he showed up at my house on Thanksgiving accusing me of something that I hadn’t done and being terrible to me in front of my family.  After that night, he began his plan of deceiving me and sucking me back in.  He was the kind wonderful considerate man that took responsibility for his actions.  He quit drinking and he didn’t try to push me to be more than friends because that was all that I would allow at the time.  He did exactly what he needed to do to make this happen. Unfortunately, it worked and after three months I began dating him again. 

Over the next several months, I would like to say that he kept up the persona that sucked me back into this relationship, but he did not.  He began drinking again, his games returned and I still had experiences that should have been enough of a warning to me that I could break away from the denial that I was in but I could not.  When you are in the middle of it, it is a whole different world than when you are are looking back or you are someone on the outside looking in.  On the outside, you see the bigger picture, you are not blinded and you are not under the spell of the deception of the abuser, master manipulator. 

In July of 2011 he asked me to marry him and I said yes.  I would be lying to you if I said I was not a little reluctant.  Honestly, I was and it is sad to say I almost wanted to say no.  I know that God put that unsettling feeling there to try to get me to make the right choice.  God knew things would get a whole lot worse.  

Ron wanted to get married soon and to make this short we put a lot of plans into motion to make it happen. We set a date of November 4, 2011.  We planed to move him in my house the month before and we had to buy him out of his lease.  We began combining our things.  We sold and got rid of a lot of my things because he wanted to keep his. During this time some things started to happen that I had never experienced before.  

So, I don’t remember exactly when it began, the accusations. I remember I was about to go to bed and I checked my e mail before I turned off my computer.  This is something I almost always did.  I am lying in bed next to Ron and he starts accusing me of checking my e mail because I was talking to other men.  You could have taken a rock and hit me in the head with it and it would not have felt much different.  I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t understand. 

He told me that his ex-girlfriend use to do that all the time and she was a cheater.  This was not the first time I heard what an awful person she was, I had heard all about it.  He claimed she was a major cheater and he didn’t have many good things to say about her.  In fact, he had nothing good to say about her.  I didn’t know any different back then, but now I don’t believe the stories he told about her. 

Next, he began to accuse me of looking at men.  He called it, “Hunting”.  These things began happening and I was blindsided.  A couple of times I was going to break the wedding off but he talked me out of it.  Besides, I had already sold a lot of my things and allowed him to put the cost of breaking his lease on my credit card. He told me if we brake up, he wasn’t paying that and it was a couple thousand.  I felt stuck at every angle  He made the decision to get help, so he went to a counselor.  I know now that was just a thing he did to keep me in the game and it wouldn’t have helped anyway.  

The closer it got to our wedding the more he was messing with me.  Accusing me of cheating, “hunting” , things like that.  He told me there is something we can do that would solve this problem once and for all.  I asked him  what and he said he didn’t want to tell me but wanted to know if I wanted him to do this.  I told him, yes, if it would solve this, than yes.  I was willing to do what ever, I knew I had done nothing wrong.  He said it would take a couple days to get in the mail.

A couple days later on November 2, 2011, he told me on my lunch hour that he got was he was waiting for and finally told me what it was.  He said it was a test for my under ware, to test for semen.  I couldn’t believe it, I was appalled.  Ron and I had not been having sex.  Not that we never did but after we decided to get married we made a commitment to refrain from that until we were married.  So, in my mind, this would show him he was wrong even if I didn’t like it.

He got home before me and on my way home from work, he called me and told me that he had taken my under ware that I had worn on an occasion when he thought I had cheated.  He said he tested it three times and it shows semen on my under ware and that I was a cheater and a liar.  I thought he was messing with me at first but he was serious.  When I got home, he showed me and told me this is scientific proof that I have cheated.  He said he knew I cheated on him when I went to the pumpkin patch with my daughter and grand kids.  I told him there had to be something wrong but nothing I said mattered because “He had Proof”  He began to tell me things like I am a sex addict and I need help.  He kept calling me a “Cum Dumpster Bitch” and many other horrible things.

I called a friend and asked her if I could come to her house and she told me I could but Ron took my keys.  He would not let me leave.  He said that I shouldn’t be driving in the state that I was in.  I called her and asked her to come to me and she did.  After we talked for quite awhile she had to leave. I honestly don’t have a memory of all the details but at some point he ended up in my room tormenting me again.  I wanted to leave out of my room and he would not let me.

He began to grab me and throw me.  I grabbed the phone to call 911 but he got it away from me.  I finally got past him and tried to get to the door but he was able to stop me and blocked me in my living room.  I tried to call 911 again on my cell and he stopped me some how.  I just kept trying to get past him and he kept grabbing me and throwing me and grabbing me from behind and choking me. Never in my life had I experienced what it was like to be choked and now this man that claimed he loved me was giving me that experience.  I was so frantic, my only focus was to escape and some how in that struggle his lip got busted open.  I did not punch him, I didn’t even know that it happened but he suddenly stopped and began to complain about what I did to him.  I was stunned and now I was defending myself that I didn’t do that on purpose to him.

Most of what happened is a blur.  At some point he ended up locked up in his truck with his gun saying he was going to shoot himself.  I was able to get him to give me the gun and I hid it.  I locked myself in another room and tried to fall asleep.  He kept trying to work his way in by messing with me and messing with the door but at some point he gave up and I finally ended the night.

I would like to say that the next day I got him out of my house and far far away from me.  Before this experience, I would have been one of those people thinking that I should have just done that but it is just not that simple.  There is still a lot that is a blur but the next day, Ron immediately turned on the charm and showed great remorse for what had happened.  He told me he needs help and that he was going to get it. Even though he was saying all the right things, he had really sucked the life out of me.  

It was a Thursday, we had taken the day off to get everything ready for the wedding.  He was being kind and loving and showing his remorse but I felt numb, like I was moving in slow motion and my mind was in a fog.   We went through the day getting the things done that we had planned.  Him, acting normal like nothing had happened, me, numb and in a fog.  I was in an unfamiliar place, not knowing how to get out of this.  

I talked to my friend, I wanted her to scream at me to tell me what to do, but she didn’t.  She didn’t know he had assaulted me.  I met my daughter for our pedicures because we had that planned for the wedding.  I had a little time to talk to her before Ron showed up.  I told her about him accusing me and just a little of what happened but not much.  She didn’t know about the assault either.  She, like everyone else,  really liked Ron a lot because he was a very likable person.  They did not know the real Ron.  I wanted her to tell me I was crazy and to stop this thing, but she didn’t. I wanted her to notice that the life had left my spirit but she didn’t notice I guess.  She told me that everyone can change.

The next day we were getting married at the home of another friend of mine that had no idea what was happening.  She called me mid-morning and asked me if everything was still on.  That caught me off guard and I asked her why she was asking me that.  I don’t even remember exactly how she answered, I don’t even know if she knew why she was asking.  I feel like that was God trying to give me another out.  A chance to tell someone but I couldn’t.  I felt so much shame and I was so embarrassed.  

We went through the wedding and during our vows, Ron, showed so much emotion and showed everyone how much he “Loved” me.  I was a lucky gal in their eyes.  We just had a small wedding with family and a couple friends.   After the wedding and pictures we headed out to go to the reception.  Things seemed to be going okay at the reception but I began to notice Ron’s behavior had changed, behavior that meant something was wrong, that I had done something wrong, according to him.  When everyone was gone, we cleaned everything up.  There was just an area to mop and the key to return but he told me to go ahead and go.  I had to take my daughter home so I rushed as fast as I could because I didn’t want him to try to say I cheated on him while I was gone.  Stupid, I know, that he would think that way but he did.  

When I got home he was on the computer looking at the pictures that had been taken.  He barely acknowledged that I was there.  We bought something special for me to wear for our wedding night.  I put it on and sat there waiting for him, he ignored me.  I asked him a couple of times if something was wrong and he gave his normal response of nothing while acting like I was crazy for asking.  I changed back in to my regular pajamas and went to bed.  He ignored me all night and the next day he continued to act like there was nothing going on.  

We had to be at his son’s football game at noon. His kids, my kids and other friends were going to be there. When we got there, before we got out of the car he began to tell me that I was a liar and a cheater.  He said that I ignored him at the reception and I left him there by himself to do all the work.  He said that because I am a cheater that he had permission to cheat.  He accused me of standing close to his brother on purpose in the pictures, like I was trying to do something wrong with him or something.  He went on and on with the verbal beating while I sat there balling, trying to defend myself.  When he was done, I had to suck it up, clean my face up the best I could and go up to the stands with everyone to try to put on the act that everything was wonderful.  Hard as I tried, I couldn’t.  I hid my face with my hood the best I could and said as little as possible.  That was the beginning of my marriage!  

I have shared so much and I have so much more to share.  I tried to give you as much of a condensed version as possible.  I am writing this blog for awareness and for women who are in the position that I was! I want to help them to see that they are not crazy and they are not alone and that there is HOPE.  So please bare with me as I share.  This has been long and I thank you for sticking it out with me.  I will end this for now but will be writing another post to share the next chapter of my story.  

Peace and Blessings, 

Ruthie