The Honeymoon From Hell

We went to Scotland for our honeymoon from hell, and the local pub was our very first port of call. Whisky had wanted to introduce me to some of his friends, catch up with them, etc. We could “kill two birds with one stone,” as he said.

So, off we went, all dressed up, stopping at the ATM on the way. He was laughing and joking, clearly excited to see his buddies. It was infectious; it made me excited, too. He gave me the low-down on what to expect as we walked to his not-so-local. There was the one friend who was going through a breakup, so we shouldn’t mention his ex. And that other friend who always got too drunk and ended up going on solo adventures. My husband seemed genuinely happy to be seeing his people again, and I was happy for him. It was nice to see the happy, carefree side of him again.

I got on with his friends like a house on fire, and we had a really, really great night. Lots of laughs. Lots of learning the local lingo. Lots of tales of times gone by that made Whisky blush for the first time ever in front of me. Honestly, it was brilliant. All of those pre-wedding doubts started to fade away for the first time. I can do this, no problems, I thought to myself.

Towards the end of the night, I watched as Whisky, my husband, got a little too close to a girl at the bar… for the third or fourth time that night. Tall, skinny, everything I wasn’t, you know. She was touching his arm, then laughing – all the typical flirting techniques. I wasn’t having that on my damn honeymoon, so I made my way to the bar and introduced myself. It went down like a lead balloon. She kept her back to me the entire time, and he didn’t look at me once.

Well, that’s embarrassing.

That one move – me, introducing myself – turned the entire night on its head. I had fucked it. He ignored me for the rest of it. Not her, of course. Oh, no. She had his full attention… on my fucking honeymoon.

I was beyond mad at him for very obvious reasons, and by the time we left the bar, all I wanted to do was go home and sleep. He wanted food, so we stopped at his favourite late-night burger place.

“Can you grab me a burger, please? Just cheese and ketchup,” I asked.

He nodded, but only came back with one portion: his. When I asked him why, he said: “Think you’ve had enough, don’t you?”

I’d put on weight after having the contraceptive implant put in my arm and was struggling to lose it after removal. He knew that. It felt like he’d slapped me around the face with that. In fact, I wish he’d just done that instead. That one comment seemed crueller than all of the violent events put together.  

Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite finished yet.

He started telling me how much he preferred that girl at the bar. I was the “consolation prize because she chose someone else”  It made me cry. Of course it made me cry. It would make anyone cry and ESPECIALLY on their honeymoon.  

He still wasn’t done, though.

He pulled his half-eaten burger apart into two halves, then threw them at me. One. Pause. Then the other.

“You’re a cunt,” he said. “And you’ve ruined my food.”

He followed that by dragging me to the ground by my hair, then spitting in my face. Whisky did so many bad things during the course of our relationship, but spitting in my face always seemed so much worse than anything else. I don’t know why. I just remember feeling lower than the ground. Worthless. Like I belonged with the trash, along with his spit, on the dirty floor.

We were right outside the food place, with people inside – three men if I remember rightly. My husband didn’t care, and nor did anyone else. Nobody did anything. They just watched as he dragged me into the parking lot by my hair. It scraped the skin away from the tops of my feet. The right foot was a little worse than the left, and the scars on both feet have faded somewhat over the years… but they’re still there. I suffer from eczema in just those two spots on my body. Nowhere else; just the scars from that night.

Eventually, a man walking by called something out. I couldn’t make out what. It made Whisky stop, though, so I was thankful for that.

We walked back to his mother’s house without saying a word, and I cried the entire way.

The next morning, he apologised profusely, over and over again, and brought me breakfast to apologise for “the burger thing.” He was the nicest man in the world for the rest of the honeymoon.

By the time we finished our honeymoon, I started to wonder if I’d imagined the entire episode.

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: Day One.