My name is Lila Meadowbrook (a pseudonym to protect my husband’s privacy), and being married to a person with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder for 20 years is akin to having several degrees in psychology, if you ask me.
It has also been a two-decades-long course in the stages of loss. I experienced years of idealism, hope, shock, sadness, mourning, resentment, numbness, and realism, and now I have had my fill of bending. I am being firm, throwing up boundaries, and allowing myself to mull over concepts I never allowed myself to consider in the past like separation and divorce. I never wanted to have anything but a happy marriage and a secure foundation for our children, and now I have no idea what the future holds. But it feels freeing to finally think about life no longer tied to another person’s deep-seated issues that were formed long before I came into the picture.
I had no idea a human could exist who would not need or want daily exchanges of love, affection, and connection with their spouse, and instead be highly attuned to the minutiae around us. This website exists as a way for me to work through this and at the same time share my story with you so that if you have loved ones like this, you know you are not alone.
I recently wrote a book about my journey called Neglect’s Toll on a Wife, which composes the first many posts of this blog in its entirety (an introduction and 22 chapters), and I will refer to it often. For many reasons, it took a lot of inner courage to write the book. I always wondered if I would regret it. Would it color my future life in a negative way by bringing up so many things I had stuffed down for so long? Would it harm my family? Would it harm him? Now that I am on the other side of it, I am so thankful I wrote and published it. While it was immensely difficult to unearth all of those buried hurts, and even harder to allow myself to consider other paths of moving forward because of unearthing them, I would have conversely remained numb in trying to keep them all down. I have now read my own book many times in order to continue processing everything I’ve dealt with over the years.
If I were to boil this whole blog down into one sentence, I would say this: If you are an affectionate person who loves intimacy in all its forms – conversational, emotional, physical, and spiritual – know that you may never get to share those things with a person characterized by OCPD. Expecting deep, daily fulfillment in those ways in a lifelong relationship would be unfair to expect of them and tragic for you to live through.
Thank you for visiting, and I hope my story helps you.
