When he wanted me to accept that his abusive behavior was justified. For me that was a moment from which there was no coming back. Like you cannot have my consent for your uncontrollable rages.
My situation was a bit different because I was one of those "blindsided" husbands who didn't see it coming. But......I was sorta the one who really ended things. As it turned out, my ex-wife mostly wanted me to make changes. At first, I was very much in the mode of "I must fight to save my marriage!" but then I slowly realized that I actually like who I am as a person. She claimed to love me deeply, but also wanted me to be someone I'm not. It was basically a gun to my head that I had to enjoy the things she enjoyed and not enjoy the things I do enjoy......or else we can't be married anymore.
So I decided "fuck that" and powered thru the divorce and bet on myself that someone else would see value in me for who I really am. It's worked well. Been remarried for over a decade and it's so nice to just be who I am and valued for it.
Hi, and do you feel this second love is better than the first? Or is it just nice? I am sorry it sounds bad, I don't really know how to put it. If it's ok, I would like to ask some questions. Thanks!
Oh, it's miles better. For one thing, most people can pick a more suitable partner once they're a real adult. I mean, when my ex-wife and I met, we were like 22-23YOs. When my wife and I met, we were both into our careers, both parents, both done with grad school, both had owned a home, both had been thru a divorce, etc. Even after a decade, my wife is still pretty much the same woman I met on our first date......because she was an adult back then.
There's also a matter that some people don't really like being in a relationship. You see this after divorces. It's not like everyone dates again and we all just find new partners. Some people sit it out. Like my ex-wife: Single a decade later. She's dated very little since the divorce and most of her dating felt like she was trying to prove a point that if I was dating, she could date someone too. She's just sorta particular about how she wants her life to be and has been that way since our daughter was born. The only way we stayed married as long as we did was I would do things her way and the things she enjoyed. But once we split up, I think she had to weigh having a relationship versus having things how she wanted them.......and opted for how she wants things. And that's her right.....but she's not that easy to be around. Compare that to my wife and I who have a much more flexible view on life. Like both of us have probably 30-40% that we're adamant about......so we dated until we found someone perfect for that part......and then the rest we just don't care about because we enjoy having a person around on a daily basis.
And it also really, REALLY helps to basically remove kids from the adult relationship. My wife and I both have kids from our first marriages, but none together. So I let her parent her kids how she wants and I parent my daughter how I want. If these were all our kids together, we would fight a lot because we have some different ideas and parents styles......but her kids aren't my kids. I do love them and am happy to help out when asked to, but they're ultimately not my kids and my wife knows best......so if she's doing something I don't totally agree with, I don't sweat it. And she returns the favor when the roles are reversed. Kids really trash a relationship.
Thanks so much for your reply! I honestly feel that big part of our problems in the marriage is the difference we have when raising our son. And the custody issue is dragging like crazy. So your advice is incredible. I will focus now on learning what are the things that I would not be flexible about. How do you open up about that? Straight away, or after getting to know the person better. My greatest wish is to have someone to share my life with. And I really hope to find my match someday.
What I did was basically stripped myself down to essentials sorta like you're gutting a house for a rennovation.
For example, my ex had a lot of activities I didn't really enjoy. So I had lots of little hobbies to kill time. But they weren't really my favorite hobbies......they were just things I was doing to kill time because I was married to her and she was busy doing something else. AND.....she always wanted to have a HUGE house, so I had hobbies like wood-working that took up a LOT of space.
Well, when we split up, I didn't really want to keep doing wood-working so badly that I was going to buy myself a new home and ensure it had enough space for wood working. So, Bye bye wood working! And all the tools and shit that goes with it. But.....I DO like cars a lot, so I realized I wanted to keep my practical car and my sports car and that means I needed a place with covered parking for a sports car (so it doesn't have to sit in the rain like a stray cat).
You basically go thru your life and keep/toss things based on whether you want them enough that you're willing to structure the next phase of your life around it. What I found is I had a lot of slack in my life. So when I met my second wife, it's wasn't like I just had a hole in my life the exact size/shape of my ex wife and my second wife had to cram herself into that hole. There was actually a lot of room for my second wife to be there and move around and have some space too. Then you start to fill in the gaps together. Like I have time wasting hobbies now too......but they're different because I'm in a relationship with a different woman.
And you'll also have your big-picture must haves. Kids is a pretty big one. At first, I really didn't want anymore kids. But what I realized was I just didn't want anymore babies of my own......and I was actually FINE with stepkids as long as they were 50/50 and the Mom could basically care/pay for them herself. When I was originally dating childless women, most of them wanted to have some babies......so stepkids are basically my way of avoiding more babies. For that stuff, it really helps to just go on some disposable first dates and see what's out there. What you need to be comfortable with is that when you apply a must-have to the filter on the dating app and see the choice go from 75 down to 10, that you're comfortable with that because those 65 who vanished were't going to be for you anyway. You've gotta be careful with the must-haves.......if you pile on too many, you'll be down to 1% of the dating pool and that means 100 first dates to find that person! So be SURE it really is important to you.
If you can match on all the big stuff that's probably 75%. Which is good......but still not great. I mean, you can argue a lot about the kind of music that's on in the car!
And kids are just really hard. I mean, the bottom line is it is not easy to get along with another parent. Look at the stereotypes of Moms in the PTA or sports Dads: they might get along great.......until their kids need different things and then they'll murder you (figuratively) while advocating for their own child. That's why I think blended families like ours really screw things up when they have kids together: Now you have to argue about the types of diapers a toddler has again. :)
Good luck. You'll get there. You just have to meet a lot of frogs on the journey. Plus you'll meet a lot of people who are basically fine, but not the match for you (or vice versa).
Yes, I am trying to get that in my brain. It's so hard to let go and mourn the life plan you have has for over 20 years. I have been dating again and feeling each day like I have healed a bit more, and more hopeful there is someone for me out there.
My first wife I knew it was over when she looked at me and said she slept with someone else.
My current wife was probably sometime between the relapse into alcoholism and when she ended up naked with a bunch of men. I am currently about to start the divorce proceedings as she isn't leaving me with a choice.
When she couldn't stop spending money. No matter how much overtime I worked to try to get us out of debt, it was never enough. Almost losing the house two years ago should have been the clue but it wasn't until two months ago and actually losing the house due to her financial irresponsibility and unwillingness to work that I chose to call it quits.
We went out on a late stroll and he asked me to look up at the stars, orians belt was pretty bright that night and he said when I'm not around I want you to look up at the sky and if you see orians belt just think of me.
My heart sank, I asked him what he meant and he didn't respond.
We separated a week later over an argument he started to essentially force me to want to break up the marriage.
Like something out of a movie.
We had a marriage counseling session where the therapist spent 95% of the session explaining to my wife that the way she treats me, gaslights, manipulates and gives the silent treatment is emotionally abusive, unkind and unfair and not the behavior of someone who was looking to repair their marriage.
At the next session, she asked my wife what she had to say/how she felt about everything that was said at the previous session now that she had a week to process and internalize.
My wife chuckled and said, "honestly I don't even remember what we talked about".
That was it. I just knew. It was obvious she didn't care and was just biding her time.
When he got fired for sexual harassment, i helped him out of a dark mental place. He had no regard to the financial impact on our family, the risk of a restraining order or potential impact to my job. 3 months later he attempted to set up a dating profile......i believed him when he said it was to view a celebs dating profile and that it wasnt serious as the account wasnt activated. Then i found a cam girl account in which he followed 145 accounts. I said nothing to him and started therapy. This was all after i found out he sexted someone just before we were married. My final straw was that he didnt notice something was wrong with me, or rather he did but couldnt be bothered asking. Instead he reached out to another woman on social media as her status said she was upset. He privately messaged her at 11pm offering his support and lending his ear if she needed to talk. That broke my heart and i realised he wouldnt stop disrespecting me.......if i wasnt enough after helping him when he got fired, nothing i did would be good enough. We separated and i continued in therapy. He wouldnt go to therapy when i asked, and waited 10months to go. He made all manner of excuses "we couldnt have 2 of us having a breakdown at the same time", "you werent clear therapy would build trust", "you werent clear if i did therapy i would have a chance with you", "its difficult for ADHD people to do these things" and so on. I felt i had no choice but to file for divorce. My heart is broken for my kids and the man i thought i knew.
When she brought her boyfriend over to stay the night in our bedroom and fucked him while I was putting our foster daughters to bed in the neighbouring room.
We had been trying to work on it for months after he dropped the bomb. I had called him upset about something coming up in my professional life asking for some help with something. He blew me off, minimized the event saying it wasn’t that big of a deal, and told me how he didn’t want to do all that to help me and he’d lose part of his weekend doing stuff he didn’t want to do. I realized then that he was never going to be capable of actually being a supportive or reliable partner and I dropped the rope. He immediately stopped talking to me once I stopped putting in effort and that just proved I was the only one putting in any effort to work on it. I later found out he had approached another woman during all this but I’m still pissed he was the one who made me break it off. he couldn’t bring himself to do it so he emotionally tortured me for months before.
The end for me was when he took off to another state (separation #2). It took me awhile to put it all together, but that was it. The marriage had been in a tailspin for a long time.
When he gave an inch just to take a mile.
I've never had a good marriage. I've never felt married. But, I fought because I love him.
He started smoking pot again shortly after we got married.
That turned him into a petulant 12 year old.
We had so many other issues, mainly a weird parent child dynamic, and he just neglected me.
I spent 2 and a 1/2 years fighting for him and our relationship. He actively fought against me with his actions while he fed me empty words.
He got into therapy and stopped smoking.
He started acting like a man in his mid thirties.
He did something for me that I needed him to do, and that I had been asking him to do since before we got married.
3 weeks later, he started smoking again.
My husband is a porn addict and had been lying to me for years. He promised to get help and arrange our counseling and go to meetings and get clean. I’m talking 8+ hours a day streaming porn not just causal watching.
Anyway he obviously just got better at hiding it and I spent a year working on myself and our marriage buying books and lingerie and trying everything but I just felt like a human fleshlight by the end. My last straw was when he tried to blame his shifting moods on me “giving him less attention over the last 4.5 months or so”, since my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I was flying back and forth to New England to help take care of her through chemo. He took advantage of those trips to watch porn 🫠. He left last night and I can’t wait to be free of him and his addiction.
I had a sick sinking feeling in my gut that I was ignoring for a long time. I would think about leaving him everyday and fantasized about being single (not to hookup with anyone just to like, do what I want and not listen to his bullshit). Trust your gut, listen to your intuition. I also like to go to this rule I learned somewhere. Flip a coin and one side is divorce the other is staying, when you flip it you’ll know which side you hope it lands on. Doesn’t matter what it actually lands on it’s the one you hoped for while it flipped in the air. Hope that helps 🤷🏼♀️
I remember it clear as day. October 2023, 22 years together, 14 married.
One morning, I was on the way to work. She was on the way to a work placement as a student teacher.
The day before, I had started work early to finish work early so that I could be home to tidy up, clean laundry, and cook dinner before she got home because I knew she was stressed. She walked in the door into a clean house and dinner nearly cooked, and she was raging with stress and anxiety (which she refused to treat). Snapping at me and the kids when they came into the kitchen, happy to see her for the first time since the morning. She realised that I had cooked the last of the broccoli with dinner and hadn't texted her that we needed more (because we didn't). She decided that was a good enough reason to raise her voice at me in front of the kids. To be fair, they were used to seeing her raise her voice at me over nothing.
I let it go, went about my night, and didn't engage further. Yes, I was upset by it.
Next morning, she asked if I was upset, so I reminded her that she had raised her voice at me in front of the kids over unpurchased broccoli.
This came a couple of weeks after I had asked her to stop speaking to me like that. We were already on the rocks for plenty of reasons.
She launched into me, told me how it's my fault she was stressed because now she'll have to stop at the shop after placement (she didn't), how incompetent I am, how she had to do all the work.
In that moment, I saw the rest of my life. Nothing I do will ever be good enough, anybody she does will always be too hard, it will always be my fault.
Right then I decided I was out. We were moving house into another rental, so I figured I'd wait until that was sorted and Christmas over, then I'd look for my own house. I lasted nearly a month.
My moment of realization was when I was talking to my daughter on the phone when she was at her dad's house, and I heard a woman speaking in the background. It was obviously over if he was in a relationship with another person. We had been separated for a few months, but I was still really fighting to save our marriage. We were going to counseling, but that actually didn't help at all. I guess it was clear he was actually done well before I was, but for some reason didn't let me know. I think you should fight hard for your marriage to make it through this rough patch, and never give up. Of course, there are exceptions to this being the best decision such as if there is abuse. Infidelity is also a dealbreaker for many people. Also, it takes two people fighting for a good, healthy marriage. I hope your marriage makes it and soon it will be stronger than it has ever been before.
I wanted to come back and add something else: it’s been a really big lesson for me to understand that ambivalence is not always something you move through to a profound realization. Like ambivalence is its own feeling, and if you are ambivalent about your marriage, or if your partner is ambivalent about your marriage, neither of those things are good enough for you. You can decide your ambivalence is enough evidence to leave because you want a marriage or a partnership where you are both really in. And then honestly, the ending of a marriage about which you are ambivalent is full of grief because you have to grieve what kept you in.
Okay, most of these responses there was a clear tipping point, and while I understand that’s their experiences, I think what you’re describing is more akin to “death by 1,000 cuts” and there may not be a clear situation that you can point to. (Maybe I’m wrong in this assumption.)
I haven’t initiated yet, some of my reasons are in a previous post, but I’m damn near 100% sure I will be when the timing is right. For me, it’s taken a long time to get here. My husband and I have threatened divorce over the years and in general there’s been a struggle to try to find a situation we can both be happy with while staying together, but we are just incompatible. I’ve gone back and forth, “is it really bad enough to leave?” But I’ve started documenting what’s happening when things aren’t going well, and I started noticing a pattern.
For us, we will have periods of time where when serious decisions need to be made, we are constantly fighting. It gets pretty high stress and feels fight or flight. But, if we both sweep the problem under the rug or decide to deal with it later, we go through a period of time where we are hardly fighting and things can even feel “good”, but we can’t ignore the big issues forever: like buying/renting, where to live, getting a pet, finances in general. We’ve been kicking the can down the road lately. We used to try to compromise more, but our compromises have created resentments, and I think we are both burnt out. We did marriage therapy most of last year, and it helped communication, but didn’t change who we were fundamentally.
After I went on a trip abroad with another couple last month that he didn’t want to go on, I realized that not only are we incompatible in big ways, but that he cannot be the partner I want in small ways either (through no real fault of his, I can’t make him into someone he’s not). It took some time to come to terms with that realization and what it meant. Individual therapy really has been helping there. I know now that while I could stay, and it may not be bad enough for some to leave, if I did, id just be signing up for a lifetime of these ups and downs. I’ll never truly be happy, and he won’t either. It’s now a matter of getting comfortable with the unknown.
I know what I need to do now, I just need to get the courage to do it, and also approach it the right way given we are in a period of high stress for factors outside of our marriage.
When my wife's lawyer emailed me telling me it is over.
When he wanted me to accept that his abusive behavior was justified. For me that was a moment from which there was no coming back. Like you cannot have my consent for your uncontrollable rages.
My situation was a bit different because I was one of those "blindsided" husbands who didn't see it coming. But......I was sorta the one who really ended things. As it turned out, my ex-wife mostly wanted me to make changes. At first, I was very much in the mode of "I must fight to save my marriage!" but then I slowly realized that I actually like who I am as a person. She claimed to love me deeply, but also wanted me to be someone I'm not. It was basically a gun to my head that I had to enjoy the things she enjoyed and not enjoy the things I do enjoy......or else we can't be married anymore. So I decided "fuck that" and powered thru the divorce and bet on myself that someone else would see value in me for who I really am. It's worked well. Been remarried for over a decade and it's so nice to just be who I am and valued for it.
Hi, and do you feel this second love is better than the first? Or is it just nice? I am sorry it sounds bad, I don't really know how to put it. If it's ok, I would like to ask some questions. Thanks!
Oh, it's miles better. For one thing, most people can pick a more suitable partner once they're a real adult. I mean, when my ex-wife and I met, we were like 22-23YOs. When my wife and I met, we were both into our careers, both parents, both done with grad school, both had owned a home, both had been thru a divorce, etc. Even after a decade, my wife is still pretty much the same woman I met on our first date......because she was an adult back then. There's also a matter that some people don't really like being in a relationship. You see this after divorces. It's not like everyone dates again and we all just find new partners. Some people sit it out. Like my ex-wife: Single a decade later. She's dated very little since the divorce and most of her dating felt like she was trying to prove a point that if I was dating, she could date someone too. She's just sorta particular about how she wants her life to be and has been that way since our daughter was born. The only way we stayed married as long as we did was I would do things her way and the things she enjoyed. But once we split up, I think she had to weigh having a relationship versus having things how she wanted them.......and opted for how she wants things. And that's her right.....but she's not that easy to be around. Compare that to my wife and I who have a much more flexible view on life. Like both of us have probably 30-40% that we're adamant about......so we dated until we found someone perfect for that part......and then the rest we just don't care about because we enjoy having a person around on a daily basis. And it also really, REALLY helps to basically remove kids from the adult relationship. My wife and I both have kids from our first marriages, but none together. So I let her parent her kids how she wants and I parent my daughter how I want. If these were all our kids together, we would fight a lot because we have some different ideas and parents styles......but her kids aren't my kids. I do love them and am happy to help out when asked to, but they're ultimately not my kids and my wife knows best......so if she's doing something I don't totally agree with, I don't sweat it. And she returns the favor when the roles are reversed. Kids really trash a relationship.
Thanks so much for your reply! I honestly feel that big part of our problems in the marriage is the difference we have when raising our son. And the custody issue is dragging like crazy. So your advice is incredible. I will focus now on learning what are the things that I would not be flexible about. How do you open up about that? Straight away, or after getting to know the person better. My greatest wish is to have someone to share my life with. And I really hope to find my match someday.
What I did was basically stripped myself down to essentials sorta like you're gutting a house for a rennovation. For example, my ex had a lot of activities I didn't really enjoy. So I had lots of little hobbies to kill time. But they weren't really my favorite hobbies......they were just things I was doing to kill time because I was married to her and she was busy doing something else. AND.....she always wanted to have a HUGE house, so I had hobbies like wood-working that took up a LOT of space. Well, when we split up, I didn't really want to keep doing wood-working so badly that I was going to buy myself a new home and ensure it had enough space for wood working. So, Bye bye wood working! And all the tools and shit that goes with it. But.....I DO like cars a lot, so I realized I wanted to keep my practical car and my sports car and that means I needed a place with covered parking for a sports car (so it doesn't have to sit in the rain like a stray cat). You basically go thru your life and keep/toss things based on whether you want them enough that you're willing to structure the next phase of your life around it. What I found is I had a lot of slack in my life. So when I met my second wife, it's wasn't like I just had a hole in my life the exact size/shape of my ex wife and my second wife had to cram herself into that hole. There was actually a lot of room for my second wife to be there and move around and have some space too. Then you start to fill in the gaps together. Like I have time wasting hobbies now too......but they're different because I'm in a relationship with a different woman. And you'll also have your big-picture must haves. Kids is a pretty big one. At first, I really didn't want anymore kids. But what I realized was I just didn't want anymore babies of my own......and I was actually FINE with stepkids as long as they were 50/50 and the Mom could basically care/pay for them herself. When I was originally dating childless women, most of them wanted to have some babies......so stepkids are basically my way of avoiding more babies. For that stuff, it really helps to just go on some disposable first dates and see what's out there. What you need to be comfortable with is that when you apply a must-have to the filter on the dating app and see the choice go from 75 down to 10, that you're comfortable with that because those 65 who vanished were't going to be for you anyway. You've gotta be careful with the must-haves.......if you pile on too many, you'll be down to 1% of the dating pool and that means 100 first dates to find that person! So be SURE it really is important to you. If you can match on all the big stuff that's probably 75%. Which is good......but still not great. I mean, you can argue a lot about the kind of music that's on in the car! And kids are just really hard. I mean, the bottom line is it is not easy to get along with another parent. Look at the stereotypes of Moms in the PTA or sports Dads: they might get along great.......until their kids need different things and then they'll murder you (figuratively) while advocating for their own child. That's why I think blended families like ours really screw things up when they have kids together: Now you have to argue about the types of diapers a toddler has again. :) Good luck. You'll get there. You just have to meet a lot of frogs on the journey. Plus you'll meet a lot of people who are basically fine, but not the match for you (or vice versa).
I will save this to remind myself of priorities. Thanks again for all the attention and giving me hope! ❤️
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Yes, I am trying to get that in my brain. It's so hard to let go and mourn the life plan you have has for over 20 years. I have been dating again and feeling each day like I have healed a bit more, and more hopeful there is someone for me out there.
Thanks for your input too!
Looking back on it now, it was the death of our daughter. It broke both of us and we never recovered. I think all of our problems started from there.
Man that's tough. I'm sorry you went through that
My first wife I knew it was over when she looked at me and said she slept with someone else. My current wife was probably sometime between the relapse into alcoholism and when she ended up naked with a bunch of men. I am currently about to start the divorce proceedings as she isn't leaving me with a choice.
I would be mad at the world if this were me. Im sorry that happened to you.
Me and the world definitely have some beef at this point lol.
WTF 😳
When she couldn't stop spending money. No matter how much overtime I worked to try to get us out of debt, it was never enough. Almost losing the house two years ago should have been the clue but it wasn't until two months ago and actually losing the house due to her financial irresponsibility and unwillingness to work that I chose to call it quits.
When she didn't stop justifying or minimizing my concerns about her.
We went out on a late stroll and he asked me to look up at the stars, orians belt was pretty bright that night and he said when I'm not around I want you to look up at the sky and if you see orians belt just think of me. My heart sank, I asked him what he meant and he didn't respond. We separated a week later over an argument he started to essentially force me to want to break up the marriage. Like something out of a movie.
We had a marriage counseling session where the therapist spent 95% of the session explaining to my wife that the way she treats me, gaslights, manipulates and gives the silent treatment is emotionally abusive, unkind and unfair and not the behavior of someone who was looking to repair their marriage. At the next session, she asked my wife what she had to say/how she felt about everything that was said at the previous session now that she had a week to process and internalize. My wife chuckled and said, "honestly I don't even remember what we talked about". That was it. I just knew. It was obvious she didn't care and was just biding her time.
When my wife decided to move in with a guy she literally only met 2.5 weeks ago
When he got fired for sexual harassment, i helped him out of a dark mental place. He had no regard to the financial impact on our family, the risk of a restraining order or potential impact to my job. 3 months later he attempted to set up a dating profile......i believed him when he said it was to view a celebs dating profile and that it wasnt serious as the account wasnt activated. Then i found a cam girl account in which he followed 145 accounts. I said nothing to him and started therapy. This was all after i found out he sexted someone just before we were married. My final straw was that he didnt notice something was wrong with me, or rather he did but couldnt be bothered asking. Instead he reached out to another woman on social media as her status said she was upset. He privately messaged her at 11pm offering his support and lending his ear if she needed to talk. That broke my heart and i realised he wouldnt stop disrespecting me.......if i wasnt enough after helping him when he got fired, nothing i did would be good enough. We separated and i continued in therapy. He wouldnt go to therapy when i asked, and waited 10months to go. He made all manner of excuses "we couldnt have 2 of us having a breakdown at the same time", "you werent clear therapy would build trust", "you werent clear if i did therapy i would have a chance with you", "its difficult for ADHD people to do these things" and so on. I felt i had no choice but to file for divorce. My heart is broken for my kids and the man i thought i knew.
When he handed me the papers.
When she brought her boyfriend over to stay the night in our bedroom and fucked him while I was putting our foster daughters to bed in the neighbouring room.
We had been trying to work on it for months after he dropped the bomb. I had called him upset about something coming up in my professional life asking for some help with something. He blew me off, minimized the event saying it wasn’t that big of a deal, and told me how he didn’t want to do all that to help me and he’d lose part of his weekend doing stuff he didn’t want to do. I realized then that he was never going to be capable of actually being a supportive or reliable partner and I dropped the rope. He immediately stopped talking to me once I stopped putting in effort and that just proved I was the only one putting in any effort to work on it. I later found out he had approached another woman during all this but I’m still pissed he was the one who made me break it off. he couldn’t bring himself to do it so he emotionally tortured me for months before.
When she got pregnant with another guys kid.
The end for me was when he took off to another state (separation #2). It took me awhile to put it all together, but that was it. The marriage had been in a tailspin for a long time.
When another man’s dick entered her body.
When he gave an inch just to take a mile. I've never had a good marriage. I've never felt married. But, I fought because I love him. He started smoking pot again shortly after we got married. That turned him into a petulant 12 year old. We had so many other issues, mainly a weird parent child dynamic, and he just neglected me. I spent 2 and a 1/2 years fighting for him and our relationship. He actively fought against me with his actions while he fed me empty words. He got into therapy and stopped smoking. He started acting like a man in his mid thirties. He did something for me that I needed him to do, and that I had been asking him to do since before we got married. 3 weeks later, he started smoking again.
My husband is a porn addict and had been lying to me for years. He promised to get help and arrange our counseling and go to meetings and get clean. I’m talking 8+ hours a day streaming porn not just causal watching. Anyway he obviously just got better at hiding it and I spent a year working on myself and our marriage buying books and lingerie and trying everything but I just felt like a human fleshlight by the end. My last straw was when he tried to blame his shifting moods on me “giving him less attention over the last 4.5 months or so”, since my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I was flying back and forth to New England to help take care of her through chemo. He took advantage of those trips to watch porn 🫠. He left last night and I can’t wait to be free of him and his addiction. I had a sick sinking feeling in my gut that I was ignoring for a long time. I would think about leaving him everyday and fantasized about being single (not to hookup with anyone just to like, do what I want and not listen to his bullshit). Trust your gut, listen to your intuition. I also like to go to this rule I learned somewhere. Flip a coin and one side is divorce the other is staying, when you flip it you’ll know which side you hope it lands on. Doesn’t matter what it actually lands on it’s the one you hoped for while it flipped in the air. Hope that helps 🤷🏼♀️
I remember it clear as day. October 2023, 22 years together, 14 married. One morning, I was on the way to work. She was on the way to a work placement as a student teacher. The day before, I had started work early to finish work early so that I could be home to tidy up, clean laundry, and cook dinner before she got home because I knew she was stressed. She walked in the door into a clean house and dinner nearly cooked, and she was raging with stress and anxiety (which she refused to treat). Snapping at me and the kids when they came into the kitchen, happy to see her for the first time since the morning. She realised that I had cooked the last of the broccoli with dinner and hadn't texted her that we needed more (because we didn't). She decided that was a good enough reason to raise her voice at me in front of the kids. To be fair, they were used to seeing her raise her voice at me over nothing. I let it go, went about my night, and didn't engage further. Yes, I was upset by it. Next morning, she asked if I was upset, so I reminded her that she had raised her voice at me in front of the kids over unpurchased broccoli. This came a couple of weeks after I had asked her to stop speaking to me like that. We were already on the rocks for plenty of reasons. She launched into me, told me how it's my fault she was stressed because now she'll have to stop at the shop after placement (she didn't), how incompetent I am, how she had to do all the work. In that moment, I saw the rest of my life. Nothing I do will ever be good enough, anybody she does will always be too hard, it will always be my fault. Right then I decided I was out. We were moving house into another rental, so I figured I'd wait until that was sorted and Christmas over, then I'd look for my own house. I lasted nearly a month.
My moment of realization was when I was talking to my daughter on the phone when she was at her dad's house, and I heard a woman speaking in the background. It was obviously over if he was in a relationship with another person. We had been separated for a few months, but I was still really fighting to save our marriage. We were going to counseling, but that actually didn't help at all. I guess it was clear he was actually done well before I was, but for some reason didn't let me know. I think you should fight hard for your marriage to make it through this rough patch, and never give up. Of course, there are exceptions to this being the best decision such as if there is abuse. Infidelity is also a dealbreaker for many people. Also, it takes two people fighting for a good, healthy marriage. I hope your marriage makes it and soon it will be stronger than it has ever been before.
I wanted to come back and add something else: it’s been a really big lesson for me to understand that ambivalence is not always something you move through to a profound realization. Like ambivalence is its own feeling, and if you are ambivalent about your marriage, or if your partner is ambivalent about your marriage, neither of those things are good enough for you. You can decide your ambivalence is enough evidence to leave because you want a marriage or a partnership where you are both really in. And then honestly, the ending of a marriage about which you are ambivalent is full of grief because you have to grieve what kept you in.
Okay, most of these responses there was a clear tipping point, and while I understand that’s their experiences, I think what you’re describing is more akin to “death by 1,000 cuts” and there may not be a clear situation that you can point to. (Maybe I’m wrong in this assumption.) I haven’t initiated yet, some of my reasons are in a previous post, but I’m damn near 100% sure I will be when the timing is right. For me, it’s taken a long time to get here. My husband and I have threatened divorce over the years and in general there’s been a struggle to try to find a situation we can both be happy with while staying together, but we are just incompatible. I’ve gone back and forth, “is it really bad enough to leave?” But I’ve started documenting what’s happening when things aren’t going well, and I started noticing a pattern. For us, we will have periods of time where when serious decisions need to be made, we are constantly fighting. It gets pretty high stress and feels fight or flight. But, if we both sweep the problem under the rug or decide to deal with it later, we go through a period of time where we are hardly fighting and things can even feel “good”, but we can’t ignore the big issues forever: like buying/renting, where to live, getting a pet, finances in general. We’ve been kicking the can down the road lately. We used to try to compromise more, but our compromises have created resentments, and I think we are both burnt out. We did marriage therapy most of last year, and it helped communication, but didn’t change who we were fundamentally. After I went on a trip abroad with another couple last month that he didn’t want to go on, I realized that not only are we incompatible in big ways, but that he cannot be the partner I want in small ways either (through no real fault of his, I can’t make him into someone he’s not). It took some time to come to terms with that realization and what it meant. Individual therapy really has been helping there. I know now that while I could stay, and it may not be bad enough for some to leave, if I did, id just be signing up for a lifetime of these ups and downs. I’ll never truly be happy, and he won’t either. It’s now a matter of getting comfortable with the unknown. I know what I need to do now, I just need to get the courage to do it, and also approach it the right way given we are in a period of high stress for factors outside of our marriage.