The first thing I should have noticed was the credit. I knew hers wasn’t good, but I didn’t realize how bad until we showed up at the apartment complex with a moving truck full of everything we owned. The manager wouldn’t hand over the key because she had a vehicle repossessed that she just never mentioned. I had to call my parents from the office and have them wire money so we could get inside our own home.
Then she lost her mind at the deli counter because her quarter pound of sliced turkey came out one slice over. She wanted a freaking quarter pound. We made it fifty weeks. She called me from her boyfriend’s house while I was visiting her parents, with her six-year-old in my care, and told me she’d spent the night with him.
I rented a truck, rallied my dad and some friends, drove to our place, and emptied it to the bare walls. I married my wife extremely quickly because she wanted to get married and didn’t want to break up. The day of the wedding, my friends asked how I was feeling, and I said, “Well, I can always get divorced. ” That should have told me everything.
Don’t settle. Marry someone you genuinely love and can see yourself with when you’re both old and broken down. I’m remarried now, and it makes all the difference. When you’re with the right person, you know it.
If you don’t know it, you aren’t. I wasn’t married, but I lived with my boyfriend for years, so the breakup felt like a divorce. He was perfect at first. Then I noticed how angry he got over small things.
When he drove and something felt unfair, he’d roll down the window and scream. I don’t know why I ignored that. Once we lived together, that anger came home. If I accidentally stood in front of the TV for two seconds, he was angry.
If I didn’t rinse a dish properly before loading the dishwasher, he was angry. If I used his lotion or toothpaste or ramen without asking, he was angry. It was a whole personality mix of perfectionism, self-righteousness, and arrogance. I’m answering for my mom.
She was married for over twenty years. She tried everything, books, therapy, being the perfect wife. She had dinner ready after work even though he got out at three and she got out at five. She cleaned the house while he played video games.
He was mean to her, to me, even to the dog. Once I moved out, he took everything out on her, and she started spending more and more weekends at my house. Then, just before Christmas, she left. My dad said she did a horrible thing and that I was betraying him by staying neutral.
He can get bent. I haven’t spoken to him in three years. From the outside, we were the textbook high school sweethearts, together for nearly ten years and married for just over one. But no one sees what happens behind closed doors.
When we got married, he changed. Suddenly he could demand anything from me because I was his wife, like an object he owned. Every problem I tried to fix was met with, “Well, you married me like this. ” It took the death of someone very close to me for me to finally see the relationship for what it was.
When I asked for space, he lost it, locked me in the house for hours, got physical, and faked a mental health emergency. I had completely checked out by then and just wanted him to leave me alone. It took two arrests for assault and a restraining order before he finally got the message. Suddenly, I wasn’t controlled anymore.
Never settle for someone so selfish and unwilling to work with you. My wife cheated on every long-term partner she ever had, including her first boyfriend, with her own brother. Looking back, she talked about it almost proudly, like they deserved it. Every guy she dated, according to her, was abusive.
Plot twist, she cheated on me too. And when her family found out, she accused me of being abusive. She was also a pathological liar from the start, at first about unimportant things that made no sense to hide, then about practically everything. She lived in a private world where her lies were true, and I convinced myself she’d grown up.
I never saw it because the opportunity wasn’t there. He never lived alone. He spent most of his late teens and early twenties living with my twin brother and roommates. The place was always clean enough, and I’d see him doing dishes or cleaning up now and then.
Once we got married, I realized he did nothing. No housework at all. My twin brother told me to just tell him what to do, and sometimes he would, but I couldn’t follow him around forever making sure he picked up after himself. When his roommate moved out and the baby was born, the house became a mess.
He’d play with the kid and occasionally change a diaper, but all the dishes, laundry, shopping, cleaning, and feedings fell on me. Soon enough, I realized I could do it all on my own, and it would actually be less work. That wasn’t the only problem in the marriage, but it was the big one. Listen to your family and friends.
Mine warned me that my ex wasn’t good for me, and I ignored them through six years of on-and-off until we finally got married. It took four months of marriage to realize they’d been right all along. There wasn’t one specific event. I just slowly came to understand that I wasn’t happy.
Six years of thinking she was the one, and only four months of marriage to wake up. The real kicker was realizing I don’t think I was ever actually in love with her. I always try to fix the broken ones without regard for my own feelings, and they saw that long before I did. As a guy, I carried the stigma that I couldn’t be on the receiving end of abuse.
But if there was ever proof that a man can be emotionally abused, it was that relationship. It feels oddly satisfying to finally say it. He called me up and confessed that he’d kissed a girl. He was so emotional and distraught about it that I found it cute.
We were eighteen and I didn’t even consider us to be dating. We’d gone on a few dates after graduation, then went to different colleges. That conversation actually started our exclusive relationship. I married him four years later, and the accusations began.
He’d go silent for days, then ask where I’d been at noon two weeks earlier. He’d bring up guys I dated in college and twist the timeline. It escalated from moodiness to insinuations to full arguments. About every five years he’d lose it over some perceived slight.
Once I brought over a friend and sat her down to deny that I was cheating with a friend’s husband, because her husband and I worked together on a project and only saw each other in groups. We separated, went to counseling, got back together, and it slowly started again. Five years later, a friend of his made a stupid joke on social media about a work trip, and somehow that meant I was cheating. Another separation, another round of counseling.
Five years after that, he decided I was cheating when I went to a community college play with friends, which he’d also been invited to. He locked me out of a room and tied down the garage door so I couldn’t open it. We divorced after that. I’d tell my eighteen-year-old self to run for the hills.
He wasn’t cheating on me. He grew up in a house where cheating happened, and both his father and stepfather completely exited his life after it. He still hasn’t gotten over it. I don’t hate him.
I wish he could heal. But there is a limit to empathy when you’re being mistreated. Don’t cheat. It has generational effects.
There was no cardinal sin. We were together for eleven years, and it was a slow burn. We were both troubled and unhappy, and I worked on it. I tried everything to change my life and my perspective, and I invited him to try every single thing with me, together and separately.
He made no effort. He just stayed unhappy. By the end, I was a profoundly different person and he was almost exactly the same. The whole time, he dismissed everything I said as silly, house ideas, directions, cooking, hobbies, movies, music, bedroom things, camping, family things.
I didn’t respect myself enough to stand up for myself. Then I learned self-respect, and I ended up isolating myself from him and realizing how lonely I was. The hardest thing I’ve ever done was telling him I didn’t respect or trust him anymore, and that I had decided to leave. I think mine was more than one.
She was a single mom with two kids. One baby daddy was her brother-in-law. The other was in prison for grand theft auto. She took “I’m going to marry you someday” as a proposal.
She faked a pregnancy to get me to propose. She hurt herself when she didn’t get her way. She constantly belittled me in front of her family. She had a friend open a credit card in my name so she could eat pizza for lunch while I ate jalapeno pickles because that was all that was left in the house.
I was violently ill the day of my wedding. I was concerned that he had a disproportionate preoccupation with my age. I didn’t ignore it. I addressed it directly.
I asked him if he was sure he wanted to marry me because I was young, and I reminded him I wouldn’t always be. I told him I had no interest in being a trophy wife. He assured me that wasn’t the reason. He’s seven years older.
Maybe it wasn’t simply that I was young. I think it was that he felt he had the upper hand through life experience and earning power, and that meant he should make the decisions. He didn’t really want a grown woman. Seven years, two kids, and endless support and compromise from me later, he divorced me when I was thirty.
He now dates women eighteen to twenty years younger than him. Thank God I never gave up on my education and professional standing. His loss. I got left at the altar, so to speak.
Two days before the wedding, my high school sweetheart, the best thing that ever happened to me, fell apart. He was a mama’s boy beyond what was reasonable. If he wanted something, he’d go to her in tears and ask for it. He was failing community college and claimed the professors all hated him, so his mom kept paying for him to retake comp one and college algebra.
I was at a university nearby, and when I tried to help him, he’d get angry and cry to his mom that I made him feel stupid. He absolutely refused to get a tutor. He spent six years failing his first semester. I told myself he was just misunderstood and sensitive, maybe not cut out for college.
His mom paid for art school. He finished and decided to move to a bigger city for work, moving in with a female friend he’d been gaming with for years and her roommate. Things got awkward immediately. They’d stop talking when I walked into her room.
She’d be home when she said she’d be at work. They’d message each other back and forth all night, even though she was in the next room. He got hypervigilant about his passwords. And the intimacy completely dried up.
He said he was tired from job hunting. We were getting married soon, so I let it go. A week before the wedding, I flew home to come back with my mom and sister, who had never been on a plane. On the day we were supposed to return, I got a long instant message from him.
Not even a phone call. He told me not to come back. He wanted to be with his female friend, that they’d been carrying on a roleplay relationship through messages since they were thirteen, almost a decade by then, and that they were in love. He said he’d ship my stuff, but he didn’t want to see me again.
I lost the apartment, almost lost my job, and lost my fiance. The joke was on him, though. He never told her he was planning to dump me, and he just assumed she felt the same way. When he told her, she said she wanted to date a marine and saw herself as a military wife, but she’d always treasure what they had as kids.
She briefly got physically involved with him out of pity while she hunted, then found her military guy and left him stuck with an apartment he couldn’t afford. He had to move back across the country to live with his mom. That’s the last I heard. A couple of years later, I met my now husband, and we’ve been together for eleven years.
He’s awesome and doesn’t cry to his mom when he wants a new game. I ignored an ocean of red flags, got dumped, and life is much better for it. I could never do enough to make her happy. I did all the housework and yard work, and nothing was enough.
I wasn’t allowed to be tired because my job was just sitting at a desk for nine hours. We both had absent fathers, and when we talked about kids, she asked if I’d be a stay-at-home dad. I said yes, and she told me she couldn’t respect me. She was still completely attached to her mom, who got all our wedding money to keep her house.
Once she threatened to kick me out because I ate cookies she hadn’t touched in a month. She told me she wanted a divorce over text. We were only married six months before filing. She wasn’t kind to people she felt were beneath her.
Waitresses, housekeeping, mechanics. She was very beautiful, so I didn’t think about it as much as I should have. I remember the exact moment I realized I didn’t love her anymore. I was sweaty from playing basketball, and she said, “You are going to shower, right?
You played basketball with all those black guys. ” How did I miss all those cues? She also believed Jesus only loves American white people and the Second Amendment, and that dinosaurs and men were on Earth at the same time and got on a boat together. Marry someone because they’re kind, not because they’re beautiful.
Mentally abusive. He never laid a hand on me, but sometimes I feel it would have been easier to leave if he had. It was small things he said. When I talked about it at work, my coworkers were horrified.
We were engaged for years, and the only reason we got married was because he threatened to leave if we didn’t. I wasn’t ready because I knew the red flags, but my pride and fear of being alone kept me from leaving. The wedding night was horrible. He refused to sit with me, went around talking to other guests, and refused the first dance.
Even his own family asked why I was with him. His cousin tried to convince me to find someone better. A month after the wedding, he told me he wanted a divorce because he thought I was fat. I was the same size, if not smaller.
We split up exactly a year after we got together, and it was the best day of my life. The only reason I cried was because I didn’t know how to be independent. I’d never lived by myself. If you want to leave, do it before you get stuck.
Mental abuse is just as bad as physical. I’m in a loving relationship now, and I’m still affected by that prick. My ex had to control every aspect of the wedding, including my dress. I thought it was sweet at the time, but he pushed my friends and family out of the shopping process and basically picked it for me.
I wanted a small, affordable wedding. He wanted something grand that would make everyone jealous. Everything was about status. The biggest red flag was that I nearly had a panic attack walking down the aisle.
I wanted to run. I told myself cold feet were common, but if you look at my wedding photos, my smile was never real. I was miserable. I fell into a depression during the honeymoon.
He was abusive and controlling, and it escalated into full mental abuse. I was so young and naive. I didn’t see it. What’s not normal is actively dreading it and telling yourself during the ceremony that divorce is always an option.
There were so many signs I explained away. He wanted almost nothing to do with planning our wedding. We knew the date a year and a half in advance, yet he waited until three days before to buy his outfit. When I pushed him to participate, he got angry, like I was bothering him by asking him to plan his own wedding.
His work history was a mess. He switched jobs constantly because he’d get angry and quit. In ten years, I don’t think he ever stayed anywhere more than a year. I thought he had terrible luck with employers.
Looking back, he was probably just difficult to work with and had no emotional brakes. He was also deeply depressed and completely uninterested in getting help, so it became my job to accommodate it. I had to be patient. I had to understand.
I had to adjust my plans around his feelings. But when I struggled, mine never mattered the same way. He wouldn’t do anything with me unless it involved food. No parties, no drinks after work, no walks with the dog, no grocery shopping.
But he’d stay out until all hours with his car group friends. I just wasn’t invited. Even gifts disappeared. He convinced me we shouldn’t exchange presents to save money, so birthdays and holidays went by with nothing from him.
Individually, each thing seemed explainable. He was stressed. He was depressed. He hated his job.
We needed to save. But over the years, I realized those explanations always required me to accept less while he did whatever worked for him. Mine is a little different. My widowed mom started dating a guy from her Sunday school class.
Very quiet, but nice. Her friends warned her he was never home, always hunting or working, but they said he was a good man. They got married, and it turned out he was just depressed. His wife of twenty-five years had been cheating on him with the same guy for at least half that time.
He worked all the time or went on hunting trips because he didn’t want to be home. Mom told him it was too bad he couldn’t retire so they could enjoy time together. He said he could, and he did. He spent the next twenty-plus years having a great time, traveling, just enjoying each other.
They had a great marriage before he passed away. Sometimes a divorce is one hundred percent one person’s fault. Just because you’re divorced doesn’t mean you’re a failure. My wife acted like she was cheating.
Said she wasn’t. She was. Friends warned me she was loose in high school, but I didn’t grow up in that town. She wouldn’t stop talking to her exes despite my requests, and the secrecy made me sick with worry.
She insisted I was overthinking and that she’d changed. Two years in, I was away at the fire academy, and she got pregnant. Her best friend and her own brothers told me it wasn’t mine, and the timeline confirmed it. It came out that she’d been seeing several exes behind my back, plus guys she met on Tinder.
She took my belongings before I got back and caused the death of my dog. It was devastating, but I should have seen it from a mile away. Love is blind. The joke’s on her, though.
She’s in jail now. He freaked out at a party because she smoked occasionally and decided they couldn’t hang out with that crowd again. She was popular and had a lot of friends, but they moved away before the wedding. On the wedding night, he told her they weren’t moving back to her home state as planned because he decided he didn’t like his boss there.
No discussion. She’d already packed the kitchen because she was so excited. She cried for three days straight. He had no idea how to treat a wife.
He thought gaining a wife was the endgame and there was no reason to be romantic. He treated her like an employee, verbally abused her about her weight, and constantly asked her friends to help make her work out more. She sank deeper into depression and lost all her self-worth. He wasn’t interested in the kids either.
She did most of the work. He’d go to the son’s sports but rarely the daughter’s, and often forgot to leave work on time to pick her up. Always his way or the highway, only doing things he enjoyed, never trying to connect with anyone else’s hobbies. He micromanaged everyone.
She started reading a lot because he’d nag if she watched TV besides the news. She finally got the nerve to leave after the sons went to college and the daughter was in high school. He’s now been divorced twice. His second marriage lasted about two years, and his current girlfriend doesn’t want to marry him or move in with him.
He had the nerve to ask me if my husband treats me well. It took everything not to throw that back in his face. He visited recently and nitpicked so much crap I can’t stand being around him more than a couple days. I’m the daughter.
A friend from college married a guy she dated through most of college, and they divorced after two years. Back then, a friend of mine told me that this guy had messaged her saying he wanted to be with her instead of his girlfriend. My friend went to his girlfriend and told her. She ignored her, unfriended her on Facebook, and married him anyway.
My other friend is getting divorced right now. She and her ex were together eight years, married about two. Someone asked what happened, and she said he had habits she didn’t like when they were dating, but she assumed they’d improve after marriage. Spoiler, they didn’t.
He withheld affection and intimacy. It was manipulative and gaslighting and emotionally abusive. It wasn’t that I ignored the red flags. I was just dumb enough to believe that if I tried hard enough, he’d treat me the way I deserved.
But I got the best part of him, our daughter and son. Now I’m struggling because he’s with someone I used to consider a friend, and he’s doing all the nice things for her that I begged for when we were married. I find out through the kids. Daddy bought her a necklace.
Daddy’s taking her on vacation. I don’t regret ending it, but it hurts. I’m lonely, and it makes me irrationally convinced there’s something wrong with me, that I don’t make men want to treat me well. My dad has been married six times, and as his son, I’ve noticed things.
He’s a liar, and he’s really good at it. He smiles and nods slightly when he’s confirming something he doesn’t know. He talks with his hands when he’s telling a lie. He gaslights.
You’ll leave your phone on the table, come back, and it’s missing. He searches the whole house and the car, then you find it exactly where you left it. He passed lie detector tests on more than one occasion. He cheats constantly, claiming he’s working late while he’s with other women.
On the surface, he’s a nice, charismatic guy. Beneath it, he’s an angry man with a short fuse who’ll do whatever it takes to get his way. I used to sleep with a pencil clenched in my hand under my pillow because I feared he might hurt me. He appears wealthy, but he’s in debt, relying on seducing women, marrying them, moving into their houses, and opening joint bank accounts to keep up appearances.
I love him because he kept me fed and gave me a bed, but part of me hates him for what he did to my mother and me. He’s not husband or father material, and I feel sorry for his current wife. I don’t think marriage makes sense. If you love someone, why pay money to get it in writing?
But if you must, make sure you really know the person. Even when you think you do, you probably don’t. I’m going through a divorce now, after sixteen years together. He had to control every situation, and in my head, I told myself he just handled things better.
He came from money. I came from nothing. His grandparents bought him a house, and we moved in. I got pregnant soon after.
I wanted to go back to school, but he wanted me to be a stay-at-home mom, then criticized me for not having an education because I dropped out of high school due to family troubles. He said getting my GED was useless because I wasn’t good for anything. He mistreated me physically and emotionally. While my mother was dying in hospice, he called to yell at me to come home because he wanted dinner.
Like a fool, I went. A cousin called right after I left to tell me my mom had passed. I broke down, and he told me to stop crying because his son didn’t need to see that. In front of me, he told his friends I was only good for cooking, cleaning, and intimacy, then laughed.
He lied to get me to sign my name off the house we bought, saying the papers were for something else. I trusted everything he said and did most of what he wanted, even degrading things. He pushed me into a job involving adult-oriented work that made me deeply uncomfortable and ashamed. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and left him a year ago.
Today I got my GED. I’m back in school, taking care of my son, seeing a therapist, working on me. He screwed me up in so many ways, but I will not let him keep me down again. I’ve been happily married ten years now.
My parents weren’t, but I learned from their mistakes. Don’t lie. I was a compulsive liar and good at it. I loved creating complex stories people believed.
My wife is the opposite. I tell her everything now, even what I spend on stupid stuff. It keeps the air fresh. Be ready to share finances.
We started early, opened a joint savings account for the wedding and our life together, and we’re both transparent. Talk about children. We always wanted at least two. I see colleagues fighting about it all the time.
Talk about feelings. When my first daughter was born, I hated her. It’s hard to admit as a father, but I couldn’t stand having a baby in the house or my wife’s attention being taken. There was no love there.
All good now. She’s six, and I’m crazy about her. It takes time. Animalistic behavior takes over men in some situations, and I had deeply disturbing thoughts toward my child.
Education and talking with my wife helped me overcome that. I would never abandon her now. My second daughter is due in a month. Marriage is a union of the most intimate matters.
If you’re unsure, live together first. I was raised to stay pure and not cohabit. Don’t do that. Save yourself if you feel the need, but live together for a few months.
You might find out scattered socks and morning toilet sounds are not what you’re ready for. I met my wife overseas. She seemed perfect for me, and I for her. I was thirty-one, she was twenty-five.
After ten months of dating, we married. The morning after the wedding, the person next to me in bed was a completely different personality. If we argued, she’d take off her ring and decide not to be married, disappearing for days. When I came back from deployment, I learned she’d had repeated mental health crises requiring emergency care.
She called my command and said I was abusing her. They investigated and found no evidence. After her final crisis, the military flew her to the psych ward, where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. After ten months of that bizarre marriage, I gave her divorce papers, telling her that since I was so horrible, I’d set her free.
She mocked me for weeks before realizing she couldn’t fight it. I’m thankful we never had children. One thing I learned I’ll carry to my grave: it’s better to grow old alone than with the wrong person. My sister and her husband.
When I first met him at my parents’ house, they were playing a game, and I joined. A cat jumped up and he was immediately rude to it. You don’t treat an animal with cruelty without good cause. He’s also passively aggressive and loud to the point of discomfort.
Three years later, their marriage is rocky. He can’t hold a job, and they barely talk. She’s emotionally high maintenance, and he has no idea how to communicate with her. He spends his time ignoring her and playing video games.
It’s toxic. I’ve been hoping for a divorce for a while. Even my traditional mom wants it. There are religious factors slowing it down, and I can’t bear to think what my sister would go through.
It’s painful to watch. Her parents’ history. Her mom abandoned her father, her, and her two siblings and moved to another state, where she married another guy and had two more kids. My ex and I married because she got pregnant, and her aunt and uncle adopted the baby.
Seven years later, she cheated on me, moved two hundred fifty miles away with the guy, got engaged, and just had a kid with him. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. His family hates her. He’s over forty-five thousand dollars in debt, can’t get his transcript to transfer universities until he repays it.
He got a full ride, dropped out, and has to pay the scholarship back in full. He works at Best Buy. He ran to his ex every time we argued and told her everything. He drank constantly to the point of heavy intoxication.
He was selfish, manipulative, and lied about things he didn’t need to lie about. I recognized all of it at the time, but manipulative people break you down while making you feel like if you just do better, you can make things better, because you’ll never do better than them. I remember thinking I could deal with this for the rest of my life. I couldn’t.
It took seven years, but I finally kicked him out. I hadn’t worked in three years and had no job when I did it, but I had one within a week. When your back’s against the wall, you do what you have to do. It was like being eighteen again, moving out on my own.
I did it once, I did it again, and I vowed never to be dependent on a man again. I did a lot of things alone. Family events, friend parties, I’d go by myself or not at all out of guilt. He was controlling in a subtle way.
I was nineteen when we got together. I heard many times that I was in an emotionally and mentally abusive situation. Over a decade later, I see all the manipulation clearly. He got angry at me last week because my mom blocked him and his new wife on social media.
I’m glad I’m raising my son and he lives on the other side of the country.