My wife never told me she had been raised to avoid responsibility. Her parents removed every obligation from her life, and she carried that into our marriage. I wake up every morning and she is off to work, leaving every light in the house on, cups on random tables, clothes thrown around, trash sitting on counters. She does no chores.
She barely pays bills, and when she does, it’s late. I work, I do the dishes daily, I handle the laundry, I mow the yard, I pay the bills. I maintain the breadwinning job. She is an amazing teacher, but at home, she just doesn’t see it.
I ran a weeklong experiment. I normally clean up after her, so I stopped. For one week, I did nothing except my own work. Every single day she was horrified by the state of the house, and every day she went into what she called cleaning mode, which was really just moving trash around while making confused noises.
She never understood the problem. We’ve been married for a while now, and her parents still treat her like a child. She is 29 years old and they treat her like their little baby girl. Not only do they expect no responsibility from her, they encourage the lack of it.
They demand daily phone calls and time with their grandchild, regardless of her schedule or mine. They raised her as a friend, and now my wife is raising our daughter as a friend. I will not let that happen. Tonight I sent both of them to their rooms, my daughter for badly misbehaving and my wife for thinking it wasn’t a big deal.
I feel relieved, honestly. I just don’t want to deal with the drama. Before we got married, we had the typical conversation about past partners. She talked about the guy she dated who modeled for Calvin Klein.
He was thin, tall, good-looking, and he had a heart condition that kept him from gaining weight. He and his friends would drop acid and smoke weed, and I thought it was pretty cool. All his friends were in great shape, and they would spend hours at his place ending up in their underwear, doing flips and messing around off the furniture. That guy died.
His condition was terminal. She had dated him for a couple of years before he passed. When she later cleaned out a box of old memories, I saw a few pictures of him, and she tore them up quickly. After he died, she started dating one of the other guys in the group.
That didn’t last long. He died in a car accident about six months into their relationship. She also told me she had been raped once, by a random guy in a recording studio. And there was an attempted rape, by a friend of her ex-boyfriend.
The attempt was stopped when the boyfriend walked in, and he put the offender in the hospital. Fast forward several years. We are married, but we are having problems, so we go to see a counselor. After several sessions, the therapist asks about traumatic sexual experiences.
She says there are none. I stop her. I say, I don’t want to answer for you, but aren’t you forgetting something? She says, well, you aren’t going to like this, but I lied about the rape.
Turns out none of that stuff happened. She was basically a virgin. She had only ever had oral sex, and she thought those stories would make her more interesting. I was furious at the time.
The therapist said that sometimes people do things that are hard to explain, and the mind of a young adult is often unpredictable. That incident actually helped me see the world differently. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt now when they are mean or thoughtless, because I have no idea what is happening in their lives. Week four of marriage, I go to bed and talk with my wife about feelings and goals.
We reach a genuinely good place in our relationship. The next morning, she doesn’t remember any of it. She and her family are sleep talkers, sleep stalkers, whatever you call it. I was hurt, but we came up with a plan.
I just ask her if she is awake now. Then comes week six of marriage. I call it my night of terror. It is 2:30 in the morning and I’m dead asleep when my wife screams at the top of her lungs.
I thought someone broke into our apartment. I went into fight mode, ready to throw down. I jump out of bed, look over, and she is sitting up in bed with the side table light on, eyes wide open, and she is furious. I have never seen her this mad, and we dated for a year and a half before this.
She starts screaming my full name, first, middle, and last. Why are those kids playing in the street? You were supposed to be watching them. They got in the trash, it’s all over the place.
I am not sure if she is sleep talking because her eyes are wide open and she is looking directly at me. I ask, honey, are you awake? I did not think she could get angrier. I was wrong.
She went straight to nuclear. She looks at me with so much anger I can feel it in my gut. She screams, of course I am awake. I have no idea what is going on.
I’m terrified. After what feels like forever, I finally ask, honey, what kids am I supposed to be watching? She pauses, then says, the ones in my head. Then she goes back to sleep.
I laid there for the rest of the night, questioning every life choice that brought me to that moment. I’m still married. I love her even more now. She says some pretty funny stuff in her sleep.
My husband and I have been married for ten years this coming year. Around year six, I found out he was cutting himself, and he had done it when he was younger too. He said he thought he suffered from depression, so we got him counseling. He bounced around on medications, but finally found one that seems to be helping.
Year eight, he started drinking every night before bed. I didn’t think much of it because he had to be up early and it helped him sleep. The drinking got worse, and so did his nightmares. I could hear him whimpering and crying out in his sleep.
After a few months of this, he sat me down and told me his sister, five years older, had molested him for five to six years, well into her teens, when they were younger. He told me he felt dirty and guilty, and that he had been suicidal since he was very young. Small problems in our marriage, along with his past, sent him into a fast downward spiral. The neighbor across the street came over and got him too drunk to function, because he had planned to kill himself that night.
My heart hurts thinking about what could have been. We asked his parents over to tell them what his sister had done. They seemed concerned, but it was all bull. They basically stopped talking to my husband, and they think he should just forgive his sister and move on like nothing happened.
He no longer speaks to his parents or his sister. He realized that just because they are his parents, it doesn’t mean they have the right to make him miserable. He is doing very well now. He has more good days than bad.
The bad days have triggers, like phone calls and holidays. This Christmas, we are going on a mini holiday instead of spending time with his family. Nothing like before. I am so proud of him and his strength.
I love him more every day. My ex-wife was a show. A silverback’s ruination, all around. I was introduced to her through a mutual friend.
She was taking a break from classes because her parents stopped paying her tuition, for academic reasons. My ever-growing student loan debt wept for her in secret. I didn’t understand, because her parents were very well-off, exceptionally well-off. We dated for two and a half years before marriage.
We lived together for six months first. When we moved in together, her parents furnished our whole house and paid off a car. She was always coming home with clothes, shoes, handbags, jewelry. It was always on sale, or a friend had repaid an old loan.
Spoiled little rich girl. Meanwhile, I completely surrendered the finances to her. I never laid eyes on a bill. After six months of wedded bliss, I’m lounging at her parents’ mansion for the Fourth of July.
Her sisters are home from school. Everyone is having a great time when her mom starts nagging her about going back to school. It turns out mommy and daddy had cut off her college funds because she was taking out student loans in addition to the money they were paying. That was the second kick to the marriage.
My wife has money issues, issues with numbers that growing up poor white trash did not prepare me for. She hid it very well. The first sign of a storm was that she was a nagging hypocrite. I worked full-time and went to school full-time.
At the end of the day, I liked to have a beer or two while I did my homework, maybe three if I was too tired. Beer was what alcoholics drank. Apparently, I was an alcoholic. She would announce this diagnosis frequently, all while hammered on wine.
But that’s different. You can’t be an alcoholic if you’re guzzling $25-a-bottle wine. This started about three months into the marriage. After eight short but glorious months of marriage, our mutual friend stops by to tell me my wife has been sleeping with her husband since the early days of our relationship.
After that battle, it was determined she had slept with eleven people outside our marriage bed. She had told me I was only the second person she’d ever slept with. The divorce was easy. She agreed to my terms for fear of her parents finding out the truth.
I got my things, she got hers. My debts were mine, she claimed hers. I moved halfway across the country for a job, a job I didn’t get because of my background and credit history. That’s where the secrets get entertaining.
I had three Visas, multiple gas station credit cards, and cards from every retailer in America. And about three weeks after settling in, I found out I had herpes. God bless that woman. Not marriage.
Not after marriage. But after engagement. His father brings us to a meeting to explain that my now-husband is the twenty-third generation firstborn son since the beginning of the family, insinuating that I would be failing if I didn’t give birth to a boy. We have a daughter.
My husband’s father’s family is from Korea, not China. It seems to be a cultural thing, because my great-grandmother, who is Japanese, experienced something similar. My dad’s side is Vietnamese and gives zero care as long as the baby is healthy and has all limbs attached. Yes, this is a real thing.
Yes, we are both aware of how science works. My husband didn’t know about his family history. Apparently, it’s only revealed when the son gets a wife. Nor does he care.
We still have the smartest, sweetest, baddest kid ever. I didn’t learn this until after seventeen years of marriage. My wife passed away. At the funeral, I met her ex-husband, her 22-year-old son she hadn’t seen for nineteen years, and her other 20-year-old son she gave up for adoption, from a different father.
I never knew any of them existed until the night before the funeral, when her best friend asked if I minded if they came. Yes, it was awkward. She never spoke of them. The closest she came to admitting anything was when we were dating, and she said, don’t believe a word my sister says.
She tells everyone that I’m divorced and had two kids. Seventeen years later, I found out that was the truth. She had died suddenly, so I was in shock at the funeral. I didn’t want to be a jerk and not let them pay their respects.
I wasn’t in a clear state of mind that day, so I just said sure, and hi, sorry to meet like this. We dated for two years before getting married, and I only met her mom and sister. Her parents divorced after her dad beat her, so I never met him. Her sister was on probation for embezzlement and was a huge liar.
Her mom passed away after we got married, and her sister went to prison. We were married ten years before we had a daughter, and at no time, with the doctor in my presence, did she indicate she had been through any of this before. Needless to say, I have trust issues now. My daughter was young when my wife passed, so I didn’t tell her any of this.
I will when she gets older and is capable of understanding. I’m doing fine. I was angry with my wife on many levels when she passed, but she left me with a beautiful daughter, and that makes up for everything else. She was really bad at swimming.
I discovered this on our honeymoon, when we were about a hundred yards from shore and she started having a panic attack. My wife grew up with a swimming pool, so she was comfortable in water. We’re from New Jersey, so we’ve been in the ocean plenty of times. On this occasion, we were in Honolulu.
We had a catamaran excursion booked in the evening that left from Waikiki Beach, so we were hanging out in a bar. Our waitress, Linda, asked where we were from. When we told her New Jersey, she got excited, telling us she grew up there and just moved to Hawaii a year earlier. She said she had a friend from home coming out the next day, and they were going to Electric Beach to swim out to the swimming with the dolphins excursion.
She invited us along, and we said yes. We had snorkel gear, and she brought flippers for us. Here’s the thing about Electric Beach: it’s called that because across the highway from it is a power plant. The shoreline where you could enter the water was only maybe twenty feet wide.
Half of that stretch had large rocks sticking out of the water, so we had a very narrow gap to enter. The left side was bounded by a rock wall. The right side was a cinderblock wall, separating where the power plant releases its cooling water into the ocean. There were many hazard signs telling you not to go in the water.
Whatever, no big deal. We get to the beach and meet Linda and her friend, and they give us the flippers. My wife and I had snorkeled before, but always off a boat, always with a life preserver. We had never just waded into the ocean with flippers.
As we walked out, there were waves. Without flippers, you get nowhere. We start to swim out, and my wife is going very slowly. I see she’s spinning her legs like a doggy paddle instead of slowly kicking up and down.
Her hands aren’t helping much. I ask if she wants to go back, because she’s having a lot of trouble, but she says she’ll stick with it. As we head further out toward the swimming with the dolphins boats, my wife tells me it seems like she’s not going anywhere. It turns out the excursion was over and the boat was leaving, and we didn’t realize how far out we had gone.
We turn around, and she sees how far out into the ocean she is. She has a full-on panic attack and starts hyperventilating. I remember thinking, this is it, my wife is going to drown on our honeymoon. I didn’t want to grab her and pull her in, because my sister was a lifeguard for a few summers and told me that people in a panic can drown their rescuer in a desperate attempt to stay up.
Instead, I tell my wife to look at me, and to just bob up and down by scissoring her legs back and forth very slowly. I show her with my fingers. She’s having trouble because of the panic attack, so I start breathing in and out very slowly and visibly, telling her to do the same. We start to slowly swim back, with me coaching her the whole way.
Breathe in, breathe out. When we make it back to shore, it is the most relieved I have ever been in my life. I need to sit down for a few minutes to get my heart to stop pounding out of my chest. Later, Linda’s friend gets to shore and tells us a story about how a few months ago they went hiking on some unmarked jungle path at night and had to get airlifted out.
That explained a lot. The next day, I spent a few hours at the resort teaching my wife how to swim with flippers. When we went on an official snorkeling excursion later that week, she did fine. She was a bank robber.
She told me she had saved up seven hundred dollars from working summer jobs and babysitting while in high school. We get married and head to Branson, honeymoon capital of America. On the way, she confesses that she did not, in fact, save up seven hundred dollars from part-time jobs. She had saved up over seven thousand dollars.
So we go on an extravagant, for me, week-long spending spree of a honeymoon. We do everything. Helicopters, boat rentals, every show we see, every souvenir we buy. Five hundred dollars on new wheels?
Sure. We spent over six thousand five hundred dollars extra on this trip. We get home on a Sunday afternoon. We both have to return to work the next morning.
There are several messages on the answering machine. This was in 2000, before either of us had cell phones. The third or fourth message plays. It is her boss from the bank where she works, telling her to contact him at once, that there is an issue they need to discuss, leaving a number.
Up to this point, I’m in the dark. But by Monday morning, it has all hit the fan. I learned there was no mysterious savings account from high school. I learned she had been transferring money from a couple of large accounts on a regular basis into her own account.
The total was somewhere north of seven thousand seven hundred dollars. The bank was pissed. The clients were pissed. The authorities were already neck-deep in this, and they were scary, to say the least.
After several meetings, it was decided that if we made full restitution, the bank would not press felony charges. So now we have one unemployed wife who is likely unemployable, one scared husband desperately trying to get his bank-thieving wife a job anywhere, and one debt due immediately for seven thousand seven hundred dollars. We gather all the money left over, borrow five hundred dollars from her parents, five thousand five hundred dollars from mine, and my next paycheck. You want to know stress?
Ask your parents to help you pay back the money your new wife stole from a bank. We get the bank paid back by the end of the week. After several weeks, things die down. She is working at McDonald’s, because I pulled strings with manager friends, and we begin paying back the parents.
We don’t hear anything for a while. In fact, it wasn’t until 2002 that we were contacted to appear in court. We were still young and ignorant, so we got lucky. The feds were easy to work with.
The bank didn’t make a huge deal about it since the money was returned. It was a small-town bank, two branches total, so somehow we avoided any real heavy issues. She went into court with a lawyer and pled guilty to a Class C misdemeanor. The judge gave her two years probation and the restriction of never working at an FDIC institution.
And this is how my life as a married man began. To answer some questions: yes, I know it wasn’t a robbery, and yes, bank robber sounds more dramatic than embezzler. Second, yes, my mother-in-law is a great woman. Third, the divorce was delayed because of her pregnancy, and then because of surgery she needed on my insurance.
Fourth, the kid wasn’t mine. It came out the wrong color. The father signed the paperwork and did the tests, and he didn’t fight paternity. Fifth, I did do some smart things.
I convinced her it would be cheaper to divorce with just one lawyer, so she said to pick one and she’d pay half. That meant he was my lawyer, looking after my best interests. I got away with the girls, with 50/50 custody. They use my address as their legal residence, attend school in my district, and I pay no child support or alimony.
I kept the house, my belongings, and my girls. I would like to think she and I would make better choices if we had it to do over, but I wouldn’t trade or change a thing, because I have two wonderful daughters from her. Found out about a year after we were married, when we went to buy a house. We were both in our thirties, and I had already bought and sold a house before.
Took us well over a year to find the exact house we wanted. I thought the mortgage application would be a slam dunk. I was floored when the bank called and said our application was rejected. I asked for an appointment to find out why.
We both went in to see the loan officer. The conversation went like this: we take both spouses’ incomes and credit history into account. Your income, pointing at me, is fine. Your credit history is almost flawless.
There is one late payment from three years ago, but that is nothing to be concerned about. However, pointing at my wife, her credit history is an issue. He pulled out sheet after sheet of credit issues with my wife. Late payments, non-payments, credit card after credit card.
It seemed like it went on forever. She just stared forward the entire time. We had to apply for a mortgage using solely my income. Before we started living together, I thought she was normal when it came to finances.
She drove an old car from the late nineties. She shared a flat with a friend. She wasn’t flashy. Then after we moved in together and things got serious, I met her parents.
They lived in a large house in a great neighborhood and had a really nice classic car. After we got married and spent more time with her father, her mother passed away just after the wedding, it became clear she actually had quite rich parents. They had lots of homes, both in our country and abroad, and a lot of money in my wife’s name. Every few years she would get a piece of it released.
The whole time before we got married, I thought I was the one with money. I had a great job. But it turned out she has much more money than I do. Just from the assets in her name, she is probably worth nine times more than me.
That doesn’t include the homes her dad intends to leave her. Combined, that could end up being several million dollars. I have no idea what the tax implications are for receiving all that. I imagine we would need to sell almost everything when her dad dies, just to pay the inheritance taxes.
The way I feel about that, particularly her father passing in the future and us getting that wealth, I’d rather have her dad around. We have two little girls who adore him. He is a lovely grandfather and a great person. I wish money could bring back her mother, because that is a huge source of heartache and depression for my wife.
It was only a few years ago, so it still hurts a lot. Finding out she had more money than me, even just from the endowments, was surprising. It didn’t mean we could go spending money like we were the Monopoly man. I did feel emasculated at first, but that’s petty.
Our marriage is a union of equal parts, and it doesn’t really matter who brings more money into it. Since we’ve had kids, all I really want is for them to be happy and healthy. The money helps us facilitate those goals.