What happened to her? Well... I have some theories and thoughts. Before we married she was always living with family and attending some sort of education fulltime. First she was at high-school living with her family, then she moved 600km away to the city to attend university, living with her sister and I followed her there, getting a job and renting a 2 bed room unit. Eventually we married, she moved in with me and 6 months later she finished her Uni and started working.
Talking with the marriage counselor over a year ago she asked us to take a list of people/groups and put them in a sort of order based on priority for who's needs we regard as more important (it was worded differently but lets go on that). Below is how an individual's list should look, how mine looked and how hers looked.
......................... CORRECT Yourself Partner Family Friends Work | ......................... MINE Partner Yourself Family Friends Work | ......................... HERS Family Friends Work Yourself + Partner |
Thats wasn't the list I put up at the time since I'd obviously corrected the problem of always putting her needs before my own and had switched it, but before that it was the list I had for much of our marriage and dating. But the interesting point she made is that she didn't think of us as different but as the same. Sweet but when we're both down at the bottom... Yeah, basically the thing to remember about this list is that she regarded everyone else's needs, perceptions, opinions and stuff as not only more important than her own but more important than the one person she should love more than anyone else. The important thing is that by thinking of us as one she was not only constantly worried about everyone's opinion, perception and criticism of her but also gaged any actions of mine as reflecting on her. My failures are her failures, negative perceptions of me are negative perceptions of her, etc.
My theory is that before we married and moved in together, she still regarded us as separate and probably had me at the top of her list, thus she didn't see my actions as reflect on her and regarded my perceptions and needs very highly, thus having no problem with being romantic, intimate, affectionate and never going off at me.
Essentially the insecurity has always been there but I was at the top of the list during our dating, engagement and early marriage so like everyone else, I was never really able to spot it since she'd never want to have a breakdown, throw a tantrum or get angry at me and affect my perception of her. Now thats no longer the case she's very aware of people's perceptions of corny or cheesy romance together with affection and intimacy (going back to my example that even in the seclusion of our bedroom she would act as if her mother was in the room).
At first I thought it was just stress from her work and that if we had children then she could quit her work to look after them and all would be right with the world (this was her opinion as well). But I've come to realise that work stress isn't the entire story and if we did have children guess where they would end up on the list... right down with me and her. Their actions and failures being perceived as her own.
The solution lies in her somehow changing this list and putting herself back on top with me in second place. So it's not even going back to exactly what we had before since that would still have her at the bottom of her own list with me at the top. I asked for marriage counseling for quite sometime and even suggested she should see a psychiatrist about her stress but she never would because of her insecurity about people's perceptions on herself and her marriage. By going to such people, that would be acknowledging there were issues and she couldn't do that. It wasn't until I separated from her and put a countdown to divorce on the table that she knew there was no more hiding. We corrected things for a while and, as before, there's certainly been a severe reduction in the abuse but there's still issues and I've had to set the clock once again to get her to acknowledge it and agree to work on it.