I'm just needing to write out my thoughts, because the anxiety is killing me. If this is too long for you to read, I'm sorry, and thanks in advance to anyone who cares to read the entire thing and send me some insight or support. I'd appreciate it very much, because at the moment I'm extremely confused, and I don't know what to do with myself.
So my wife and I got engaged back in April when we decided to take our relationship to the next level. I love her to pieces, and I have from the very beginning. After dating for a while, we got engaged, and everyone was so happy for us. However, there's a detail about her, and that's that she has a severe drinking problem. She drinks those boxes of wine, and she'll go through a box in two days easily. Her family has a history of alcoholism, and it's a subject that has been very reactive before. How her family chooses to pay a blind eye to her condition is something that confuses me, though I'm not exactly sure they know the extent of her problem.
Ever since we got together, I tried to put the pieces together, and tried to identify the root cause of her drinking. Mind you, I have no experience with substance abuse first hand, so excuse me if my methods were naive. When she tried to get a raise the week after our engagement and was declined, she went on a severe bender. I thought I put the pieces together, and thought that her job was the root cause of her unhappiness. Coupled with the fact that her proposal for a raise was declined, along with the fact that we were now engaged, we discussed her quitting her job in great detail. My objective here was to absorb her responsibilities as she found clarity on her own, and that was that.
I was wrong. She quits her job, and I figured that since we're already planning a wedding, we may as well get the legal formality out of the way and get married at the courthouse. We did so, in secret, and the moment we said our vows was the happiest moment of my life. I now had a wife, someone besides myself to care for and to consider, and we would grow old together.
Now a little about me, I was essentially working two jobs at once. To make things easier, we'll call them Company A and B. Company A leased me out to Company B in an advisory role to advance their systems in our line of work. Company A is a massive company you know, and Company B isn't even a blip on the radar, so even though we were helping the competition in principle, Company B was paying a steep price for my services to my company. They would also provide me with an income, so I had two forms of income, both of which were livable. I went ahead and had my make from Company A go into an investment account, and Company B would be what I would live off of.
Now my bills are minimal. I pay my car, and that's it. My cell phone and car insurance are both paid for. My wife's bills are plentiful, and her debts are considerable. They're also very bottom heavy, in that they all land at the end of every month. Considering that she quit her job at the end of the month, I was thrust with $3500 in bills immediately. That essentially did a number to my account, but since Company B pays me weekly, it wasn't that big of a deal. However, she got an unexpected severance pay of $3000 from her company, and instead of putting that into our account, she kept it in hers and used it to pay outstanding credit cards, rather than the live bills. I was annoyed, but what could I do?
Moving forth, come June, her cousin invited her to Vegas for her birthday party. She went from "thinking about going" to it being a MUST GO TO event as time went on. Her parents put pressure on me to send her, and that trip was not cheap. My project profits from work came and went as fast as they could possibly go. To make matters worse, business got slow at Company B immediately after her trip to Vegas, so the money got tight fast. Eventually it'd pick back up again, but July in itself was a rough month.
After a dispute between the manager and I at company B, I had company A sever my contract with them, because those projects I worked on for them were supposed to have bonuses that would otherwise double my make in case they were successful (which they all were). The bonuses were unpaid, and along with the manager's attitude, I had enough. In my exit interview, I demanded 2 weeks of pay and my bonuses, both of which were agreed to. I needed those, because they would equal out to over a month's worth of pay, which would be perfect as I got my pay in order from Company A to go back into my casual checking account, rather than the investment account. Except they didn't pay me out like they promised.
So I could just pull money at a heavy penalty from my investment account, right? Yeah, but not as much as I would've wanted. Now I'm stuck, because I can't transfer money, I can't get paid directly by Company A for another two pay cycles, and Company B just screwed me. So it was officially time to get a short term loan from my parents, but my wife jumped the gun without my say so and got her parents involved, in which they gave her money, but they made it hard on her (I know that they weren't very kind about it). Because of that, she kicked me out of the apartment, and told me that she's hired a divorce lawyer.
All for what, $5000? I could pay that back in full when I get my first check next month, and still have leftover to pay the bills! Her parents that loved me, and thought I was the first normal guy she ever dated? They turned on me quick, because they're the ones that got her the lawyer in the first place. I've been staying at a friends house for the entire weekend, and I got about $1500 in my bank right now. At this point, I really don't know what to do, because I don't understand how everything escalated so fast, and why. So this right here is why my marriage is ending, what I will write now are supplemental thoughts that will better highlight what I've endured.
From the moment that we got married, everything stopped. Intimacy stopped. Time spent together stopped. Going to bed together stopped. Everything. What increased was the drinking, the fighting, and now verbal abuse was added to the mix. Respect went out the window, and then things got violent.
Now as I made my decision about Company B, I had money for the bills until the payout (that never happened) was to happen. However, I stopped trusting Company B, so I had to be careful about the money that I had at the time, in case these guys were to try and **** me over. What does she do? Her friends mom died, and her friend felt like partying. So my wife goes to Costco and blows $400 on a pool party, buying beer, towels, food, and all sorts of other favors. Unfortunately, I didn't find this out until 3am, so I try and wake her up so we can talk about returning it. She's 10 feet away and starts shouting, then making gagging sounds, screaming at me to stop attacking (physically) her.
I left her passed out drunk on the couch, and I grabbed everything that wouldn't spoil and took it to my room so that I could return it myself the next morning. She comes in the room trying to be nice about something, and when I don't reciprocate, she dumps her water bottle all over me and the bed. So I get up, and I simply lock the door and go back to sleep. She finds out later on that I had everything from Costco, and she begins to kick the door until she kicks it down... destroying it. This was in an apartment, that at the time, we had been living there for 10 days. When she gets in, I grab the case of beer, and she punches me in the face. She grabs one end of it, and the box rips open and the beers all go to hell. The cops were called on us, which at first they were naturally aggressive with me, until I clarified that she punched me, kicked the door down, and caused the beer to spill. I didn't press charges over the punch. This in itself was what I still feel was our dark est moment to date, yet this money fluke is what broke us. I left for the weekend, and two days later she was asking me to come back home.
I've tried my hardest at making this work in the most honest way possible. I misread her reason for drinking, and even then, I never quit on her. I've endured her abuse on many levels, and have otherwise given her anything she's needed while she got on a backward schedule and started going to bed at 8am and waking up at 5pm, never looking for a job. I upgraded her 1 bedroom apartment into a town home, despite that I travel for a living and we didn't need the extra space. When her family visited for a week, she didn't have any money to host them, and I made sure that they had a great time at my literal expense. We weren't married at that time. Vegas was about $3000, and she didn't even have a good time at the very least. The saying is very true, you can't buy love. My job at Company B was rough, there was a lot of hard work, and a lot of travel involved. Even at that sacrifice, I was never appreciated. And now that the times got rough momentarily, everyone flips on me. I never asked her to get help from her parents, and now the judgment has been cast on their behalf, and no one gives a cares about me anymore.
On Friday, we argued much of the day as a result of her parents attitude toward helping her out with her bills. We made amends prior to going to sleep, and we agreed to give it a good shot before things escalated any more. By the time I called on Saturday, she was aggressive all over again, and told me not to contact her anymore unless it was through her lawyer. She threatened me with a restraining order, despite that I haven't made any attempts to reach her in person, nor have my calls/texts been excessive.
Today, the mudslinging began. Her family started to delete me on Facebook, and the more pragmatic ones sent me messages that implied that I was inflicting some form of harm on my wife, which isn't true, unless you count limiting the supply of wine, and trying to be careful about our spending in recent times a form of abuse.
I've never felt so small before, so lost, confused and helpless. I know where I went wrong with myself, I just don't know where I went wrong in the relationship. I gave it my very best, and I feel like I'm going to leave this emptyhanded. I love my wife very much, and I care about her well-being more than I care about my own. I don't pretend to change her into a different person, but she has so much potential for self-improvement. Saving the marriage isn't something I seek to do, since saving it is ignoring this problem just for the sake of having the title of being married. I want to restore our marriage, as to how our relationship used to be before things got like this. I feel like this entire episode has gotten too big for me, too exposed, and too many people are making decisions on our lives. I'm entirely broken.
So my wife and I got engaged back in April when we decided to take our relationship to the next level. I love her to pieces, and I have from the very beginning. After dating for a while, we got engaged, and everyone was so happy for us. However, there's a detail about her, and that's that she has a severe drinking problem. She drinks those boxes of wine, and she'll go through a box in two days easily. Her family has a history of alcoholism, and it's a subject that has been very reactive before. How her family chooses to pay a blind eye to her condition is something that confuses me, though I'm not exactly sure they know the extent of her problem.
Ever since we got together, I tried to put the pieces together, and tried to identify the root cause of her drinking. Mind you, I have no experience with substance abuse first hand, so excuse me if my methods were naive. When she tried to get a raise the week after our engagement and was declined, she went on a severe bender. I thought I put the pieces together, and thought that her job was the root cause of her unhappiness. Coupled with the fact that her proposal for a raise was declined, along with the fact that we were now engaged, we discussed her quitting her job in great detail. My objective here was to absorb her responsibilities as she found clarity on her own, and that was that.
I was wrong. She quits her job, and I figured that since we're already planning a wedding, we may as well get the legal formality out of the way and get married at the courthouse. We did so, in secret, and the moment we said our vows was the happiest moment of my life. I now had a wife, someone besides myself to care for and to consider, and we would grow old together.
Now a little about me, I was essentially working two jobs at once. To make things easier, we'll call them Company A and B. Company A leased me out to Company B in an advisory role to advance their systems in our line of work. Company A is a massive company you know, and Company B isn't even a blip on the radar, so even though we were helping the competition in principle, Company B was paying a steep price for my services to my company. They would also provide me with an income, so I had two forms of income, both of which were livable. I went ahead and had my make from Company A go into an investment account, and Company B would be what I would live off of.
Now my bills are minimal. I pay my car, and that's it. My cell phone and car insurance are both paid for. My wife's bills are plentiful, and her debts are considerable. They're also very bottom heavy, in that they all land at the end of every month. Considering that she quit her job at the end of the month, I was thrust with $3500 in bills immediately. That essentially did a number to my account, but since Company B pays me weekly, it wasn't that big of a deal. However, she got an unexpected severance pay of $3000 from her company, and instead of putting that into our account, she kept it in hers and used it to pay outstanding credit cards, rather than the live bills. I was annoyed, but what could I do?
Moving forth, come June, her cousin invited her to Vegas for her birthday party. She went from "thinking about going" to it being a MUST GO TO event as time went on. Her parents put pressure on me to send her, and that trip was not cheap. My project profits from work came and went as fast as they could possibly go. To make matters worse, business got slow at Company B immediately after her trip to Vegas, so the money got tight fast. Eventually it'd pick back up again, but July in itself was a rough month.
After a dispute between the manager and I at company B, I had company A sever my contract with them, because those projects I worked on for them were supposed to have bonuses that would otherwise double my make in case they were successful (which they all were). The bonuses were unpaid, and along with the manager's attitude, I had enough. In my exit interview, I demanded 2 weeks of pay and my bonuses, both of which were agreed to. I needed those, because they would equal out to over a month's worth of pay, which would be perfect as I got my pay in order from Company A to go back into my casual checking account, rather than the investment account. Except they didn't pay me out like they promised.
So I could just pull money at a heavy penalty from my investment account, right? Yeah, but not as much as I would've wanted. Now I'm stuck, because I can't transfer money, I can't get paid directly by Company A for another two pay cycles, and Company B just screwed me. So it was officially time to get a short term loan from my parents, but my wife jumped the gun without my say so and got her parents involved, in which they gave her money, but they made it hard on her (I know that they weren't very kind about it). Because of that, she kicked me out of the apartment, and told me that she's hired a divorce lawyer.
All for what, $5000? I could pay that back in full when I get my first check next month, and still have leftover to pay the bills! Her parents that loved me, and thought I was the first normal guy she ever dated? They turned on me quick, because they're the ones that got her the lawyer in the first place. I've been staying at a friends house for the entire weekend, and I got about $1500 in my bank right now. At this point, I really don't know what to do, because I don't understand how everything escalated so fast, and why. So this right here is why my marriage is ending, what I will write now are supplemental thoughts that will better highlight what I've endured.
From the moment that we got married, everything stopped. Intimacy stopped. Time spent together stopped. Going to bed together stopped. Everything. What increased was the drinking, the fighting, and now verbal abuse was added to the mix. Respect went out the window, and then things got violent.
Now as I made my decision about Company B, I had money for the bills until the payout (that never happened) was to happen. However, I stopped trusting Company B, so I had to be careful about the money that I had at the time, in case these guys were to try and **** me over. What does she do? Her friends mom died, and her friend felt like partying. So my wife goes to Costco and blows $400 on a pool party, buying beer, towels, food, and all sorts of other favors. Unfortunately, I didn't find this out until 3am, so I try and wake her up so we can talk about returning it. She's 10 feet away and starts shouting, then making gagging sounds, screaming at me to stop attacking (physically) her.
I left her passed out drunk on the couch, and I grabbed everything that wouldn't spoil and took it to my room so that I could return it myself the next morning. She comes in the room trying to be nice about something, and when I don't reciprocate, she dumps her water bottle all over me and the bed. So I get up, and I simply lock the door and go back to sleep. She finds out later on that I had everything from Costco, and she begins to kick the door until she kicks it down... destroying it. This was in an apartment, that at the time, we had been living there for 10 days. When she gets in, I grab the case of beer, and she punches me in the face. She grabs one end of it, and the box rips open and the beers all go to hell. The cops were called on us, which at first they were naturally aggressive with me, until I clarified that she punched me, kicked the door down, and caused the beer to spill. I didn't press charges over the punch. This in itself was what I still feel was our dark est moment to date, yet this money fluke is what broke us. I left for the weekend, and two days later she was asking me to come back home.
I've tried my hardest at making this work in the most honest way possible. I misread her reason for drinking, and even then, I never quit on her. I've endured her abuse on many levels, and have otherwise given her anything she's needed while she got on a backward schedule and started going to bed at 8am and waking up at 5pm, never looking for a job. I upgraded her 1 bedroom apartment into a town home, despite that I travel for a living and we didn't need the extra space. When her family visited for a week, she didn't have any money to host them, and I made sure that they had a great time at my literal expense. We weren't married at that time. Vegas was about $3000, and she didn't even have a good time at the very least. The saying is very true, you can't buy love. My job at Company B was rough, there was a lot of hard work, and a lot of travel involved. Even at that sacrifice, I was never appreciated. And now that the times got rough momentarily, everyone flips on me. I never asked her to get help from her parents, and now the judgment has been cast on their behalf, and no one gives a cares about me anymore.
On Friday, we argued much of the day as a result of her parents attitude toward helping her out with her bills. We made amends prior to going to sleep, and we agreed to give it a good shot before things escalated any more. By the time I called on Saturday, she was aggressive all over again, and told me not to contact her anymore unless it was through her lawyer. She threatened me with a restraining order, despite that I haven't made any attempts to reach her in person, nor have my calls/texts been excessive.
Today, the mudslinging began. Her family started to delete me on Facebook, and the more pragmatic ones sent me messages that implied that I was inflicting some form of harm on my wife, which isn't true, unless you count limiting the supply of wine, and trying to be careful about our spending in recent times a form of abuse.
I've never felt so small before, so lost, confused and helpless. I know where I went wrong with myself, I just don't know where I went wrong in the relationship. I gave it my very best, and I feel like I'm going to leave this emptyhanded. I love my wife very much, and I care about her well-being more than I care about my own. I don't pretend to change her into a different person, but she has so much potential for self-improvement. Saving the marriage isn't something I seek to do, since saving it is ignoring this problem just for the sake of having the title of being married. I want to restore our marriage, as to how our relationship used to be before things got like this. I feel like this entire episode has gotten too big for me, too exposed, and too many people are making decisions on our lives. I'm entirely broken.
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