Hi everyone. I'm new here and want feedback, particularly from women. My situation is complicated, so here goes.
My wife and I have been married for 7 years. We don't have kids but we have sole custody of her 11 year old from her first marriage, who I think of as my kid (I've been with her mom since she was 1 and her real dad hasn't been very involved). We have different emotional types, I'm rational and cold while she's hot-headed and passionate. But I've always thought that was a strength because we balance out each other's bad qualities, and our marriage was good for the first 5 years.
Two years ago we had to move to a different part of the country for my work...I landed a spectacular job, but in a place where neither of us wanted to live (it's expensive here). My wife almost had a fit because she's never cared about a career. She's an artist (writing and music), hated her dull office job, and had hoped that with my big career move she could be a SAHM and play music or maybe teach piano on the side. I knew it would be tough, but I promised her that if she would agree to move, I would make sure she wouldn't have to do a job she hates. She agreed and we moved. Then she turned into a completely different person.
First, while looking for a place to live, we were jerked around by realtors and mortgage agents. That wasn't either of our fault. But she had totally unrealistic demands for what she wanted in a house. She insisted on living in a rural area with no neighbors, on enough land that she could raise animals (chickens, goats, etc.), AND cheaply enough that we could do it on a single income with some money to put away each month. This in one of the most crowded and expensive parts of the US. After finding nothing and living in temporary housing for a month, she lost patience with finding a place to live. She took our kid and moved back in with her parents, telling me "we'll come back when you find us a house." I was left alone, living in a hotel in an unfamiliar city, trying to do my new job and find a house that matched her demands, all at the same time. After three months of shirking my duties at my new job, I finally found a place that she could live with...semi-rural wit h a large yard, very cheap but also very far from my work. While I was looking for this place she treated me quite badly, angrily shooting down every suggestion I made over the phone, saying things like "it's insulting that you think I'd live in a house like that". She looked up houses online and asked me to take the time to go look at them (she was far away), and insisted it was "up to me" but still kept meddling in the process. When I finally found our current house, she agreed to come back and I considered myself lucky and thought the ordeal was over.
When she moved in, she did try to be a SAHM and to grow our own food in the yard. She got chickens. But in the process she lost all interest in spending time with me. I'll admit that my work eats up huge amounts of my time (and the 1-hour commute each way doesn't help), but it's nice to interact with my wife and kid in the small amount of time I do get to see them. But I don't get to choose when I have to be at work, and she sets a ridiculous schedule for herself. She gets up around 3-4 am and writes; I get up at 5:30 and have maybe 15 minutes with her before I have to leave to catch a long-haul bus. I get home around 6 most days, but she goes to bed between 7 and 8. This means I get at most an hour to have dinner and talk to her before she goes to bed, and I can not make myself go to bed at 7. She does not want to adjust her sleep schedule: "that's just how my body is", she says, and expects me to accommodate her (even though doing so means I have to choose bet ween spending time with her and spending time with my daughter in the evenings). She does usually cook dinner, which is nice (and I tell her so).
This last fall her behavior started getting weirder. She wanted to make plans to travel for the holidays and needed someone to feed the chickens while we were gone. But she refused to ask anybody in our town, because she "doesn't like talking to people" and "you can't trust people in towns like this, they'll steal your stuff." I told her I would find someone to watch the chickens when I had time (this was in late October). When I hadn't done so in a day or two, she said "well, we'll stay with my parents for the whole winter break; you'll just have to fly up to [her hometown] the day before Christmas and fly back the day after so the chickens don't starve." Nice to see the chickens outrank me. So I asked around my work the next day and found someone to watch the chickens (keep in mind this was a month or more before Christmas, hardly something that had to be done urgently, and they're her chickens). Then she agreed that I could come with them on the trip to her p arents' for Christmas. I told her that I felt hurt she said I should stay home and watch the chickens rather than spend the holiday with her and our kid, and she said "well, you wouldn't find anyone to watch them; what choice did I have?"
In the last couple of months it's gotten much worse. She's begun hanging around the local park with these local no-good types who drink and smoke weed in the park all day. Among them is a schizophrenic teenager whose parents ignore him, and whom my wife has claimed as her new best friend. She spends almost all her time with him: according to her, she does an hour or so of housework in the morning, then works in the garden for a while, and when this guy gets up they meet at the park and hang out together all day long. They play on the swings and go for walks. Every day. Weekends included. I don't care that she does when I'm not home, but my daughter and I would like a little attention when we're around, but she insists she needs time with her friends "too." (I have no friends at all). On Valentines day I got her some nice things and asked her if she wanted to come on a hike in the woods with me and the kid; she texted me back saying "no, but want to come to the park w ith me and hang out?" She ended up coming home after dark that day, not drunk but clearly having been drinking. Dinner was cold and daughter and I had been worried about her. When we told her we felt hurt by her absence, she said "well, I invited you to come along!" (Yeah, just how I want to spend valentines' day, drinking at the park with a bunch of tweekers).
It gets worse. A few days after that, my daughter (who walks past this park on her way home from school) saw her mom at the park with said tweekers and schizophrenic teenager, and my wife told her "I'll be home at 4". She (daughter) told me this when I got home at 6 to find her sitting alone in the house, hungry. My wife had left her phone on the counter so we couldn't contact her to see where she was. So we went out looking for her mom just as it was starting to get dark. We finally found her, riding her bike down an unlit street with no headlight, in the dark, so drunk she could barely ride. I had to drag her home. The next day she was embarrassed, but would not admit she'd done anything irresponsible. "I just drank too much."
Then 2 weeks ago came the worst incident. We were invited to a housewarming party at a nice couple's house in our town. We went and hung out for a while and it was fun. I left early to take the daughter home (she was bored and there were no other kids her age there). My wife, once again, said she'd be home shortly but didn't come home until after dark, again almost too drunk to stand up. The next day I found out she'd left the party, found her schizophrenic teenage friend at the park, brought him back (uninvited) to the party, and the two proceeded to get wasted and make a big scene in which the teenager had a psychiatric freakout. They got thrown out and we are no longer welcome at this nice couple's house. I've tried to go over and apologize in person but they seem to be avoiding me, not answering the door. Wife refuses to admit that she did anything wrong, other than drink too much. She says "if they can't handle my friends, then they're a******s and I don't want to see them anyway." This has become her excuse for all her misdeeds: anyone who doesn't like her hanging out with losers "just doesn't understand me" and "thinks they're too good for my friends".
I've tried to inform her of her childish behavior in the direct way counselors always suggest: "When you ______, I feel _______". She cannot accept that she's done anything wrong. It's always someone else's fault. When I tell her she's hurt me, she says "when?". I then list all the things she's done to hurt me (leaving me to find her a home, hanging out with losers instead of her family, embarrassing me at the party, other stuff not mentioned here), and she turns the conversation around and says "why do you keep bringing up all this stuff from the past? It's over. Quit being so butt-hurt about it." (She uses the term "butt-hurt" on me about 50 times a day.) She says that she never meant to hurt me; when I point out that intentional or not, she IS hurting me, she replies "that's just because you don't understand me; you don't have feelings like normal people do." She also insists that I'm autistic, and when I pointed out that I've been seeing mental health professiona ls for my entire adult life and not one has ever suggested I'm on the autism spectrum (I'm simply quiet and emotionally unexpressive, which is not the same thing), she said "so you're going to believe them and not me?" This coming from a woman who, by her own admission, got the autism idea from 3 friends on FB. She cherry-picks my words to use against me: a month or two ago I told her that I don't need her to comfort my anxieties about my career any more, now that I have the job I always wanted. Then she later said "you told me yourself that you don't need me." When I call her on her selective quoting, she either denies it ("no, that's exactly what you said") or turns it back on me: "you just don't understand the way I tell you how I feel. Only [crazy teen] understands how I feel. You wouldn't understand because you don't have feelings; you're autistic."
I know this post has made my wife out to be a monster and that isn't my intention. She's a good person who was once very supportive and responsible. When I was struggling with anxiety about my career and making little money at jobs I hated, she was there for me. I do love her. But it isn't just me who thinks she's changed. Her parents think she's being irresponsible ("they're irresponsible," she says). Her daughter is embarrassed by her and wants to spend her time with me instead ("all kids are embarrassed by their parents when they're 11," she says). The pastor at our church is so concerned that she's taking my wife out for a day of "girl stuff" this weekend as a kind of one-on-one intervention.
And I'm no saint myself. I haven't always been a good husband. I've always been extremely career-focused and sometimes have put the family aside for that. I did move us to an expensive place that none of us like that much. I have said hurtful, unnecessary things when pushed over the edge of anger. My wife tells me she feels sexually unwanted, and she has a good point there. I have zero interest in sex, with her or anyone, and even when I did I would rarely initiate. That's 100% my fault, due to my personal anxieties (long story short, I was raised to believe no woman would ever want me sexually, and that desiring sex with a woman was chauvinistic and disrespectful). I've tried to work on that with my wife but it's been extremely hard for me. The antidepressant medication I take is part of the problem...but if I didn't take it I wouldn't be able to hold down a job. I know because I've gone off it before. I hate taking it and I hate what it does to me but I really ha ve no choice if I want to be responsible.
I consider myself fortunate...I have a job I love, no financial debt besides my mortgage, and I'm in reasonably good health. But my job and my family are all I have. I've always put all my energy into work, so I don't have any friends and not much in the way of outside interests. And now it looks like my family is falling apart. I think I would give up my job to go back to how it was before we moved here and my wife decided that my career success means she gets to spend the rest of her life living like a spoiled 13-year-old. If I hadn't taken this job, she wouldn't be acting like this...or at least that how it seems to me. I'd rather not get divorced because I do love her, and because I'd probably never see my stepdaughter again...since I'm not her biological dad and I never adopted her, I would be at her mom's mercy legally. And I know the first thing she'd do is pack up and move back in with her parents, 1100 miles away.
I'm in this alone, which is why I posted here. Again, I have no friends outside work, I have very little relationship with my own family, and my options look like trying to live with my wife's irresponsibility, or get divorced and never see my daughter again. She's agreed in theory to MC, but she insists that I be the one to find someone and set it up, and I'm working on it, but I have very little time during the workweek (and will probably have to take time out of work to go to counseling). I will give it a shot but I don't expect much. My wife has already decided that she's in the right and my hurt feelings are all because (in the words of a FB friend of hers) I "just didn't want to be married to an artist."
Thank you if you made it through all this, even if you leave no comment. It's taken me hours to write this out in a few sittings, and it's good to vent. Now to spend the rest of my coffee break looking for that MC, I guess. That and feeling like an ungrateful idiot.
My wife and I have been married for 7 years. We don't have kids but we have sole custody of her 11 year old from her first marriage, who I think of as my kid (I've been with her mom since she was 1 and her real dad hasn't been very involved). We have different emotional types, I'm rational and cold while she's hot-headed and passionate. But I've always thought that was a strength because we balance out each other's bad qualities, and our marriage was good for the first 5 years.
Two years ago we had to move to a different part of the country for my work...I landed a spectacular job, but in a place where neither of us wanted to live (it's expensive here). My wife almost had a fit because she's never cared about a career. She's an artist (writing and music), hated her dull office job, and had hoped that with my big career move she could be a SAHM and play music or maybe teach piano on the side. I knew it would be tough, but I promised her that if she would agree to move, I would make sure she wouldn't have to do a job she hates. She agreed and we moved. Then she turned into a completely different person.
First, while looking for a place to live, we were jerked around by realtors and mortgage agents. That wasn't either of our fault. But she had totally unrealistic demands for what she wanted in a house. She insisted on living in a rural area with no neighbors, on enough land that she could raise animals (chickens, goats, etc.), AND cheaply enough that we could do it on a single income with some money to put away each month. This in one of the most crowded and expensive parts of the US. After finding nothing and living in temporary housing for a month, she lost patience with finding a place to live. She took our kid and moved back in with her parents, telling me "we'll come back when you find us a house." I was left alone, living in a hotel in an unfamiliar city, trying to do my new job and find a house that matched her demands, all at the same time. After three months of shirking my duties at my new job, I finally found a place that she could live with...semi-rural wit h a large yard, very cheap but also very far from my work. While I was looking for this place she treated me quite badly, angrily shooting down every suggestion I made over the phone, saying things like "it's insulting that you think I'd live in a house like that". She looked up houses online and asked me to take the time to go look at them (she was far away), and insisted it was "up to me" but still kept meddling in the process. When I finally found our current house, she agreed to come back and I considered myself lucky and thought the ordeal was over.
When she moved in, she did try to be a SAHM and to grow our own food in the yard. She got chickens. But in the process she lost all interest in spending time with me. I'll admit that my work eats up huge amounts of my time (and the 1-hour commute each way doesn't help), but it's nice to interact with my wife and kid in the small amount of time I do get to see them. But I don't get to choose when I have to be at work, and she sets a ridiculous schedule for herself. She gets up around 3-4 am and writes; I get up at 5:30 and have maybe 15 minutes with her before I have to leave to catch a long-haul bus. I get home around 6 most days, but she goes to bed between 7 and 8. This means I get at most an hour to have dinner and talk to her before she goes to bed, and I can not make myself go to bed at 7. She does not want to adjust her sleep schedule: "that's just how my body is", she says, and expects me to accommodate her (even though doing so means I have to choose bet ween spending time with her and spending time with my daughter in the evenings). She does usually cook dinner, which is nice (and I tell her so).
This last fall her behavior started getting weirder. She wanted to make plans to travel for the holidays and needed someone to feed the chickens while we were gone. But she refused to ask anybody in our town, because she "doesn't like talking to people" and "you can't trust people in towns like this, they'll steal your stuff." I told her I would find someone to watch the chickens when I had time (this was in late October). When I hadn't done so in a day or two, she said "well, we'll stay with my parents for the whole winter break; you'll just have to fly up to [her hometown] the day before Christmas and fly back the day after so the chickens don't starve." Nice to see the chickens outrank me. So I asked around my work the next day and found someone to watch the chickens (keep in mind this was a month or more before Christmas, hardly something that had to be done urgently, and they're her chickens). Then she agreed that I could come with them on the trip to her p arents' for Christmas. I told her that I felt hurt she said I should stay home and watch the chickens rather than spend the holiday with her and our kid, and she said "well, you wouldn't find anyone to watch them; what choice did I have?"
In the last couple of months it's gotten much worse. She's begun hanging around the local park with these local no-good types who drink and smoke weed in the park all day. Among them is a schizophrenic teenager whose parents ignore him, and whom my wife has claimed as her new best friend. She spends almost all her time with him: according to her, she does an hour or so of housework in the morning, then works in the garden for a while, and when this guy gets up they meet at the park and hang out together all day long. They play on the swings and go for walks. Every day. Weekends included. I don't care that she does when I'm not home, but my daughter and I would like a little attention when we're around, but she insists she needs time with her friends "too." (I have no friends at all). On Valentines day I got her some nice things and asked her if she wanted to come on a hike in the woods with me and the kid; she texted me back saying "no, but want to come to the park w ith me and hang out?" She ended up coming home after dark that day, not drunk but clearly having been drinking. Dinner was cold and daughter and I had been worried about her. When we told her we felt hurt by her absence, she said "well, I invited you to come along!" (Yeah, just how I want to spend valentines' day, drinking at the park with a bunch of tweekers).
It gets worse. A few days after that, my daughter (who walks past this park on her way home from school) saw her mom at the park with said tweekers and schizophrenic teenager, and my wife told her "I'll be home at 4". She (daughter) told me this when I got home at 6 to find her sitting alone in the house, hungry. My wife had left her phone on the counter so we couldn't contact her to see where she was. So we went out looking for her mom just as it was starting to get dark. We finally found her, riding her bike down an unlit street with no headlight, in the dark, so drunk she could barely ride. I had to drag her home. The next day she was embarrassed, but would not admit she'd done anything irresponsible. "I just drank too much."
Then 2 weeks ago came the worst incident. We were invited to a housewarming party at a nice couple's house in our town. We went and hung out for a while and it was fun. I left early to take the daughter home (she was bored and there were no other kids her age there). My wife, once again, said she'd be home shortly but didn't come home until after dark, again almost too drunk to stand up. The next day I found out she'd left the party, found her schizophrenic teenage friend at the park, brought him back (uninvited) to the party, and the two proceeded to get wasted and make a big scene in which the teenager had a psychiatric freakout. They got thrown out and we are no longer welcome at this nice couple's house. I've tried to go over and apologize in person but they seem to be avoiding me, not answering the door. Wife refuses to admit that she did anything wrong, other than drink too much. She says "if they can't handle my friends, then they're a******s and I don't want to see them anyway." This has become her excuse for all her misdeeds: anyone who doesn't like her hanging out with losers "just doesn't understand me" and "thinks they're too good for my friends".
I've tried to inform her of her childish behavior in the direct way counselors always suggest: "When you ______, I feel _______". She cannot accept that she's done anything wrong. It's always someone else's fault. When I tell her she's hurt me, she says "when?". I then list all the things she's done to hurt me (leaving me to find her a home, hanging out with losers instead of her family, embarrassing me at the party, other stuff not mentioned here), and she turns the conversation around and says "why do you keep bringing up all this stuff from the past? It's over. Quit being so butt-hurt about it." (She uses the term "butt-hurt" on me about 50 times a day.) She says that she never meant to hurt me; when I point out that intentional or not, she IS hurting me, she replies "that's just because you don't understand me; you don't have feelings like normal people do." She also insists that I'm autistic, and when I pointed out that I've been seeing mental health professiona ls for my entire adult life and not one has ever suggested I'm on the autism spectrum (I'm simply quiet and emotionally unexpressive, which is not the same thing), she said "so you're going to believe them and not me?" This coming from a woman who, by her own admission, got the autism idea from 3 friends on FB. She cherry-picks my words to use against me: a month or two ago I told her that I don't need her to comfort my anxieties about my career any more, now that I have the job I always wanted. Then she later said "you told me yourself that you don't need me." When I call her on her selective quoting, she either denies it ("no, that's exactly what you said") or turns it back on me: "you just don't understand the way I tell you how I feel. Only [crazy teen] understands how I feel. You wouldn't understand because you don't have feelings; you're autistic."
I know this post has made my wife out to be a monster and that isn't my intention. She's a good person who was once very supportive and responsible. When I was struggling with anxiety about my career and making little money at jobs I hated, she was there for me. I do love her. But it isn't just me who thinks she's changed. Her parents think she's being irresponsible ("they're irresponsible," she says). Her daughter is embarrassed by her and wants to spend her time with me instead ("all kids are embarrassed by their parents when they're 11," she says). The pastor at our church is so concerned that she's taking my wife out for a day of "girl stuff" this weekend as a kind of one-on-one intervention.
And I'm no saint myself. I haven't always been a good husband. I've always been extremely career-focused and sometimes have put the family aside for that. I did move us to an expensive place that none of us like that much. I have said hurtful, unnecessary things when pushed over the edge of anger. My wife tells me she feels sexually unwanted, and she has a good point there. I have zero interest in sex, with her or anyone, and even when I did I would rarely initiate. That's 100% my fault, due to my personal anxieties (long story short, I was raised to believe no woman would ever want me sexually, and that desiring sex with a woman was chauvinistic and disrespectful). I've tried to work on that with my wife but it's been extremely hard for me. The antidepressant medication I take is part of the problem...but if I didn't take it I wouldn't be able to hold down a job. I know because I've gone off it before. I hate taking it and I hate what it does to me but I really ha ve no choice if I want to be responsible.
I consider myself fortunate...I have a job I love, no financial debt besides my mortgage, and I'm in reasonably good health. But my job and my family are all I have. I've always put all my energy into work, so I don't have any friends and not much in the way of outside interests. And now it looks like my family is falling apart. I think I would give up my job to go back to how it was before we moved here and my wife decided that my career success means she gets to spend the rest of her life living like a spoiled 13-year-old. If I hadn't taken this job, she wouldn't be acting like this...or at least that how it seems to me. I'd rather not get divorced because I do love her, and because I'd probably never see my stepdaughter again...since I'm not her biological dad and I never adopted her, I would be at her mom's mercy legally. And I know the first thing she'd do is pack up and move back in with her parents, 1100 miles away.
I'm in this alone, which is why I posted here. Again, I have no friends outside work, I have very little relationship with my own family, and my options look like trying to live with my wife's irresponsibility, or get divorced and never see my daughter again. She's agreed in theory to MC, but she insists that I be the one to find someone and set it up, and I'm working on it, but I have very little time during the workweek (and will probably have to take time out of work to go to counseling). I will give it a shot but I don't expect much. My wife has already decided that she's in the right and my hurt feelings are all because (in the words of a FB friend of hers) I "just didn't want to be married to an artist."
Thank you if you made it through all this, even if you leave no comment. It's taken me hours to write this out in a few sittings, and it's good to vent. Now to spend the rest of my coffee break looking for that MC, I guess. That and feeling like an ungrateful idiot.
Put the internet to work for you.
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