Love is a Battlefield

They don’t warn you about this version of marriage. Not in the vows, not in the baby books, not even in the trauma dumping conversations with your divorced sister who keeps saying “get out while you still can.”

This isn’t about fists or bruises, but the kind of invisible blast radius that detonates in a kitchen mid-morning because your tone wasn’t warm enough. It’s about the shark eyes—the way his pupils vanish when the rage switches on. The voice lowers, the door slams, and suddenly your body is flinching before your brain has even caught up.

And if I’m being brutally optimistic—
I was built for this.
My emotionally neglectful childhood trained me like a damn Navy SEAL in hyper-vigilance.
I could sense a mood shift before the door even opened.
I could shrink and smile at the same time.
I could make dinner while tracking tone, posture, and whether his jaw clenched on the third chew.

But instead of parting ways - you’ve chosen to stay. You’ve seen the loop, traced the trauma, unpacked your childhood, whispered “not again” into your pillow, and still… here you are. Not because you’re broken, but because something deeper, more dangerous, maybe even divine, said no—not this time. You’re going to stay and change the pattern from the inside.

But how do you do that without losing your f**king mind?

How do you stay when everything in your nervous system is screaming run—not because you’re in danger, but because you’re in the blast zone?

It’s not that I stayed because I’m weak. No, staying requires a whole new kind of ferocity. You’ve got to become part therapist, part hostage negotiator, part trauma-informed witch. You learn to read the wind, scan the tone, prep the house like you’re waiting for a storm that might or might not hit.

This is not a love story. This is not a sob story. This is a survival manual with tear drops and bite marks and coffee rings on every page. This is for the women like me—like us—who stayed. Not out of fear. But out of fire.

The suit:

There’s a kind of armour you learn to wear when you love a man who might explode. It’s not made of Kevlar, but cortisol. Woven not with fabric, but with foresight. And you don’t put it on in a hurry—you wake up in it. Sleep in it. Parent in it. Bleed in it.

It’s the suit of the bomb diffuser.

And no one tells you how heavy that fucking thing is.

You learn the mechanics. The way his footsteps shift on the floorboards. The weather patterns of his mood swings. The exact phrasing that might set him off—or soothe the fuse just long enough to make it to bedtime.

You become fluent in micro-calibrations. You can cook dinner, monitor the kids, and simultaneously gauge whether the way he puts the tip of his tongue to the corner of his lips means that he’s savouring the taste of something or annoyed. You know that if you talk too long, sigh at the wrong moment or make the wrong facial expression —it might mean the evening derails.

But here's the real cost: it’s not just that you're always ready. It's that you're never off.

The suit doesn't come off when he’s calm. It doesn't hang on a hook when the house is quiet. Because the threat isn’t constant—but the possibility is.

So you carry the weight like a ghost load. Invisible. Impressive, even. People call you “so strong.” But strength, in this case, is a euphemism for exhausted. You smile through gritted teeth. You joke about “walking on eggshells” like it’s quirky. Like you haven’t actually trained your body to flinch less.

You might even forget you’re wearing the damn suit. Until one day, the zip won’t budge. Your shoulders are locked. Your jaw is wired shut. And someone asks you how you’re doing and you almost laugh. Or cry. Or both.

But you don’t. Because bomb diffusers don’t get to cry in the middle of the mission.

They breathe. They hold steady. They cut wires with shaky hands and pray to whatever version of God still answers women like us.

There were days I could take the helmet off. Sit down. Smile. Even fake a laugh that didn’t sound like it came from the bottom of a trench. But the rest of the suit? It stayed on.

But then kids came into the scene.

The boots I wore to tiptoe around his moods were the same ones that stomped on any chance of softness. The gloves that kept me safe from his sudden detonations also made it damn near impossible to feel anything—my own skin, my kids’ warmth, the messy magic of motherhood.

I told myself I was protecting them. That the armor made me a good mother. That keeping the peace was love. But that was a lie I swallowed every morning with my coffee—black, bitter, and laced with adrenaline.

When he left for work, I’d peel the suit off. Slowly. Like an animal shedding its winter skin. I’d stretch my shoulders, crack my neck, breathe into the space he left behind. That’s when I could mother the way I wanted to—barefoot, unarmored, laughing from my gut instead of my throat.

But like clockwork, somewhere around 4:30, the air changed. Something ancient in my bones would twitch. He’s coming home.

And like some war-seasoned junkie, I’d suit up again.
The suit went back on before the keys even hit the lock.
Helmet stayed off—until I felt it. The tension in his silence. The twitch in his jaw. The absence of words that always meant more than the words themselves.
Then I’d snap it on. Click. Back on the battlefield.

And here's the kicker—the real twisted bit:
Even when I wasn’t in danger, I wasn’t really living.
Even when the bombs didn’t drop, I was still walking around like they might.

And in all that suit-up, stand-down, gear-up-again madness, I missed the one thing I swore I was fighting for.

My boys.

Because you can’t hold a child properly in full-body armor.
You can’t run your hands through their hair when you’ve got tactical gloves on.
You can’t whisper I love you and mean it from your gut when you’ve got a fucking helmet with blast-proof glass pressed against your skull.

I was right there, but I wasn’t with them.
I was managing. Surviving.
But I wasn’t mothering.

And I don’t know what wrecked me more—
the moments I stayed suited up while they reached for me,
or the quiet horror of realizing I didn’t even notice anymore.

---

The thing is, I wasn’t walking into this blind.
Within the first year of marriage, I was already deep in the trenches—not just of matrimony, but of understanding it. I’d started reading the John Gottman stuff, nodding along like, yep, that makes sense, highlighting pages while pacing the house with a baby strapped to my chest and last night’s arguments still ringing in my ears.

It was also coming into my second year as a mother—
and by that point, I was neck-deep in every book, podcast, and internet hole about parenting and trauma. I wasn’t trying to heal. I was just trying not to fuck up my kid.

But those books—God help me—they don’t come with warning labels.
They don’t say:
“Side effects may include: existential dread, the violent resurfacing of childhood memories, uncontrollable sobbing in the laundry room, and the sudden awareness that your entire nervous system is a rewired house fire waiting to jump across generations.”

Because what started as a noble attempt to parent better—
to not yell, to be present, to raise “emotionally intelligent” children—
steamrolled into the full-blown unhinging of everything I thought I knew about love.

It hit me like a sucker punch to the gut:
Not only could I not give what I never got,
but I was just replicating the same fucked-up dynamic in which I first learned what love was.
Spoiler alert: it was the absence of it.

Love, to me, was surviving around people who didn’t know how to hold me.
Who needed me to regulate them.
Who made me earn affection through performance, silence, or shape-shifting.
So of course I married someone who felt like home.
Of course I found myself back in that familiar ache,
calling it chemistry.
Calling it fate.
Calling it marriage.

At the time, I was naïve and half-asleep. No one had taught me—hell, it wasn’t even on my radar—that the same wounds I was unearthing through parenting would crawl their way into my marriage too.

I thought it was just about how I showed up for my kid.
Turns out, it was also about how I showed up for a man who triggered the same primal alarms.
Same nervous system, different battlefield.

The triggers don’t disappear when the baby starts sleeping through the night. They just mutate.
One day it’s the shriek of a toddler that sends your blood pressure into orbit—
and the next, it’s the sound of him dropping the lid of the bialetti because there’s no fresh coffee in there.

It was in the way he came home from work like nothing happened. Like he hadn’t detonated that morning. Like I hadn’t spent the entire day punching aggressive texts into my notes trying to rewire my nervous system with journaling.

It was in the way he walked casually, whistling. Asked what we were having for dinner like he hadn’t left a crater in the kitchen at 7:12 AM. Like I hadn’t had to smile at our kids with red-rimmed eyes for the rest of the day thinking if they had ever seen me actually laugh.

And the worst part is—
when he came home fine, smiling, reset—
part of me envied him.
The way he got to blow up, release, and move on.
Like a storm that didn’t care what it wrecked as long as it passed.
While I carried the wreckage around all day in my gut like wet cement.
Still in the same clothes. Still in the same fight.

He was done with it.
But I hadn’t even crawled out of it yet.

The hardest part of awakening is knowing what you’re seeing, what you’re living.
I had the damn playbook.
The Gottman checklists. The attachment theory buzzwords.
The “triggered nervous system” diagrams taped to the inside of my brain like bathroom graffiti.

But knowledge doesn’t save you from the war.
It just means you can name every bullet as it enters your body.

I tiptoed. He raged. I shut down. He exploded, loud and vicious, and I vanished in plain sight. “Oh look, he’s showing contempt. I’m stonewalling. Beautiful co-regulation disaster. Textbook.”

It was my move. The freeze response. My body’s favorite trauma party trick.
If he was fire, I became smoke—thin, silent, impossible to hold.

I didn’t yell back. Sure, I drained my energy trying to defend the endless accusations of my character, but I didn’t match the heat.
I went still. I went small.
Because growing up, that’s how you survived people who took up too much air.
You became unbotherable. You built a fortress inside your body and slammed the drawbridge shut.

But stonewalling isn’t power. It’s not control.
It’s a shutdown. It’s your nervous system pulling the plug before it short circuits.

It’s the soul-level version of playing dead.

And yet—I was still in it.
Still wearing the suit.
Still dodging emotional shrapnel like a goddamn pro.
Still trying to be the conscious parent, the emotionally literate wife, the generational curse breaker—
while secretly fantasizing about taking the car keys and driving until the map stopped.

This isn’t healing.
This is field work.

This is where surviving wasn’t enough anymore.

This is what it can look like when you’re trying to raise gentle children while partnered to a man whose inner child is still foaming at the mouth.

I lived in silence with it.
Just like you live with the things that raised you.
You don't call it pain. You call it life.
You don't call it trauma. You call it love.
You tell yourself they did their best.
You tell yourself he’s trying.
You tell yourself it’s not that bad.
You tell yourself you're strong enough to carry it.

And so you stay.
You stay in the suit.
You learn to breathe with it. Sleep with it.
Raise your kids in it.
Pretend it's normal to wake up every morning wrapped in armor just to eat breakfast.

It works.
For a while.
Until it doesn’t.

Until you realise the suit isn’t just keeping you safe.
It’s keeping you numb.
It’s keeping you locked out of the life you’re supposed to be living.
It’s pressing so hard against your skin you can’t even feel your boys’ arms around your neck anymore.
It’s muffling your laughter, muting your anger, draining every goddamn color out of the world.

And it’s not just you paying the price.
They are too.
The blasts you thought you absorbed clean—they still sent shrapnel flying across the room.
Tiny pieces they caught in their hands, in their chests, in the soft places you were supposed to be protecting.
And you can kiss their wounds.
You can patch them up.
But you can’t pretend you didn’t hand them the bleeding to begin with.

It’s not saving you.
It’s burying you.

And no one else is coming to pull you out.
No one even sees you sinking.
They're all too busy drowning in their own shit, clinging to their own wreckage, calling it survival.
And you could stay there. You could stay suited up, silent, strong, dead inside.
You could keep pretending this is just how love is.

Or you could finally admit the truth.
That you can't live in a bomb suit.
Not forever.
And you don’t have to.
You never did.

Words best paired with Love is a Battlefield by Pat Benatar