Should I stay in my marriage?
I (28m) have been married to my wife (24f) for 3.5 years and together for 6. I will be the first to admit that while we were dating, our relationship was super toxic. I was young and dumb and basically ignored every glaring red flag there was and continued to date her even though it wasn’t healthy and I distanced myself from my friends and family. She was very manipulative when we dated, she was an emotional rollercoaster and would get upset at something very minor and go silent and not tell me what was wrong and just drag on like that for an entire day and basically ruin my day because I’d be trying to pry out of her what was wrong, eventually she would just stop being upset after hours or days of this but still never would tell me what was wrong. This cycle would repeat constantly. We fought constantly, I honestly don’t know how we stayed together for so long, but we did. She ended up getting pregnant while dating and I felt the right thing to do was to get married. So we got married and now have 2 children (ages 3 and 4 months). Since we’ve been married, my wife has definitely grown and become a much more mature person overall compared to when we were dating but she still has issues that really make things hard for me. My wife grew up in a very toxic environment which I didn’t realize the extent of it until we had been married for a few years. But I think growing up in that environment really damaged her mentally and emotionally and has made it really difficult for her to be in a healthy relationship.
She loses patience quickly (but very often like multiple times per day) causing me to have to be careful how I act to not set her off. I feel like I have to overcompensate to try and keep her happy. I do not feel heard or that she’s interested when I tell her about things important to me, when I share a story or accomplishment about my life, I’m usually met with a smart comment instead of love and support. She will say mean or hurtful things and spin them as a joke or say I’m being “too sensitive” if I get offended or upset at it. She’ll straight up deny or flip things on me if confronted about things that I bring up that I don’t like, I seem to always be the one who has to apologize after a fight. She can be very isolated and doesn’t particularly like hanging out with my friends ever, forcing me to either not go or go by myself and make excuses for why she’s not there. Those are just a few examples of things that she does.
Also, she is a stay at home mom and I work to provide. I pay for everything and keep up with the house and cars and everything in our life that needs keeping up with. She takes care of the kids and does a great job but one thing that really irritates me is she really downplays my role in the family. On top of working and keeping up with the mortgage and bills and stuff, I try to help clean up when I’m home and obviously take care of the kids but no matter how much I do right, she always seems to find the 1 thing I did wrong. I could do 99 things to be helpful and thoughtful, but she would point out and get upset at the 1 thing I didn’t do. It’s extremely frustrating.
Honestly what I always come back to is that I feel like your spouse should bring peace and happiness into your life and my wife honestly mostly brings stress and negativity into my life at this point. Sometimes we have days that are really great and I like being with her but most of the time, I honestly dread going home and I fantasize about being single.
I’ve thought about divorce but, 1. I come from a very religious family who would be extremely against divorce and would definitely try to push me to just go to counseling or work things out and 2. I really hate the idea of our two sons growing up in a divorced household and not being able to see them every day but I literally think about being single almost every day which makes me really sad because I know that’s not normal in a good, healthy marriage. Also, I have thought to myself that if we were still just dating, I would absolutely break up with her. Which tells me that I’m staying in a marriage just because we’re married and have kids.
What should I do?
Tl;dr: I was in a toxic relationship and ignored the red flags because I was immature. We got pregnant and I married her and now I don’t want to be married anymore. What do I do?