I’m an avid board game strategist.

This is not a real term, and so I will define it:

My main (favorite) hobby at present is playing super niche and complex strategy board games. If you want some names or recommendations, that’s cool, I’ll preemptively link my board game collection somewhere in this post. Otherwise, I hope it suffices to mention that most of these games are sold at specialty retailers or on Kickstarter, let much exclusively by their creators.

There’s this one game that my partner Russell is obsessed with: Terraforming Mars. (His ultimate favorite is Everdell, but that’s much harder to make into a clever title.)

The goal is to create life on Mars through raising different metrics of livability. Temperature, oxygen levels, and even the emergence of a water source all come into play as win conditions. The game is ultimately competitive, but if you can’t figure out some level of collusion, the game can last upwards of five to six hours. This is especially true when you are first learning the game mechanics.

What does this mean?

Why am I bringing up a board game?

In my repertoire of coursework and professional development, I have taken levels 1 and 2 of the Gottman Method of couple’s therapy. (There is a level 3. But that’s really for independently licensed clinicians only, and I have not reached that.)

We talked about a lot of things.

One glaring theme was that if a couple is in any form of abusive relationship, then it is not appropriate to intervene with couple’s therapy, especially with the Gottman Method. There’s a fancy clinical term for this, contraindicated, but the best way to explain it is my lived experience:

See, abusive behavior isn’t a therapy issue.

When I was with this guy named Scott, he went to therapy and often said it was very helpful and that the counselor was nice. He began saying that couple’s therapy would be a good idea, since he thought there were a lot of things I needed to work on to preserve the relationship.

I quickly realized that he wasn’t being truthful with the therapist and that while he may have a need for and a desire to attend therapy, it provided him the tools to scapegoat me into blame.

But because he was in therapy, I didn’t feel the need to divulge about his nonsense in my personal therapy. It seemed like a waste of my time to do so, and so I avoided the issue, hoping against all odds that it would resolve itself.

In truth, he ended up not going to therapy past one or two sessions. He opted to talk to a pastor about what he was experiencing.

The pastor, Jesse (whose views were as conservative as I am liberal), sided with Scott the entire way through. He would tell me that I was at fault for distressing Scott.

The distress?

I didn’t hide my liberal views, even in a church setting or even in front of a pastor. I was openly bisexual and Scott was fuming out both ears that the church young adults small group still loved me and weren’t berating me for being queer. I was upfront about how much mental health advocacy meant to me, and most often I would talk about that (my queerness wasn’t my focus).

Scott hated that I also had a hormonal disorder called PCOS. He thought (I’m not sure why) that it meant I was transgender. (Admittedly, expecting a boy to understand that hormone compositions aren’t exactly the same as gender or phenotypes may have been on me.)

He hated the transgender community.

He despised anyone nonbinary, as well.

He threw fits over pronouns.

I got so frustrated with this at one point that I decided not to introduce him to any of my queer friends. It wasn’t worth the struggle. I wasn’t going to put my friends through hearing his terrible comments and disdain for human rights.

Eventually, I separated from him.

It took way too much effort.

Overall, though, the relationship taught me that Terraforming my own life included figuring out what values my partner could or couldn’t hold. It taught me that a partner needs to accept me for who I am, and that is non negotiable. It was a tough pill to swallow. But I made it through.

Being with Scott was being depleted of oxygen and water and comfortable climates.

I met someone who said he was different than he ended up being. I don’t apologize for him. Rather, I apologize for how stifled I became. My voice was silenced many times. I didn’t know any more how to be heard, or even when to voice my feelings.

Part of the story is acknowledging that Scott was a big part of my life for over two and a half years, and that came with a lot of struggles. It’s also about stating that the struggles were necessary for me to create a stronger self image.

I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had never met and dated Scott.

XOXO,

Dorothy B