The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention

by Anonymous

Editor’s note: The following story is true. It was sent to me by a reader who thought it would be cathartic to share her experience here. She wants to help people going through something similar feel less alone.

Later this week, I’ll share a longer response piece. This piece is gut-wrenching and much heavier than what I usually share here.

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“That poor counselor,” I thought to myself.

My husband and I were sitting in the marriage counselor’s office. When he found an opening, he launched into a monologue about how financially successful he was–well–we were. The counselor, a quiet woman in her 60s, seemed uncomfortable. Neither one of us could get a word in.

I was in my mid-20s, and he was in his early 30s. 

He was right. Our finances were in pretty good shape for our age. But I wondered why he felt the need to focus on our finances when we were trying to save our marriage. Maybe he meant to convince the counselor that our marriage performed just as strongly as our portfolio. 

Or maybe it was just that not many other people had listened to him so intently. He just wanted her approval.

The counselor I found for us didn’t comment on our finances, her face blank. At a certain point, she told us our time was up and ushered us out of the office. Although my husband seemed to enjoy talking to her, I did not make another appointment.

*

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, I would get a temporary green card in a year.

I could file for divorce as soon as it arrived.

Alternatively, I could divorce right away and restart the green card application process through my job. If I did, I would have to keep my job throughout the process for some years. Middle management had been acting chaotic lately. Some of my coworkers were pushed out. A divorce would make me happier immediately, but it would be a risky move.

There is another option that I could wait for another three years in this marriage to get a permanent green card, but did I want to? I didn’t think I was even capable.

One year, I could wait. Three, I couldn’t.

*

My husband hinted that he was browsing r/deadbedrooms, a subreddit for couples who had stopped having sex. I didn’t give it much of a thought. But when I checked the site, I found men on it very whiny. They didn’t seem to care about improving their connection. They just blamed the lack of sex on their female partners.

Later on, my husband told me he wanted to get an anime waifu pillow. I wasn’t sure why he had to tell me about it. 

I wasn’t his boss. He could buy whatever he wanted without my approval.

He ordered a pillow straight from Japan and showed it to me. It’s a body long pillow with a sexy anime girl printed on it. I said something along the lines of, “Nice pillow. The price is reasonable too. It’s great you can directly order stuff from Japan these days.”

He deflated it and put it somewhere in the storage.

I didn’t know when or if he “used” it.

*

I liked Reddit for a while. I liked reading people’s conversations.  

There were people from all walks of life talking about what they did. Teachers, nurses, police officers, blue-collar workers… As an immigrant, I found America’s ever-squabbling population fascinating. They can be annoyingly ignorant about the other parts of the world, but they are almost never boring to observe. And here they were. You can catch a glimpse of their lives on Reddit.

My husband liked the hentai subreddits the most.

He told me about some categories of hentai he enjoyed, some of them seemed fine, but many of them were disturbing.

The most disturbing ones he told me about included “hard vore,” “a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or to personally consume, another person or creature.” He liked the drawings in which anime girls were swallowed whole by monsters.

The other thing he liked was images of sexual intercourse that involved penises so large that the women’s belly “inflated.” She was being impaled by an impossibly large dick. It’s hentai, so I guess people can draw whatever they want. But it looked painful. It didn’t look sexually appealing.

He also liked r/hentaihumiliation. Again, it didn’t look sexually appealing.

My guess was he was desensitized from an early age. 

He also liked watching videos of people getting accidentally killed. He said watching these videos made him a more careful driver and machine operator. But it seemed to be his hobby, the videos didn’t look like anything remotely educational.

His parents were very strict and religious and didn't allow him to play with other kids much, so he was in the basement on the computer all the time as a kid. 

His taste for more potent pornography escalated over the years.

Thank god we only had the most vanilla sex in practice and not often. It was difficult for him to get an erection. When he did, it was hard to cum. I was mostly just bored and dry. 

Sex with my husband felt like completing a task, so I never initiated any.

*

Normalcy. 

I liked going to work. My coworkers and I were all pretty stressed out. But at least it felt normal. 

Some of them were Americans, and some of them were new immigrants like me. We discussed revenue streams, new products, deadlines, and other business stuff during our meetings. We ate lunch together, and I listened to their life and immigration problems. 

Some older coworkers took parental leave.

These people and their problems felt so normal.

I liked being immersed in that normalcy.

*

In the beginning, my friends and my family all thought my husband was pretty normal despite being a little bit shy. 

But whatever stopped him from socializing with others was deeper than shyness. Eventually, it took too much effort to include him in activities because he was always so unwilling. He claimed he was an introvert.

I started to socialize on my own.

He refused to teach me to drive because “I would be out partying all the time by myself.”

I was fairly annoyed that I had to spend a lot of money on driving school and also pay half of the car loan. And what was wrong with “partying all the time” if he himself wanted to avoid people?

It wasn’t like this before the marriage. 

We had a friend group. We went out. 

What didn’t I see? 

When I told him I was uninterested in anime and hentai before marriage, he was hurt. He told me he felt judged and not accepted, so I was like, whatever, and stopped offering my opinions on these matters.

*

Our parents started pushing for babies, and he also wanted babies. I told everybody I wanted to focus on my career for now.

But that wasn’t the whole story. 

Practically, I didn’t know how to raise a baby without driving in our area. But mostly, I didn’t want to have children with him.

My coworkers sometimes spoke about raising children. One father told me how relieved he felt about his daughter finally graduating from potty training and how much daycare centers cost these days. Another father complained about his son losing his pairs of glasses all the time, and he suspected that the son was intentionally “losing” glasses because he didn't look cool with glasses on. They seemed stressed. 

When my husband discussed raising children, he did not talk about things like daycare costs, potty training, or glasses.

My husband asked me if we’d allow kids to have sex as teenagers. 

“If they had good sex education and knew how to use protection, I suppose,” I grunted, not wanting to think too deeply about my hypothetical children having sex.

“Yeah, it’s cute when kids have teenage sex. I didn’t have any growing up.”

I recalled another conversation we had at some point. He really, really wanted two daughters because he wanted to dress them up. I asked him what if I got pregnant with a son, and he said if our baby was a boy, he’d like me to get an abortion.

Another time, I asked my husband what would happen if we couldn’t handle the workload a child requires and regretted having a child.

He told me there were government agencies where you could give children away.

*

One day, seemingly out of the blue, he talked about how he thought there was nothing wrong with sex between siblings if both of them consented. 

I thought about it and shrugged it off since I couldn’t think of any reason why it would be terribly wrong either if they were both adults, it just felt gross. The more I thought about it, the more it disturbed me.

When he thought through this subject, was he thinking about his own sister?

I liked his sister. She was a cheerful person.

*

When I say “thank god,” it’s not because I’m religious. 

“Than-k. Go-d,” if you tap the tip of the tongue twice against your teeth hard, it sounds like a curse. 

Try it, say “thank god,” but in the spirit of “fuck this shit.”

Thank god for birth control.

*

I compulsively checked the USCIS website for my green card updates. It was already delayed a few times.

My husband got into another subreddit, r/asiangirlsbeingcute. He showed it to me. 

r/asiangirlsbeingcute wasn’t as disturbing as the hentai ones. It’s mostly just Korean idols making faces.

The site seems to be a place for Asian fetishists.

I’m Asian.

*

My husband wasn’t super into Korean culture. He was mostly into Japanese culture. 

He once traveled to Japan and bought some futanari hentai manga and hid them in our bookshelf. When he showed them to me, I took one glance at them, and decided that I hate futanari.

One time, he told a friend of ours that he would move to Japan after making a lot of money here in the US. 

I felt a sudden surge of anger and said, “You can move there by yourself.”

*

I somehow became a ringleader of fun at work. 

I organized outings for coworkers, anything that got me out of my home. I joined a band and busied myself with practicing music. I signed up for difficult on-the-job training and always did homework when I was home.

My husband showed me some non-sexual manga (thank god) one day about how a tsundere girl had trouble expressing love to another girl. She was misunderstood in the manga and felt very sad and lonely. 

(Tsundere: a cold, aloof person who has trouble showing affection and is usually hostile to people they like.)

My husband said he felt just like this girl.

I cringed.

*

Two prepubescent girls in the same bikinis, Caucasian, approximately 8 years old. They looked alike. They must be sisters. 

One girl was hovering on top of the other in one picture. 

One girl was touching the other girl in another picture.

In one other picture, they faced each other, their lips pouting as if they were going to kiss each other. 

Their eyes were looking at the camera.

My husband showed me this group of pictures and told me that he thought these two girls were very cute.

I counted the days toward getting my green card whenever my husband talked about stuff I didn’t like.

After he showed me these pictures, I cried in private.

*

My husband said he liked writing and showed me a couple of stories he wrote. In one story, a Girl Scout traveled around in space, selling Girl Scout cookies to spaceships. She had sex with aliens.

In another story, a girl-devil took revenge on pedophiles after being raped and killed by an adult man in her former life. In this story, he described how the girl was killed.

My husband said Girl Scouts were boring, and Boy Scouts were cool. His sister was in Girl Scouts, and he was in Boy Scouts.

*

There were only a couple of months until my green card arrived, according to the USCIS website. A temporary green card would allow me to stay in the US and work, regardless if we stay married or not. It was not the most secure form of immigrant documentation, but I wanted out as soon as possible.

When did I first start contemplating the possibility of divorce? It was before I signed up for marriage counseling. 

It was when he sent a message asking me what I was doing, and I told him I was reading about feminism. He said if I kept reading about feminism, I’d start to read about the red pill (frowny face emoji). 

I didn’t know what the red pill was, so I looked it up.

*

He mentioned he was into 4chan when he was younger, but it was no longer true. I knew what 4chan was because I once read in the news about how 4chan users attacked Emma Watson for being a feminist.

He was very liberal on every other issue like economy, climate change. He always voted for Democrats, and donated to the ACLU.

*

My husband asked me to check out r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns, I did, and found all the anime girl memes cringe. 

But I didn’t care because I would be free soon.

My husband came out as trans, as I expected, since “indirectly communicate through introducing new subreddit” seemed to be a pattern at that point. I asked him why, and he said he liked it when skirts go spinny. 

He felt like a woman.

And he'd love the feeling of being pregnant. He also mentioned something about pillow fights between girls.

*

If my husband had told me something in person, and later I came across the exact same words on Reddit, I’d cringe, hard. 

I don’t know why this behavior makes me cringe so much.

Was it because he wouldn’t tell me he saw it on Reddit? Or was it because he took Reddit posts so seriously that he talked about it like they were his own original thoughts and feelings? 

Anyway, through some quick research, I found out that all the reasons he listed about “feeling like a woman,” were cribbed from Reddit. 

I encouraged him to transition. I acted supportive and open-minded.

*

USCIS finally sent me a temporary green card. Shortly after, I announced that I wanted a divorce and moved out. He came out to other people as trans. 

He did not want a divorce and threatened to take his own life. I did not take his threat seriously.

At some point, he accepted it and said, “You married a man, and you are not a lesbian, it's understandable you don't want to stay married to a woman.” 

*

When we went through the divorce papers in person. We chatted about what was going on in each other's lives. 

Hormones made my ex-husband feel “like a teenage girl” all the time. 

So many intense emotions, I was told. My ex-husband was also reading a feminist book.

I thought back to my teenage years. When I was a teenage girl, I mostly thought about school, America, and a couple of boys. I decided that I needed to become an American and worked very hard toward this goal. 

I read American news to learn English and American culture. I watched anime for a couple of years because my friends were into it, and then I grew out of it. The other teenage girls and I rallied around our dreams, higher education. 

It was stressful, but I felt happy, confident, and surrounded by friends. 

Teenage girls make the best friends, to other teenage girls. 

None of the teenage girls I knew befriended adult men.

Adults in our lives would be on high alert if we did.

*

My husband never asked me what it was like to be a teenage girl. I was glad he didn't. These experiences and friendships were special. 

I didn’t want these memories to be tainted by my husband.

I smiled and nodded to my now ex-husband. He droned on and on about “teenage girl feelings.” 

We parted our ways one last time.

*

I asked various professionals whether the bikini photos of these prepubescent girls my ex-husband showed me counted as illegal child pornography. I got different answers. 

When I finally became a US citizen a few years later, I walked into the police station.

The young officer who took my case was professional and solemn. He listened attentively and expressed how sorry he felt for me and how glad he was that I had made my way out. 

He thanked me for reporting my ex-husband and said it was brave.

“Although, one thing I don’t understand, why would he show these photos to his wife?”

“I know right? I have no fucking clue.”

We gazed at each other for a few more seconds.

“Maybe..” I speculated, “Maybe it feels very lonely to be a pedophile.”

The officer nodded slowly as if I just said something profound.