IN 1978, THE American Indian Movement made news again when they led a spiritual journey across the country that became known as the Longest Walk.⁴¹ The walk aimed to support Indigenous sovereignty and to bring awareness to proposed legislation that would have, among other things, nullified land treaties and limited water rights. It began with a ceremony on Alcatraz Island on February 11, 1978. Thousands of people participated, representing many nations and tribes, including Indigenous people from Canada and throughout the world and non-Indigenous allies. Led by elders, the group reached Washington, D.C., on July 15, 1979.

Sainte-Marie thinks a lot about the Indigenous individuals who worked out of the spotlight on that event. “The bigger movement itself was glorious,” Sainte-Marie says. “It brings tears to my eyes when I think of the unappreciated work that so many people did in those days. A lot of the real power and common sense and drive came from the women, who were kept tangential or who were—it was just their way—to remain in the background.”

Sainte-Marie was one of the few women in the spotlight as one of the headliners at the Longest Walk benefit concert, and her connection to this event was personal: Sheldon Wolfchild and his brother Ernie Peters (also known as Ernie Longwalker) were instrumental in creating the Longest Walk with AIM. And among the participants were her two teenage nieces from Saskatchewan, Marlyn Obey (who is now deceased) and Debra Piapot. The walk was a revelation for Piapot. “We didn’t really know at that time what was going on in terms of Indian issues,” she says. “We weren’t paying attention; we were young teenagers in Regina with a very closed view of the world. I remember thinking and believing some of the negative messages that I got bombarded with at school and by other kids, teachers, and neighbors.”

There’s a great photo from the benefit of Sainte-Marie seated at a piano next to Muhammad Ali, and surrounded by Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Harold Smith, Stevie Wonder, Marlon Brando, actor Max Gail, Dick Gregory, Richie Havens, and David Amram. Piapot remembers the massive event in Washington, D.C., and the huge support from the African-American community as well as from white supporters and even several Buddhist nuns and monks. More importantly, the Longest Walk resulted in real change when in 1979, the U.S. agreed to honor the treaties and vote against the proposed legislation.

“Just to be sixteen and in the thick of it—my whole world expanded,” Piapot says. “It was the first time I understood that there were Indigenous peoples across the world. There were Sami people from Scandinavia, Aboriginal people from Australia, the Maori people from New Zealand. It was a really informative, exciting time, and it was all because of Buffy. Everything was around her voice and her vision and her songs, and that unique ability to bring everyone together.”

But in the following year, Sainte-Marie’s personal life began to fall apart. Her relationship with Sheldon Wolfchild was strained, and like any breakup, there were a few factors that contributed to the dissolution of their marriage. Where to live was one disagreement. Sainte-Marie’s heart has belonged to Hawai‘i since the 1960s, but Wolfchild had been in the Vietnam War and the similarities to Hawai‘i were overwhelming. “It reminded him a lot of Vietnam, and he never was comfortable here. That’s a lot to overcome. He had a love for Minnesota, where he came from, but I didn’t want to live on the mainland,” Sainte-Marie says. Having a child also occupied a lot of their time, and like many new parents, they found it challenging. There was no chance to nap or have a bath or do any of the things that non-parents took for granted. Prioritizing Cody was easy for her, but multitasking work, travel, motherhood, and marriage wasn’t just hard—it became impossible. By the time Cody was about four, Sainte-Marie was a single parent.

“When I was traveling, that was very hard on everybody, but I wasn’t about to give it up completely,” Sainte-Marie says. “In part it had to do with being the one with an obviously greater income. But I have to admit that it was also who I am and what I did and how I contributed to trying to make good change in the world, and I wasn’t about to turn into a regular stay-at-home wife and mother instead of being who I am. I’ve always been clear about being a breadwinner in my life. Nobody has ever supported me. If the marriage is not going to work, there comes a point where a parent has to say, ‘You know what? I think this is going to be easier unmarried than it is married.’”

The pair officially divorced in 1981. “It’s not always for the kinds of dramatic things you see on soap operas—somebody cheated or they hate each other now. No, if it’s not working, you have to figure out how to distribute your attention between your marriage and your parenthood. And I don’t know if anybody gets it right. Anybody in show business, anyway.”

Sainte-Marie says the balancing act between motherhood and her artistic life was also tricky. She remembers how just twelve weeks after giving birth, she was already back on the road, Cody in tow. In Rapid City, South Dakota, she performed a solo concert at the local prison with Cody asleep in her open, velvet-lined guitar case, and Wolfchild by his side. After a series of interviews, Sainte-Marie eventually found a nanny to accompany Cody on the road with her. Sometimes, she’d go out on tour alone for a week and leave Cody at home with the nanny, whom he called Nana.

“It always felt like skating on thin ice to be away from Cody,” Sainte-Marie says. “But he loved Nana and she loved him, too, and was very good to him, and he had playmates among Nana’s grandchildren. Although both Nana and Cody seemed fine with my travels, I didn’t like being away, but concerts were my only real income. Hawai‘i’s a great place to hide from show business, but there’s really not much of a music scene where musicians can work steadily, mostly just hotels and bars playing for tourists. Solo concerts, without added airfares, was how I supported us.”

The same year her divorce from Wolfchild was finalized, Jack Nitzsche came back into Sainte-Marie’s life. They hadn’t seen each other since he’d finished producing her 1971 album, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, an experience that she called “awful.” His moods were mercurial and unpredictable, and in hindsight, it’s easy to see that there was also something predatory about his focused pursuit of Sainte-Marie and how that hinted at darker elements of his personality. “I hadn’t realized at the beginning of recording Ballerina how crazy Jack was,” Sainte-Marie says. “And I don’t mean fun crazy.”

After Sainte-Marie and Wolfchild had split up, Nitzsche called her to say he was coming to Hawai‘i. Could he see her? “He said he needed a melody for a movie that he was working on, An Officer and a Gentleman,” Sainte-Marie recalls. “He couldn’t come up with a melody, and he thought maybe if he came and saw me, we could come up with the melody together, or maybe I had something or seeing me after all these years would spark an idea. Jack used to say that I saved his career because I had that melody for An Officer and a Gentleman. It certainly didn’t save my career, but he thought it saved his.”

Nitzsche painted himself as a reformed drug user. He told Sainte-Marie that he’d fallen into addiction since they’d last seen each other ten years before, but that he had pulled himself out of it. He was clean, and he felt healthy now. “He claimed that he had failed [raising] his own son, and he was so happy for me and Cody that he wanted a second chance to be a father and to give his own son a brother,” she says. “During that [first] visit, he carried Cody around on his shoulders and played silly with him, and made lots of fun. He was always in a good mood. I didn’t question why he was in a good mood; he just seemed like a normal person in a good mood to me.”

Despite personal hardship, he’d flourished professionally since the last time they’d seen each other, moving away from producing rock giants like the Rolling Stones and Neil Young and into film scoring and composing. He earned his first Oscar nomination in 1975 for the music from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and now he wanted Sainte-Marie to help him with An Officer and a Gentleman. But he wasn’t just looking to work together. A few months after their re-acquaintance, the two were on the phone and Nitzsche declared that he still had feelings for her. He wanted a chance to get it right and be a father to both his own son and Cody. She responded somewhat neutrally, and he was devastated.

“He said something like, ‘Oh, my heart. I was just walking up and down Beverly Hills looking at engagement rings.’ And I said, ‘Oh, my god.’ I mean, what can you say to somebody when they say that? It wasn’t like a proposal, but he was coming on like, ‘Now I’m wounded.’ I decided to give him a chance because I didn’t want to wound him. Typical woman, eh?” There’s a shade of incredulity in her laughter as if she still can’t believe she said yes. “But this was not just a con man, and this wasn’t just an act. He really did want a good life. I believe he genuinely did think that if he could be a father to Cody—I mean, he and I had been friends and gotten along, and we do have some things in common. We’re both real smart in an artistic way and quite naïve in business ways. We both liked to talk about spiritual things. He really did want a good life, but he just couldn’t maintain it.”

Nitzsche and Sainte-Marie married in 1982, but she has scant recollections of the wedding itself. Electronic music pioneer and composer Jill Fraser, with whom she had recorded the music for the film Spirit of the Wind, stood up for her at the ceremony as a witness, and writer and director John Byrum stood up for the groom. Nitzsche knew the minister, and she’s pretty sure the ceremony took place at his house. “I wore a white Mexican gauze dress with ruffles that my girlfriend Alicia had given me years before, kind of a soft flamenco thing,” she says. “Cody was there with his nanny, and Jack was mad at me forever because I looked at Cody [during the ceremony]; I was trying to include him. Anyway, I don’t even remember doing that, but Jack never really forgave me. Said I’d married Cody instead of him.”

It didn’t get much better after the wedding day. It turned out that Nitzsche wasn’t clean—he was still using drugs and drinking, too. He went on a methadone program right after they were married, but that meant that he couldn’t travel. And because Hawai‘i didn’t have a methadone clinic at the time, Sainte-Marie felt like she had no choice but to live in L.A. “I didn’t realize when I married him that I was going to give up my home in Hawai‘i,” Sainte-Marie says. “That I would no longer have a car or my clothes and all my personal girl junk, all my makeup and stuff, all my Indian stuff. I didn’t have anything of my own life.”

Nitzsche’s mood swings worsened, and he could be controlling and cruel even when he was clean. “He didn’t believe in other people’s happiness if he was in those black moods,” she says. Nitzsche told her that he had “mental issues” that dated back to his childhood. He’d grown up in the 1940s as the child of German immigrants and had been made to feel like an outcast during and even after World War II. Nitzsche was easily influenced by men he admired or perceived to be powerful. “Jack’s personality reflected an awful lot of Phil Spector’s behavior,” Sainte-Marie says. “All of that kind of nasty, smarmy, misogynistic stuff.” Nitzsche became obsessive and possessive of Sainte-Marie, demanding all of her time and energy. “My career, once we had married, was over for that time period. It wasn’t like I could accept offers of work unless it came through Jack. He would just freak at the mention. I’d do a concert now and then, but big offers for myself were out of the question.”

Sainte-Marie and Nitzsche’s creative collaboration did have one major payoff. Together (along with Will Jennings, who penned the lyrics) they wrote “Up Where We Belong,” the theme song for An Officer and a Gentleman, which won an Academy Award in 1983. Sainte-Marie became the only Indigenous person and the first folk singer to win an Academy Award, and although it should have been a catalyst for publicity and high-profile songwriting gigs and collaborations, there was little opportunity to leverage the honor.

Nitzsche began to push Sainte-Marie into the background. She became his copyist, supporting his career rather than advancing her own. Sainte-Marie says that he would wait until the last minute to write something for a movie score, and when suddenly he knew what it was going to be, he had to act fast and write it down immediately. Sainte-Marie would sit there with her pen and her ruler—this was before computers—and set up music charts for him, numbering all the bars and putting in the cue numbers. “My mom asked me one time, she said, ‘How did that happen? Jack used to be an employee of yours.’ He was never an employee of mine; he was an independent contractor and very talented. But my mom thought that he was kind of an employee of mine, and suddenly he was ‘The Boss’ and pushing me around. How did that happen? How come he got to abuse me?”

Nitzsche did what many abusive, controlling men do to women and isolated Sainte-Marie from her friends. Kayle Higinbotham, Sainte-Marie’s best friend, remembers that when she was around Nitzsche, her skin would crawl. “I didn’t know what it was or what it was from, but I had a very physical reaction to him and fear of him,” Higinbotham says.

“None of the people who were around Jack at that time would see me privately,” Sainte-Marie says. “It’s not as though I ever got to have a real conversation with, like, Leslie Morris, [who] was one of our mutual friends . . . It’s not as though Leslie and I could ever be left alone in the room to talk together. None of Jack’s other friends knew what was going on in our marriage. I had no confidants at all. I was really isolated. It was hard.”

When Nitzsche loved an artist, it was hero worship, Sainte-Marie says, but if he hated them, he truly loathed them. “He was either putting you up on a pedestal or he was pulling you down,” she laughs. “Jack used to say, ‘Jesus Christ, they ought to have closed the border after Neil Young came in.’ He hated Joni Mitchell. ‘Oh please, don’t ever bring up Joni Mitchell because I just can’t stand to hear it,’ he’d say. He didn’t like Leonard [Cohen] either. I’ve never met another person in the world or [even] in fiction who could tear someone apart the way Jack could. It’s as though he was proud of it. It was really something.”

Sainte-Marie describes Nitzsche as a “cyclical alcoholic.” If you imagine a clock, this was his pattern: At noon he was fine, but by ten after the hour, he would get uncomfortable and start giving her the side eye, finding fault with little things and complaining. By 12:30, he’d be boiling. “If he was driving, you started to worry that you were going to have an accident. And by the time he pulled up to the restaurant, well, the poor valet would just get an earful. Jack could be so cruel to strangers, to waiters and waitresses, anybody who happened to be in his way when that nightmare was coming on. Dinner out almost became impossible; it was so embarrassing. And it wasn’t as if he was making a scene to be seen and heard; it was coming from inside him, in an awful rage. [At the restaurant], it wasn’t directed at me, at first, but an hour later, he tried to push me out of a moving car.”

The threatening behavior continued to escalate, but Sainte-Marie believed that Nitzsche was suffering too. “Jack had no control over his mood disorders. During the time I was married to him, three different psychiatrists talked about it in terms of being bipolar, borderline personality, narcissism, and possibly schizophrenia. Even without alcohol for a month, he’d suddenly get a squirt of brain chemicals and turn mean.”

Sainte-Marie says that he also manipulated her to get what he wanted. “He was not beyond playing me—as many men do with family members they perceive as weaker. It’s probably what they got away with, with their moms, only their moms saw through them and thought, ‘He’ll grow out of it.’ Guess what, moms? They don’t grow out of it. They just put it on their partners!”

“I thought I was strong enough to be his support person,” she continues. “One of the hardest things for me was that he changed psychiatrists three times during our marriage, and each time, in order for Jack to be accepted as a patient, I was required to agree to enlist as a support person for at least eighteen months . . . I ‘re-enlisted’ twice, totally against my better judgment. In those circumstances, I thought that I probably could do it. I am strong and I’ve been strong with other people too, when they were in dire straits. But Jack took the cake.”

What Sainte-Marie liked about Nitzsche was his introspection and his intelligence. He could be very funny, and he made her laugh a lot. Even in the middle of being absolutely awful, he’d think of something funny and he’d laugh, too. His sense of humor was self-deprecating, like that of the best comedians, she says. And when he wasn’t suffering, their conversations were wonderful. He was also a brilliantly talented musician, though one of the key differences in their musicality intrigued Sainte-Marie.

“Jack was incredibly gifted, but he couldn’t improvise,” Sainte-Marie says. “I can sit down at any piano in the world and start playing anything, stuff nobody’s ever heard before, including me. Jack couldn’t do that. On the other hand, he could sit down at a piano with a blank piece of music paper in front of him and start writing things down and then play them! He could write these beautiful melodies and incredible orchestrations. There were other wonderful movie composers, but Jack’s music was nothing like theirs—it’s unique. Since Jack came on the scene, a lot of people tried to copy him and learn what they could about his orchestration. He was a true movie composer; he never used a ghost[writer], which is what most busy composers do.”

He was self-aware enough to know that he was “difficult,” but usually it was after-the-fact, once the outburst had passed. Nitzsche suffered some consequences for his outbursts—in a drunken 1974 interview, after he and Sainte-Marie had lost track of each other, he complained at length about Neil Young, and their friendship never recovered—but mostly he got away with a lot of bad behavior. People still wanted to work with him, and even though he was considered among the best in the business at the time, he was sick with self-loathing. “His inferiority complex was probably the most outstanding part of his personality, I think, to anyone who knew him. He was not the cutest pup in the litter, and he hated how he looked. The best that he could do was to try to copy Phil Spector, who he kind of resembled in certain ways. You would think they were cousins. He also looked a little bit like Roman Polanski, only Roman had kind of a Hollywood polish to him and that European accent.”

When Sainte-Marie married Nitzsche, she didn’t know that just a few years earlier, he’d violently assaulted his ex-girlfriend, actress Carrie Snodgress. The two became involved in 1974 after she and Neil Young broke up. Snodgress and Nitzsche eventually split up too, and in 1979, Nitzsche broke into her home and badly beat her, threatened to kill her, and allegedly raped her with his gun. The rape by instrumentation charge was later dropped, and he pled guilty to threatening her and was sentenced to three years’ probation.⁴²

“Poor Carrie Snodgress. I’ve never spoken to her, but Jesus,” Sainte-Marie says. “He hated actresses so much, ‘They lie for a living,’ Jack would say. He insisted they were no good. He would turn his own inferiority complex and self-deprecation against other people. He also felt marginalized, I believe, and told me at length about his abusive mother.” But none of it excused Nitzsche’s threatening behavior and the escalating violence, which he backed up with props. “A couple of times he threw a big ring of keys into a sock and started pounding it into his fist to threaten me. He narrowed his eyes and said, ‘Now what’re you gonna do, ya pig?’”

Sainte-Marie slipped into old patterns of deference, making herself small in order to survive. “Any woman who has lived with a bully or an alcoholic probably knows what it’s like,” she says. “I ‘crawled under’ his dominance again and again, hoping to raise his self-esteem as self-defense. By not arguing and trying to avoid making it worse, I would make myself a smaller target by diminishing myself. ‘I know I’m nothing, and of course you’re God,’ that kind of thing.”

She didn’t know that this was a common survival reaction that abused women used until years later, when she read Louann Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain.⁴³ In response to intimidation, Sainte-Marie adopted typical female survival techniques that Brizendine describes in her book: stay small, hide, monitor his aggression, make mental notes of the exits, avoid escalation, communicate, and do not confront his confrontation because you cannot win in a fist fight. “I should be very clear that Jack never hit me,” Sainte-Marie says. “But Jack, in his threatening ways and intimidation, in his belittling and verbal assaults, could really reduce you to something that you weren’t. And you’d better convince him that you believe you are nothing, or it continues. It continued until he was convinced that I was broken. I was conquered. I was dead. Just make it stop.”

Dr. Brizendine claims that when a woman finds herself in the position of being in a losing fight with a man, especially a man who weighs fifty pounds more than she does and is in the “gorilla stance” men take when they’re angry, the female brain can be on the edge of seizure. “Until I read her book, I didn’t realize that was that feeling that I was having,” Sainte-Marie says. “I would go into the same mental state that I did when I was a child and my brother would beat me up. There’s a feeling where you give up, and you know they’re going to do their worst. With Jack, I would stay calm in my behavior, although I was terrified. I’d be subconsciously checking for the exits and strategizing how to protect my son. And in spite of all that tension, I continued to feel compassion for him. I could empathize. I knew that he was in trouble, even more than me. I continued to feel sorry for him and to respect his talents and skills while hiding my own, but it was hard on me.

“I remember being relieved every time [that he didn’t hit me], and making mental notes that next time could be worse,” she says. “He also liked guns. But most of all, he liked to threaten. Looking back on it now, I can see that he liked to threaten.”

Sainte-Marie managed to work on a couple of film projects of her own, which Nitzsche approved, during their seven-year relationship. She composed the score for a 1986 docudrama titled Stripper about a group of professional strippers on their way to Las Vegas for a contest. Sainte-Marie got to know some of the dancers during the filming and found them fascinating. She also scored Harold of Orange, a short film starring her friend, comedian Charlie Hill, and wrote its theme song, “Trickster.” But she was operating in Nitzsche’s shadow. He not only minimized her contributions to his work, sometimes he even took the credit.

“There’s a lot of music in movies that nobody realizes I wrote during the time that I was married to Jack because Jack sometimes would forget to tell people,” Sainte-Marie says with a laugh. “For the longest time, he couldn’t tell Taylor Hackford [the director of An Officer and a Gentleman] that I had written the melody for ‘Up Where We Belong.’ He didn’t know how to tell him. Jack was supposed to write it himself . . . Taylor wasn’t very happy about finding out that I had actually written it because he thought Jack had. Taylor was always very nice and polite to me, but I think he was just concerned that Jack hadn’t told him. There wasn’t any kind of kerfuffle about me writing it, but about the way it went down.”

Sainte-Marie sang or played or wrote for a number of films that Nitzsche worked on. Sometimes she’d be credited, sometimes not, and she wasn’t usually paid. “One time, I think it was for The Razor’s Edge, a Bill Murray movie, Jack wrote a beautiful, beautiful melody for it, just a fantastic melody, which he always thought was a bit too grand for the movie itself. Jack was a very harsh self critic. He didn’t hold back. He would criticize himself, and if he thought he’d made a mistake, he was very honest about it. Anyway, I had gone with Jack to London when he was recording the music. I sang on some of the movie cues, but instead of having a contract and earning a thousand bucks for having sung something, when I was on the way out, the guy in charge handed me fifty quid [pounds] like I was a hooker. It was so ugly.”

Sainte-Marie was still writing her own songs in secret and recording her private thoughts in her diaries—but then Nitzsche read her diaries. Once he found something she’d written about an old boyfriend who’d died years before, and he went into a rage. But even all of his erratic, threatening behavior couldn’t prepare her for what Nitzsche would do one night towards the end of their marriage. “I think I probably slept with one eye open all the time I was married to Jack,” Sainte-Marie says. “One time, when I was asleep, he did assault me but not by hitting me: he shot me up. He skin-popped me with heroin while I was asleep.”

That violation finally pushed Sainte-Marie over the edge. “I had never chosen to be involved with opiates—I mean, I had been addicted [to prescription opiates] in the 1960s—you know the ‘Cod’ine’ story—so my body recognized it. That was the only time I had been involved with opiates, having been given codeine against my will by a doctor. I hated opiates after that experience, but Jack just thought they were so wonderful that, when I was asleep, he skin-popped me and woke me up. I hated it. It gave me the creeps. The whole world looked like horror. He was dangerous, there was no doubt about it.”

Sainte-Marie started to formulate a plan. She was afraid for herself, but she also became afraid that Nitzsche would hurt her son. “Jack would say terrible things about my little boy. If Cody would make a noise down the hall in his room or cry Jack would go into one of his horrible black moods and say, ‘Go. Go to your baby Jesus, your goddamned baby Jesus in there.’ It became really frightening.”

She set up her escape with the help of Kayle Higinbotham. “I had packed carry-ons and hid them in Cody’s little closet. At four in the morning, I got up, picked up the suitcases, put them by the door, lifted up my son, walked out the door, got in [Kayle’s] car [and] went to the airport. Cody said, ‘Where we going, Mom?’ I said, ‘We’re going home, Cody.’”

After returning to Hawai‘i, Sainte-Marie never went back to Nitzsche’s, not even to pick up her belongings. Nitzsche came to Hawai‘i once after she fled, but she never allowed it again. “I never wanted to be in the same room [with him] again, ’cause it was over. It was just done. I wanted nothing to do with Jack.” She didn’t care whether he paid back the $25,000 she’d given him in the first week of their marriage so he wouldn’t lose his house in Studio City, California, and she had no interest in alimony. “I just wanted my life back, and I wanted to be Buffy again. I didn’t even bother getting a lawyer. I didn’t want to talk to him on the phone. He’d say, ‘Come on, c’mon, you don’t mean it.’ He used every trick in the book. He’d say, ‘Well, are you going to divorce me?’ and I’d say, ‘I want nothing to do with you. I don’t even want to see you for a divorce.’ That’s how much I didn’t want to see him. So I said, ‘If you want a divorce, you divorce me.’ He was so worried I was going take his money. I had no interest in his precious money; all I wanted was never to have to look at him again. Eventually I got some papers in the mail, and I signed ’em and sent them back.”

Even with the divorce papers signed, Nitzsche tried to get Sainte-Marie back, to control the situation and her. “Jack didn’t give up. Until the year before he died [in 2000], he was still trying to get in touch with me. He would call me and try to convince me that I didn’t know what I was doing. There was no arguing with Jack because he understood clearly that he hurt people, for which he would apologize sincerely. He really did. He did know that he’d often treated me very cruelly. I felt sorry for the neighbors who had to hear me cry all the time. He was a terrible, terrible bully and liked me to be frightened. He loved to threaten, but he knew how wrong that was. He was terribly apologetic every time that it happened. But he had no control over it, so he said. And I believe that he didn’t, but it doesn’t make any difference. I couldn’t live with him.” The situation was intolerable and no amount of apologies or explanations could make it worthwhile.

Sainte-Marie is glad she left when she did, but knows that some people won’t understand why she stayed for seven years. In some ways, she’s not even sure. Nitzsche’s relentless bullying was part of it—the isolation and the threats and the violence of his language and his intimidation all factored in—but so was her generous heart and compassion for his suffering. She thought she was doing something important and valuable in staying with him, not abandoning him, and she believed in his creative genius.

“But was it worth it? No,” Sainte-Marie says. “Sisters, it was not worth it. Please, don’t go through it; it’s not worth it. Your sacrifice or martyrdom to Bluebeard means nothing. God is not giving out points for women’s service to bad men. You have a brain: use it. Find a safe way out, find support, make a plan, and escape. Survive. Don’t put your beautiful heart under the thumb of some monster who thinks that your love can heal him. It can’t. It’s sad, but it can’t.”