Title.
My husband and I have been together for 12 years, married for 4. We are both in our early thirties, so started talking about getting a home, kids, all the normal couple stuff. This whole time I considered him to be the standard of a man and my best friend.
For a few years he kept putting off that conversation, but I thought it was the classic man thing of “i wanna have my freedom as long as possible” type. So I respected it.
For context: My partner is wealthy because his parents passed away at a young age leaving him a large sum of money. Decent enough for us to be able to get a house and then have money left to live on.
I on the other hand come from a poorer family. All of us are in some kind of debt and have low income jobs (myself included).
My husband insists that we keep our finances completely separate (not even having an emergency fund, or shared account for groceries etc). And that has been a source of tension.
However I put up with it because he was always very nice, kind and loving towards me.
One day we had a fight about money, and I put my foot down that we needed to seek therapy to deal with our relationship problems. So we did.
It ended up making things worse. His personality took a 180 turn, and he became very mean and kind of ruthless towards me.
In the span of one month he told me my close friends were more attractive than me and thats why they have better jobs, that he has not been physically attracted to me as long as we have been married because I ve gained weight (which he did as well), and that if I care about our relationship I need to lose it. He threatened to divorce me during a fight and then took it back immediately.
He started initiating sex a lot more frequently, making me feel like if we didnt it would be the end of our marriage. But obviously after all the emotional whiplash it was hard for me to even get in the mood, as I am now very self conscious about my body.
He has put me through the emotional ringer and in the midst of all this odd behavior I picked up that he was adding on social media / hitting up all of his ex-girlfriends who thankfully live in different cities and are either married/away/ won’t reply to him.
He even opened a dating app.
I didnt even have to snoop because he aloofly was showing me something on his phone when i saw the confirmation email.
I confronted him about it as calmly as I could, and he denied it until he couldnt anymore. And even then he kept at it.
I am absolutely devastated. I cannot state enough how out of character all of this has been.
He was my absolute safe space and I have built my life around him. I dont have the means to leave him and signed a prenup so even if I did leave it would be really hard for me to start over at 30 especially wanting kids.
I made a list of all the pros and cons. And decided to stay.
I am a feminist and feel extremely embarrassed to be in this situation but it is absolutely hardcore out there.
Im hoping someday he will go back to being the sweet man I fell for but after this I just dont know how to pick up the pieces.