1. My dear Jil, this is not marriage. Whatever it is you have violates the essence of marriage. #Letr2Jil
2. Is a bed of nails really a bed? Yes, it looks like one but can it support comfortable sleep? One might as well sleep on the floor. It will be more comfortable. #Letr2Jil
3. Only an Indian mystic will fancy a bed of nails; but even for him it will be more about proving a point, and for a short period of time. No mystic permanently sleeps on a bed of nails. #Letr2Jil
4. Once something fails in essence it ceases to be what it claims to be. If your “television set” is incapable of receiving transmission or displaying video is it still TV? #Letr2Jil
5. By the same token it’s hard to describe a marital union full of hatred as marriage. Love is an essential component of marriage. Those who dispute this don’t know what a loveless marriage feels like – the ramifications. #Letr2Jil
6. When there’s no love or affection in marriage the marriage loses essence. It becomes a functional anomaly, a harbinger of sorrow and regret. #Letr2Jil
7. A marriage without love is nothing more than a legal apparatus for certificated cohabitation. #Letr2Jil
8. The very essence of marriage is that love qualifies everything – loving affection, loving kiss, loving devotion, loving care... If you subtract love from the equation the quality of a marriage must necessarily be questioned. #Letr2Jil
9. Marriage is totally defined by love and affection, has to be. It entails sacrificial love - the giving up of something for someone. #Letr2Jil
10. Remove giving from marriage and the love comes into question. You can’t love without giving. #Letr2Jil
11. When the actions of a spouse are the antonym of love it’s even worse. How can you claim to love someone when you abuse the person? #Letr2Jil
12. Abuse is not always physical. There are many varieties of abuse – physical, emotional, psychological, financial, sexual, material, spiritual… But abuse is abuse. #Letr2Jil
13. Let me try and describe emotional abuse to you. It’s like what happens in spy movies, when a spy is tied up for beating. To avoid leaving marks a blanket is placed against the body and the cudgel descends. #Letr2Jil
14. Physical abuse leaves physical marks, emotional abuse leaves no physical mark. But the pain is no less and the wound is deep. It’s internal. #Letr2Jil
15. You can’t have a husband who subjects you to emotional abuse all day. Damage will be done. Esteem will be destroyed. #Letr2Jil
16. The verbal violence you’re being subjected to will enslave you. And it will reduce you. You’re going to be reduced to nothing in your own esteem. Too much negativism is injurious to the soul. #Letr2Jil
17. Let’s imagine the opposite. Imagine a man constantly giving affection to his wife, telling her how much he loves her, how much he appreciates her... Her self-esteem will rise. We all want to be appreciated. We all want to be loved. #Letr2Jil
18. Once you subtract love from a marriage it becomes something called “non-marriage.” Love is essential to marriage and the primary channel of love is our spouse. #Letr2Jil
19. When the man who’s supposed to be the primary medium of affection becomes the purposeful channel of hatred a marriage undergoes reformation and redefinition. #Letr2Jil
20. An abusive marriage produces damaged characters. Both the abused and abuser are damaged. #Letr2Jil
21. It’s debilitating to wake up to negativism. It’s destructive when marital communication is soaked in bile. There will be depression in that marriage. #Letr2Jil
22. We tend to imagine we can soak in abusive paragraphs. But the soul has limited capacity for abuse. #Letr2Jil
23. Words are modifiers. Faith comes by hearing. When we’re constantly exposed to reductive and abusive language we soon begin to exercise faith in those words, begin to believe the words of the abuser. We become the words of our abuser through faith. #Letr2Jil
24. Those negative words can be so powerful it can take ten, twenty years to summon up the courage to exit the geography of constant abuse. #Letr2Jil
25. That sometimes comes when the abuse is ramped up to dangerous dimensions, or when an extraneous factor that disturbs the stability of the marital ecology is introduced. #Letr2Jil
26. Because of shame we sometimes can’t leave our abuser. What are we going to tell society? Where do we start from? And where do we go from here? #Letr2Jil
27. Abuse leads to depression. Depression is a dark dungeon that so consumes the energy of her inmate she does not have the mental capacity to process leaving the cell. Depression is dark energy. #Letr2Jil
28. With depression there’s gravitational collapse of the soul. There’s only one battle – surviving, trying to stay sane. There’s not much energy left for anything else. It’s why the depressed sleep a lot. The body can’t handle the sad energy. #Letr2Jil
29. It’s why I warned you not to go into a loveless marriage. It’s dangerous and depressive. You deserve love. Love produces joy in marriage. #Letr2Jil
30. You don’t want your husband associated with the word “trauma.” The soul doesn’t want to go there. It’s like probing a truculent nerve in the tooth. The very idea of the pain will make you wince. #Letr2Jil
31. There are different kinds of pain. There are pains that feel like treble in music. There are pains that feel like alto and there are pains that feel like tenor. The pain of depression is like a deep bass. It’s not just deep it’s deadening. #Letr2Jil
32. Marital depression murders joy. You want to avoid it altogether. It’s not something to joke with. Depression will change you into a faint version of yourself. #Letr2Jil
33. Get out of this emotionally ruinous marriage, or there’ll be nothing left of you after a few years. Abuse breaks down the critical structure of the soul like the snapping of twigs, one after the other. Your “self” will collapse. #Letr2Jil
34. When we have no “self” there’s nothing more to us. We’re bleached of happiness and personality. We become a pale apparition, a gory caricature wandering the plains of time. #Letr2Jil
35. It’s the vision of a skeleton with sunken eyeballs, staggering all over life like a white walker. Soulless, mindless, brittle to volcanic shards. #Letr2Jil
36. Don’t become a victim of life. Don’t volunteer for the position. Life will always happen but we must avoid becoming her victim. #Letr2Jil
37. A marriage should be full of love. You wake up in the morning and there’s love. You go to work and you feel loved. You’re driving back home and you’re looking forward to love. You come back home and there’s love awaiting you. #Letr2Jil
38. When you have that kind of love your heart will be effused and enthused. There’ll be a warm glow. A thermometer can’t capture it. #Letr2Jil
39. Your heart will be full of invisible gratitude... There will be a smile under your skin... Your life will feel radiant... There’ll be stubborn memory of the feeling of love... #Letr2Jil
40. You’ll be grateful for your spouse... There’ll be certainty in your heart... You will feel a oneness with your spouse, a keenness of spirit... You will look forward to him, he will look forward to you... There will be loving thoughts inside of you... #Letr2Jil
41. Compare that to what you have. You have fear. You’re intimidated. You have regrets. And minor league hatred is developing in your heart. You’re afraid for your life, afraid for your children. How’s this remotely marriage? #Letr2Jil
42. How can marriage be populated with fear and anger and hatred and malice and ill will and abuse and uncare? How’s this monstrosity marriage? #Letr2Jil
43. Marriage is not “I do.” That’s matrimonial concession. The marriage is the relationship. #Letr2Jil
44. The quality of relationship matters in marriage. The quality of relationship you have will determine your happiness. It can prolong your life, or shorten it. #Letr2Jil
45. The more loving your relationship the more wonderful the marriage. The more loving the relationship the more understanding develops. And the more understanding you have the more oneness is engineered. #Letr2Jil
46. Marriage is such a beautiful thing. When it’s ugly it’s un-marriage, a deconstructed antonymy. #Letr2Jil
47. The emotional resources in a marriage are not meant for spousal annihilation. They’re meant for spousal support and encouragement. They’re meant for spousal development. #Letr2Jil
48. An abuser is a metric reducer. He kills you in centimetres, slowly, plucking away your soul like a chalked up juju priest decimating the feathers of a poor chicken designated for sacrifice to Obatala. #Letr2Jil
49. How are you going to cope with tomorrow if you leave? Let tomorrow come. Your immediate focus should be salvation of your soul. #Letr2Jil
50. You can’t give a man manliness. #Letr2Jil
51. He’s just feeling threatened by your professional accomplishments, which is why he’s seeking to reduce you to nothing. He wants to be married to nothing so the little he is will be something. #Letr2Jil
52. I hope you listen to me. If you don’t you’ll waste your life. And at the end you’re going to discover it wasn’t worth it. #Letr2Jil
53. Life shouldn’t be wasted. It’s a precious commodity. #Letr2Jil
54. Your mentor, LA. #Letr2Jil
56. For related letters, search for HE’S ABUSIVE and RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! at jacknjillive.com. #Letr2Jil
57. © Leke Alder | talk2me@lekealder.com. #Letr2Jil
