He slammed the bedroom door, again. Dinner went cold. Again. And I told our daughter he just needed space. Again.
The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful—it was thick as syrup, coating everything until even breathing felt deliberate. I scraped her untouched mashed potatoes into the garbage disposal and listened to it grind away another evening we’d never get back.
How many times can you lie for someone before you start lying to yourself?
The Wreckage
What is a toxic marriage? It’s not always what you think. It’s not necessarily screaming matches or thrown dishes—though those count too. Most toxic marriages live in the spaces between words, in the careful dance you do around someone’s mood, in the way you’ve learned to make yourself smaller so they can feel bigger.
It was always just tension—never a blowup. So I convinced myself it wasn’t abuse.
That’s the thing about toxic marriage signs. They don’t announce themselves with sirens. They whisper. They creep in wearing the mask of “difficult times” or “stress from work” or “that’s just how marriage is.” You adapt. You bend. You become fluent in reading micro-expressions and interpreting sighs.
The dishes in the sink become a personal attack on their character. Your laugh becomes too loud. Your sadness becomes manipulation. Your needs become unreasonable requests that somehow always come at the wrong time.
A woman once said she stayed because he never hit her—only belittled her. “That’s not abuse, right?” she whispered, her voice so small I had to lean in to hear it.
But here’s what I wish someone had told her, what I wish someone had told me: toxic marriages symptoms aren’t always physical. They live in your nervous system. They show up as that knot in your stomach when you hear their key in the door. They manifest as the automatic apology that falls from your lips even when you’ve done nothing wrong.
You start editing yourself in real-time. Rehearsing conversations before you have them. Calculating the emotional cost of mentioning the broken faucet or asking about the credit card bill. You become a meteorologist of moods, constantly checking the atmospheric pressure of your own home.
The cruelest part? You still love them. Or you think you do. Or you remember when you did, and that memory feels more real than the person sitting across from you at breakfast, scrolling through their phone while you try to share something that mattered to you.
An unhealthy marriage doesn’t kill you quickly. It’s a slow suffocation. You don’t notice you’re holding your breath until your lungs start burning.
The Mirror
You’ve covered for him. You’ve downplayed her rage. You’ve smiled when you were bleeding inside.
Look, I’m not here to tell you what you already know in your bones. You’ve felt it in those 3 AM moments when sleep won’t come and your mind won’t stop replaying the evening’s small cruelties. You’ve tasted it in the back of your throat when you catch yourself making excuses to your sister about why he couldn’t make it to dinner again.
You know. You’ve always known.
Toxic marriage isn’t a storm that blows through and leaves damage in its wake. It’s a slow mold—spreading in corners you don’t check until the damage is deep, until you realize the foundation itself has been compromised and you’re not sure what’s holding everything up anymore.
The hardest part isn’t admitting your marriage toxic—it’s admitting you’ve been complicit in your own diminishing. That you’ve nodded along when they rewrote history. That you’ve apologized for their behavior to people who love you. That you’ve protected someone who wouldn’t cross the street to protect you.
You didn’t marry a monster. You married someone who made you doubt your own reality. That’s how toxic marriages work. They don’t break you with grand gestures of cruelty—they erode you with a thousand tiny compromises until you can’t remember what you used to believe about yourself.
The gaslighting isn’t always intentional. Sometimes they believe their own version of events. Sometimes they’re as lost as you are, drowning in patterns they learned before they learned to love. But intention doesn’t matter when the result is the same: you, questioning everything you thought you knew about love, about yourself, about what you deserve.
Maybe you stay because you remember who they used to be. Maybe you stay because leaving feels like admitting failure. Maybe you stay because you’ve invested so much time and energy that walking away feels like throwing it all in the garbage disposal with tonight’s cold dinner.
But here’s what I know about toxic marriages symptoms—they don’t get better with time. They don’t improve with enough love or patience or understanding. They metastasize. They teach your children that this is what love looks like. They teach you that your voice doesn’t matter, that your feelings are inconvenient, that your happiness is optional.
You can’t fix a marriage that’s built on making you feel broken.
The woman in the mirror has been trying to tell you something for months, maybe years. She’s tired. She’s lost weight or gained it. She’s developed new lines around her eyes—not laugh lines, worry lines. She startles easily now. She’s forgotten how to take up space without apologizing for it.
She’s waiting for you to listen.
No, it’s not too late. And yes, you’re allowed to leave—even if no one else sees what you’ve survived. Even if it looks good on paper. Even if they buy you flowers after they make you cry. Even if you still love the person they were, or could be, or promised they’d become.
You’re allowed to choose yourself. Finally.