Marriage and the Power of Divorce

Daidraco said:

I've found a little flower shop here on the other side of town after looking into it more. I dont like the idea of flowers being delivered to them. Kind of.. defeats the point in my head?... May just be over thinking it. But I also like to see what theyre getting before sending it.

Just figured here, in the den of people that actually have relationships, I would find some good suggestions that arent blanket advertised to me. hehe

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moonarchia said:

And no, having thoughts about randos at work doesn't mean shit

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Lasch said:

Spoiler

I feel somewhat inspired after reading that behemoth of a post by Koushirou. Here’s my story:

My wife and I have been married for 15 years. When we got married, she was relatively normal, but over time, things changed—mentally, socially, and physically.

Early in the marriage, she stopped working. I didn’t mind at first; I make more than enough in the oil and gas industry here in Oklahoma. The deal was that she’d take care of the house and cook. For a while, that arrangement worked. But at some point—honestly, I don’t even remember when—she stopped cleaning and let the house go.

She never wanted kids, so we don’t have to deal with that right now. I’m thankful for that, even though I still want kids. But she would’ve been a terrible mother. A long time ago I realized I’d essentially married my own controlling and nitpicking mother. (And bipolar) She created her little fiefdom at home, rarely leaving except for the occasional store run. She ghosted her friends, literally blocked my family members, and she refused to hang out with my friends.

Now, I’m no saint. Pre-2020, I was the "fat bastard" stereotype: eating because I was sad, and sad because I was eating. I made poor choices, but even when I tried to get healthier, she actively sabotaged me. She’d tell me she was worried I’d leave her if I lost weight. (Foreshadowing) Sometimes she’d text to say dinner was in the trash because it didn’t turn out right, so I’d have to grab food on the way home. As a fat bastard it wasn’t like I needed an excuse to fall off, so I let that slide. Sometimes relieved I could gorge on shit, othertimes frustrated. And she’d lie (or at best just be wrong) about the calories/protein/carbs of meals she made.

Then 2020 happened, and it was clear it was pretty much just fat people dying. That was the turning point. I started cooking all my own meals and doing my own grocery shopping. I couldn’t trust her to stick to what I asked for. She’d bring back way too much of something or the wrong items entirely. So now, on top of managing finances and cleaning, I was fully responsible for my own food.
I rationalized this discrepancy in our relationship by telling myself that, yeah she has her faults - but when I need someone to have my back, she is going to be there for me.

Fast forward a few years: I’m in the best shape of my life. Lifting, bootcamps, yoga, cycling, running, you name it. I weigh less than I did even in middle school. Strongest I've ever been. Faster.... everything. (Tangent - Going from disgusted looks, to being looked through/ignored, to getting attention, hell twice this week being flirted with in cycle has been quite the transition) Meanwhile, she’s rotting, sitting around reading books and watching YouTube. But at least I have someone there for me when I need it.

This last summer shattered that lie.

One night, I overcooked a steak and ended up with a huge dry chunk lodged in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked - I’m not Foler, I’ve never chocked on something big before. I stood up wondering what the fuck a person does to get food unstuck from their throat. I couldn't call 911. I knew what to do for someone else…But for myself? What an embarrassing way to fucking die. I tried to Heimlich myself using my arms and then a couch arm, but neither worked - couch is too soft. Entire timing I was wondering how long I had before I blacked out. And what a shitty stat to be added to - fucking choked on a poorly cooked steak. I then went to the kitchen counter and was thankfully able to use it to dislodge the food enough to get a breath and then finally out. The whole time, she just sat there, frozen, wide-eyed, watching me. No attempt to help. No call to 911. She said she knew exactly what was happening when I stood up.

Do I have someone there for me when I need it?

A couple of months later, I got food poisoning at a fundraiser after eating fucking shrimp. For two days, I couldn’t hold down anything. I couldn’t even walk without holding onto the walls, else I'd fall to the ground. I asked her to pick up Imodium from the store, since my system clearly wasn't stopping with the purge.
Her response? “I can’t; I didn’t sleep well last night.” I ended up ordering it from Amazon, waiting an extra day for that to show up. That’s when I finally accepted it: I can’t rely on her for anything. Either from lack of caring or too useless.

I hate confrontation, but I knew I was done. I also knew she has no one, no ability to operate in society, nothing… but that is her problem. I started telling friends and family I was planning to get a divorce. A few weeks later, I told them I’d already talked to her about it. Truthfully, I hadn’t yet. It took me another month to finally have that conversation. (I already said I have my own issues.)

Now, the divorce is imminent. Sorting everything out took a little time, but it’s been smooth enough —probably because I’m basically giving her a fortune to leave. (I am not sure how this would work if I wasn’t well off. Good luck, Ko)
Everything is settled - have a meeting with a lawyer next week.
It’s easily the best decision I’ve ever made. And not doing it earlier just shows how much I like to create lies to comfort myself. And just how pathetic I was. Am? /shrug

TLDR: get to the gym.

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Koushirou said:

Spoilered for length.

Spoiler

I'm going to ask for a divorce tomorrow.

Sorry, this'll probably just end up a rant. And disclaimer that, of course, this is all just from my side of things.

Posted before in the depression thread about how completely stressed and overwhelmed I've increasingly been the past few years. I figured it was just shit in life piling up too high and me just poorly dealing with it. He'd just keep telling me that I worry too much. Sometime in the past couple of months, I think I finally snapped. It's not that I'm worrying too much, but I'm the only one worrying at all about anything. I handle literally everything we do. I pay for all our expenses, I always take the cats to the vet, I always handle arranging to call people to fix shit in the house, I plan and pay for all the vacations, I drive us everywhere. Anything important or anything joint, I do by myself. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, my husband would not have a single clue how to pick up any of that. He would be fucked and not once has he ever taken the initiative to learn about any of it or volunteered to help with any of it.

The finances have always pissed me off since the beginning. I guess I was stupid and hoped that maybe it would change when we got married, but no. I've always been the breadwinner, usually making at least twice what he makes. When we first moved in, all I expected was him to just pay for utilities. Even that sometimes was apparently too difficult for his spending (we're talking maybe $100-150/mo.). But I always just ignored it because I understood he made less than me, so what should I expect? I also didn't want to be some harpy girlfriend breaking things up over stupid things like money. He's always been adamant that his money is separate because he doesn't want to have to worry about asking for permission to spend it. As a compromise, I proposed that we get a single joint account that a % of each of our paychecks goes to that will cover all the expenses and some buffer and all the remaining we keep for ourselves in individual accounts to do whatever we want with. He didn't agree to it, so that was that and I didn't bring it up again. But I always resented the fact that it seemed like my money was our money and his money was his money. Despite me making significantly more, I felt like I never had any sort of play money, just about, except things I very carefully saved up for. Every paycheck I also pulled out $100 that I put into my own savings account to keep as a last resort if something catastrophic happened and we needed emergency funds, which has floated between $5-10k. I DO NOT touch this shit unless I literally cannot pay bills for the month and I refuse to let any sort of CC balance roll over. Now, he gives me a few hundred dollars a month to contribute and pay his "rent" as he calls it. But I only get whatever's left after he's covered whatever fun spending he's done for the month. I don't know how many times I've seen him buy pieces of art that are $1-300 and then come tell me on payday that he just can't manage to give me anything that paycheck. And then if I've come up short with my own money, out of my own savings it comes to pay for the month. This has always felt unfair as fuck to me. But again, I didn't want to blow things up over money, so every time I was pissed about it, I just bottled it up.

When I talked to him the other night and told him things weren't working for me anymore, I brought up the finances crap along with other just poor financial decisions. The worst one, to me anyway, was when we moved from NY to WV, me and his family told him that he should roll over his teacher's retirement from NY over to his WV teacher's retirement account. He did not want to do this. Instead, he decided he wanted to just pull it out. I told him exactly what would happen if he did: he's going to get a penalty for pulling it early, it's going to get taxed to hell, and we'll probably owe taxes that year. He pulled it out anyway because he wanted spending money during the vacation we were going on for Christmas (where he spent 800 fucking dollars on fancy cologne). Sure enough, it was taxed to hell, there was a penalty, and we owed taxes that year. When I brought this up the other day during our talk, apparently because of his ADHD, those reasons were not enough to not get him to do it. I was supposed to explicitly in no uncertain terms command him not to. And apparently I'm supposed to be doing this for EVERYTHING. Because he just won't realize it otherwise. So when I'm doing a long drive to go visit his family and I'm literally falling the fuck asleep at the wheel and him making feeble attempts to keep me awake, he is not going to ever volunteer to take over, I have to specifically tell him that I want him to drive. When one of our cats possibly has a blockage and needs to go to the ER at 3am and I'm freaking out about it, well I should have explicitly commanded him to go with me, even though I'd already asked him and he said he couldn't because it was too late and he has to wake up early. So off I drove the 45min to the ER by myself trying to see the road while being a crying mess (yeah, I know, typical woman). Shit, I've had to drive myself to the ER before with tachycardia because he was busy. I am not an assertive person. I have a lot of difficulty telling people what I want and much more difficulty ordering people around. Now I realize if I don't tell people what I want, most likely I'm not going to get it, and I'm fine with that. But I feel like there's some things that are fucking obvious and I shouldn't have to be telling my own husband to do. Or in the example above, if I give a shitload of reasons why something is a bad idea, maybe don't fucking do it. And when I do ask or tell him to do something, he always gets so annoyed, which just makes me feel worse about doing it.

One of my biggest stressors has been money. The past few years with this shit economy we've been barely keeping stable. But because we're not struggling to eat, or pay bills, etc. it means everything is completely fine and nothing could possibly go wrong to upset that. Every time I worry about money, I get told "it'll be fine", "it'll work out", etc. That shit makes me see red. How the fuck does he know it'll be fine? He has 0 idea how much ANY of our bills cost because he's not paying for any of that shit. The only one he sees is the big ass grocery bill every week, which would be a shitload smaller if I just didn't bring him to the store. When I go grocery shopping, I bring a specific list of shit I'm going to buy, and that's what I get. I price it out ahead of time and it's usually between $75-150 depending on if I'm buying a bunch of meat on sale. But when we actually go and we get to the register? Shit is up to $250-350 from stuff that he buys. Now previously he thankfully would just pay for his own groceries and snacks he was getting for himself, but he stopped doing even that and it just got rolled into my nebulous payment he gives me every month. Same with his car insurance when I combined that. Point is, he has no idea about our financial status except looking at our bank accounts and seeing money there. And after his inshalla-esque advice to tell me to calm down about the money, he'll say "we have savings" if we're short that month. We don't have savings, that's MY savings. That's shit I'VE put away every month and it's not there to cover when we make poor spending choices, it's there when we're going to be homeless or a pet is going to die or some shit. It's infuriating that my financial planning just gets hand-waved away as the solution to everything. He never has savings. He'll toss a few hundred in there sometimes, but it'll disappear within a month. He admits he's terrible with money, but will not just let me handle it.

So, what else happens when I stress out over money? He tosses me $200 to go have a spa day to unwind. Sure, that's a fine idea in principle, but maybe not when I'M WORRIED ABOUT FUCKING MONEY and how we shouldn't be spending it on unnecessary shit. He also constantly worries about the state of the carpet in our finished basement. Now, we almost never go down there, so it's practically untouched save for the stupid bug that'll die in there occasionally. It doesn't need to be vacuumed constantly, but still he'll go tell me to go vacuum the basement because it's dirty (notice that he won't go do it). I get annoyed by this because I feel it's a waste of my time since there's barely any reason to and I hate vacuuming in general because it always severely sets of my allergies when I clean out the vacuum. So...his solution? Spends a few hundred dollars on a robot vacuum so that I won't be stressed about the basement anymore. Why. How about if he wanted to vacuum the basement, he just went and did it? And how does this help me destress when I'm worried about the FUCKING MONEY WE SHOULDN'T BE SPENDING. Oh, and all this spending? Happening at a time when he's planning to quit his job and we're going to lose 1/3 of our income. Oh, he'd also constantly complain about not having blinds on the windows facing our backyard and the woods. Low priority to me, because no one's back there, but sure, we'll get them eventually. But it's expensive and I can't afford it right now and I'm not going to go into debt for it. Did he ever try to save up on his own to get them? Did he ever investigate what kind he wanted or how much it would be? Nope. He would just complain about them and expect me to take care of it. No initiative and no care for the money.

So October, he decides he's going to quit his job by the end of December. I get it. He worked as a teacher in the autism department at the high school. It fucking blows, and it sucked all of his energy away every day and made him miserable. Absolutely quit that shit...but have something lined up first. In all the time between October and December, he didn't look for any other work. His plan was that since he would get paid until the end of January, he didn't have to look for anything until that last paycheck came in. Despite me telling him how shitty it is to get a job right now, or that even when he does get one, there's a gap between starting and getting paid, etc. nope it wasn't a problem until he stopped getting paid. What did he even want to get a job in? No idea. He only started looking early because I had that talk with him about wanting to be done. No word back from anything, of course. And whatever he has applied to doesn't even have as much pay as his old job, so it's still going to be a worse time if he does get one of these jobs. Me and everyone else I know, my friends, my family etc. would never quit a job unless we had something ready to go afterwards.

Recent months, I'd been trying to be better about bedroom time. My drive has never been where his is, but I'd also never turn him down when he asked for sex or a BJ, etc. (unless there was some health bs going on where it wouldn't be a good idea). Lately I'd been trying to initiate a whole lot more. This is a really hard thing for me to do, since I have shit all for self-esteem and I also know that I'm not attractive in the least, but I really tried hard anyway to get him in the mood. And for 2-3 months, I got turned down every single time. Always an excuse of he's too tired, he just ate, he has to poop soon, it's too late, etc. I'd offer to just blow him and I'd still get turned down. I mean, for fuck's sake, he doesn't even have to do anything. And then I'd catch him later on masturbating as usual. And I get it, sometimes you just need a private jerk off session without having to worry about someone else, etc. or just private time in general. But 3 months. I've never felt more undesired in my life. How fucking shitty must I be when I can't even get my own husband to fuck me? Maybe if I wasn't such an ugly sack of shit, he'd get over being tired. The time that made me feel the worst was over Thanksgiving. We're laying in bed and he's on his phone and I'm just cuddled pretty much on top of him, figuring we could just cuddle a bit when he was done. Instead once he was done browsing for the night, he just kind of shoved me off, rolled over and went to sleep. No hug, no kiss, not even a "good night," nothing. I guess he somehow realized I was upset a few minutes later and asked what was wrong, so I told him. Once again, I should have explicitly stated I wanted cuddle time or any kind of good night message.

I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting to write, since I'm a bit of a mess, but I realized that I'm done. He wants to fix things but I don't think it can be. I'm exhausted, I feel like shit about myself and I think I just want to move on at this point. And it's not solely his fault. There were so many things I had problems with that I just didn't bring up or would bring up once and then just suppress and try to deal with afterwards because I didn't want to be confrontational or annoying or a bitch. I did us both a disservice there and I realize that. I feel fucking awful about doing this, but I just can't keep going with it anymore. And I would have done it sooner, but I've been so worried about what will happen to him. He has no job, no savings, no place nearby to go, no friends here, his friends back in NY all have babies now and are busy, his family in NY doesn't have any room for him to stay. What will he do? Where will he go? Will he be okay? What will happen to our house? Our cats? I feel like a monster doing this when he has basically no support to fall back on. He's not a bad person and I still love and care about him. But anymore staying together and I'm just going to end up resenting it more and more and I don't want that to happen. I realize this path is probably just going to lead to me being alone for the rest of my life afterwards; there's no market for below average 38-year old women out there. Despite that, my gut says it's still what I want to do.

Anyway, wish me luck tomorrow, I guess. Or not, if this whole thing is me just being a complete shit stain of a person. I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

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Koushirou said:

No. I still want the divorce. If he had somewhere to go, I would have done it already. Had a joint session together with my therapist, which is helping me make sure that I’m sure what I want but also is trying to help him accept this shit. Either way, though, we’re still stuck together for the time being until he can get a job and find another place to live. I can at least always go stay with my brother or my parents, but he literally has nowhere to go.

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