When Being Watched Felt Like Love

For a long time, I believed I had failed to protect my boundaries in my marriage.

That I had allowed too much. That I hadn’t spoken up clearly or firmly enough. That I had somehow participated in my own erasure.

But that story doesn’t quite hold.

Inside the relationship, I didn’t really have boundaries. Not because I didn’t enforce them — but because I had never learned they were allowed to exist.

As a child, I had no privacy.

None.

My phone calls were listened to. My belongings were gone through and scrutinized. My space was monitored. My behavior was watched closely, evaluated, corrected.

I was punished when things weren’t put away correctly. When I didn’t meet exacting standards. When some aspect of who I was or how I moved through the world failed to measure up.

There was no place to retreat. No internal life that felt protected. No sense that parts of me could belong only to me.

So I grew up understanding that closeness meant supervision. That love came with observation. That being seen was not the same thing as being known.

That conditioning doesn’t disappear when you become an adult.

It follows you.

In my marriage, the dynamic was similar, though it didn’t look the same on the surface.

I was watched. I was supervised. I was belittled. I was punished — sometimes overtly, sometimes quietly. I wasn’t allowed access to his inner world, but mine was treated as open territory.

My actions were monitored. My choices questioned. My independence subtly undermined.

And yes — my body was not fully my own.

There was an assumption of entitlement. To touch. To grab. To penetrate. Not always aggressively. Often casually. As if consent were permanent, rather than something alive and responsive.

At the time, I didn’t know how to name any of this.

It just felt familiar.

I can see now that I did have instincts that tried to protect me, even then.

Please don’t read over my shoulder. Please don’t go through my things. Please don’t monitor what I’m doing. Not because I was hiding anything. But because something in me knew that constant scrutiny was destabilizing. That privacy mattered. That having nothing of my own was not intimacy — it was exposure.

Still, when I tried to speak up, my voice didn’t feel solid. It came out carefully. Quietly. As if I were asking permission to object instead of asserting a right. Speaking up felt dangerous. So I adapted.

I learned to anticipate. To self-correct before being corrected. To minimize myself so I wouldn’t be punished. I didn’t think of this as losing myself. I thought of it as being mature. As being flexible. As being “easy.”

Emotional maturity, as a concept, was foreign to me. In the marriage, feelings were not something we explored together. When I tried to talk about mine, I wasn’t met with curiosity or care. I was dismissed. Demeaned. Made to feel ridiculous for even having them. I was told, in ways both subtle and overt, that I was too much. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too dramatic.

So I learned to hide my feelings. Not because they went away, but because expressing them came at a cost. I learned which parts of myself were welcome and which parts were better kept quiet. Eventually, I stopped offering them altogether.

Only one emotional reality was allowed to take up space, and I learned to adjust myself around it.

At the time, this felt normal. Because it mirrored what I had learned early on: that safety came from compliance, not expression.

I genuinely believed that if my marriage resembled my parents’ relationship, then it must be healthy.

It took years to understand that what I called maturity was actually endurance. That what I believed was compromise was long-term self-suppression. That what I thought was closeness was the absence of privacy, choice, and autonomy. I didn’t fail to hold boundaries. I was raised and conditioned in systems where boundaries were punished, not respected. And once I saw that clearly, I could stop blaming the woman I was for adapting the only way she knew how.

She wasn’t weak.

She was surviving under constant scrutiny — doing whatever it took to avoid being punished for existing.