Crumbs Before Vows
He was washing dishes, his shoulders moving in a rhythm that I had always read as concentration. I sorted through the mail. A single thought landed with the weight of a verdict: nothing in this kitchen was going to change.
It wasn’t that he treated me differently after we married. It was that I noticed the shape of what I’d accepted. Marriage didn’t change him. It changed what I could tolerate. The more whole I became, the less invisible I was willing to be.
My nervous system had been trained to translate absence into autonomy. Neglect? Independence. Silence? Safety. Inconsistency? Normal. The alchemy of disorganized attachment is ingenious: it turns hunger into proof you don’t need to eat.
When I asked him to marry me and he said nothing - just blinked, stunned - I called waiting a year for his answer reasonable. When I kept loving him anyway, I called that unconditional love.
I was just someone who’d been taught to snack on her own longing.
The vows didn’t stabilize us; they threw light across every asymmetry. My prior year’s autism diagnosis and the healing that followed had given me new vocabulary - enough to name what was insufficient and enough self-trust to believe my own words.
There is compromise, and there is self-subjugation. The distinction lives in the body. Compromise feels like a stretch you can breathe through. Self-subjugation feels like apnea you rebrand as calm.
His responsiveness arrived only at the brink of loss - urgent and persuasive - and I mistook that for devotion.
Therapy taught me that disorganized attachment isn’t chaos; it’s patterned hunger. The proposal silence, the closet that never had enough space for my clothes, and the way I’d praised myself for minimal oxygen consumption - all were re-examined.
I moved from disorganized to something approaching secure attachment, and security has side effects: tolerance for ambiguity narrows. The life that had once kept me from drowning now felt like shallow water.
I did not leave in rage. I left the way a person steps off a train that has reached the end of the line. I honored the distance we’d traveled; I simply refused the loop back.
If I had known how I would feel in the aftermath, I wouldn’t have married him. But I couldn’t have known; it was marriage that revealed the truth. Society prefers a neat villain, but sometimes departure is just the logical conclusion of healing. I carried guilt anyway.
With my partner Wyatt, the contrast was immediate but not cinematic: no rescue arcs, no grand declarations - just space made for our life, together, before I asked. Intensity matched. Safety as default, not reward. He has never had to bend at the brink because I have never needed to be close to departure to be heard.
This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a life that fits, which is its own wonder.
Crumbs taught me to survive. Healing taught me to see no one is meant to live such a meager existence. I want the whole meal now - not because I’m greedy, but because I’m finally fed.