So I’ve been wanting to write this for a while but haven’t found the time to put this into writing on here. And I do so knowing full well that sometimes people on this subreddit are often anti-husband and attack any husband for his woes while telling women that their husbands are pigs. Problems in marriages go two ways, and both husbands and wives can be the bad guy or the good guy and other times nobody is really the “bad guy.” Neither me nor my wife are the bad guy. But I have some things that are distressing me in my marriage and really want to get it out, and hope to hear helpful responses. If you want to critique me, that’s your problem.

This is very long as my wife and I have been together for a long time, but I am hurting and I wanted to get this off my chest and hopefully seek support. I understand if this is too much to read.

I’m 42, my wife is 39. We met when I was 29 and she was 26. It was typical dating at first and both of us had given up on love based on recent experiences with bad relationships. But in a short time we really grew close. We really, truly, fell HARD in love with each other. It was wonderful. I never felt this way so strongly in my life. She the same. Our love story in those original years were amazing, in a way that I had doubted actually existed. So close, so caring towards each other, we WORSHIPPED each other. I’ve never been that in love before.

She would stay over with me in my apartment every weekend, and every weekend we would have sex and do lots of fun activities. Less than a year in, I took her to a very special event in the city to make her happy, and that’s when she told me, with a smile and tears in her eyes, that she was so in love with me that she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, and that she was ready to consider living together. She wanted to find an apartment that was less of a “bachelor pad,” and closer to the major city we lived near (Boston), so I agreed to that. We did our search and found a nice, fairly big “urban young professional” type apartment in a city just outside Boston. While living together had the inevitable revelation of our flaws to each other, the bond only continued very strong and the love grew. A few years later, we married. With planning a wedding (and buying a house at the same time) came a lot of stress, which we managed TOGETHER. Our wedding was fantastic, great food, great drinks, great music, fun, just amazing. We continued to fall in love and when I made love to her that night, I told her she was my soulmate. We moved to our own house in the suburbs of Worcester, another major city in Massachusetts, it all felt so wonderful.

A couple years into our marriage, we had a major fight, that began with her having an unreasonable conflict with my someone in my family. She was VERY in the wrong but I STILL supported her and not my family member because she was my wife, but she was hard on me for trying to get her to understand the other side. But we got past it – but it took my family a VERY long time to warm up to her again – I mean years – and they absolutely loved her before that. That was the first blow, but we got past it.

As time went on, we got along less, and conflicts became more common. Big things that set us off with each other evolved into little things that set us off. Sex became less frequent and she lectured me many times about how we didn’t need sex anymore and that she didn’t desire it, but still “sucked it up” and gave me sex (with very minimal effort) every so often. And then we had kids. First, she put a TON of pressure on me to get her pregnant, to the point where I couldn’t enjoy baby making, so she decided it wasn’t worth trying to have sex to get pregnant (after all, she really wasn’t interested in intimacy) and then pushed me very hard to do IVF. After a couple rounds, she was pregnant. Fights continued, and then our son was born and it was magical. You want to see ACTUAL love at first sight? Have a baby. That’s the only time it actually happens in real life.

But that’s also when the reality of our financial problems became much more apparent. My wife has massive student loan debt, but still always managed to do a descent job giving me money for the bills, but once we took on the expense of childcare, healthcare for a child, and later a family-friendly SUV for her in replacement of her smaller sedan that wasn’t cutting it as a family car, she no longer gave me money for bills. It started with her only giving me money for bills sometimes, and now she doesn’t at all. I am struggling very badly to keep this roof over our heads, and she has an attitude about this because she almost feels I owe it to her. She also is unapologetic for this burden as “you knew I had loans.” Money was always somewhat tight as a young married couple before that, but by this point, it was suffocating. Over the years we took on expenses like home projects, including a renovation that went into tens of thousands last year, paid for by a loan, and she claimed she would help pay for it – until the bill came. So the fights over money have worsened and she claims I shame her for this. I pay almost all of our bills and get nothing but criticism and demands in return. I constantly hear about the sacrifices I have to make while she isn’t willing to give up what she wants.

Meanwhile, this is when our sex life came to a screeching halt. Most psychologists will tell you that a strong intimacy is key to any relationship being healthy, so it’s not surprising that our marriage got worse and worse as sex became so scarce. Initially I was understanding because she had just had a baby, but even after she recovered, she wasn’t interested. Once in a while she’d “throw me a bone” and “grin and bare it” and have sex with minimal effort or passion, but made it clear she wasn’t really interested and that I needed to prepare myself for a sexless future because a day would come where she would retire from sexuality 100%. Her words, not mine, although I am paraphrasing. It was not uncommon for us to go 6 months or more without sex, in fact I think we’ve gone a year or close to it at one point, and when she did give it to me, there was no effort on her end and so it wasn’t good. You could tell she didn’t want it and just wanted to lay there and get her punishment over with, and when it was over, she felt she had fulfilled her obligation for another 6 months. Even just my attempts to be physical in touching, kissing etc were rejected. She acted as if she was being groped by some creep on the subway, not a loving husband who wanted to BE WITH HER. I have had many talks about the connection between love and intimacy, but in the end, it fell on deaf ears and/or lip service about understanding.

After many years of demanding we have another baby, with me resisting because of financial reasons and being burnt out by high demand from our son who turned out to be special needs (he has behavioral issues, ADHD and other mental health issues, I am still working with his psychiatrist to get a full picture but progress has been made, mainly by me, my wife does not understand mental health). And of course, the state of our marriage was also a reason to resist bringing another baby into this nightmare. She persisted, I resisted. Finally, when our son was 4 years old, I agreed to just “talk to the doctor” about our IVF options (since we were both much older at this point). The IVF doctor of course said it was fine to do it again in her late 30s and what was meant to be a consult about options was a jump into doing it again and my wife booked an appointment that day. We now have a beautiful baby girl, who I love very much, but my predictions of another baby making dealing with a special needs child harder were true. I realize that I “gave in” to the second baby, but I was pushed hard and wanted to make her happy.

There was a brief time when our second baby was born that my wife and I made peace with each other, we talked, we understood each other’s needs and talked to each other about what we wanted and needed from the marriage. Her list was long, mine was simple and short. I needed a physical relationship and a happier marriage with less fighting and less influence by our parents’ crappy marriages (I’ll get to that), and she needed 10,000 things done around the house on top of what I already do. I did every single thing she asked and continue to do so. She gave me lip service about my two things, started to make an effort, but that ended quickly and the usual excuses for no intimacy came back quick and hard and the nasty things she would say to me came roaring back. She even tells our son what a POS I am when we fight (he’s 5, impressionable and very sensitive with special needs). I never talk like that to him about his mother, I was raised differently.

So family background is important. My father came from a fairly well-off Italian-American family. With the exception of the fact that my grandparents divorced in the 70s and my grandfather remarried (my grandmother became devoted only to her Catholic Church and her kids and grandkids), my father’s side was the typical close-knit Italian family with intense closeness and love not only with direct family but extended as well. My mother came from a poor working class Irish Catholic family. Barely working class to be honest, almost lower class. My grandparents on that side had many children and they believed their priest on – certain things – and my mother was not truly loved by her cruel and cold mother and most of her siblings growing up. My mother was insecure about money and family, and “married up” into an Italian family where she finally found family love (she is very close to SOME people in her family, but estranged from most). My Italian grandmother taught her all the things her mother couldn’t bother with (how to cook, how to make a home, all of it) and gave her the mother’s love she didn’t have. For many years, it was wonderful. But then when I was a teenager my mother’s demons got the best of her, the fighting started, my parents divorced, and both moved on other people, my mother “marrying up” even more the next time to a wealthy man who wasn’t so nice to me or my brother, but I’m over that. He’s gone now anyway, and my relationship with my mother is very good, as well as my Dad. I have TONS of loving family around me. Again, mostly the Italian side and all the way to distant cousins. I have small amount on my mother’s side that I’m very close with too.

My wife’s upbringing was bad. My mother in law was also (partially) Italian and my father in law was Irish, but with other things mixed in for both of them too, so similar ethnic makeup, but family structure was bad. My father in law is a good guy, but he’s a traditional Irish Catholic working class man’s man, he wanted to be the king of the castle and wasn’t very nice to his wife. The chauvinism that my wife witnessed growing up led her to really have an issue with men. My wife did not have as much closeness to extended family as I do, in fact almost none at all. My mother in law was at odds with her siblings all of her life, they truly are awful people, combined with a husband who didn’t respect her. Her purpose in his house was to cook and clean. To be fair, my mother in law is very difficult and most certainly has undiagnosed mental health issues, so I’m sure that played into why my father in law acted the way he did – on top of his old school “king of the castle” values.

So my wife saw a bad example of marriage growing up, and that always comes up. She is very jealous of my close, loving family (even though they treat her as part of that) and she also has demons from growing up the way she did that come out in our house. Comments about how marriage isn’t supposed to be happy, husbands and wives are supposed to hate each other, and so forth are commonplace in our house (by my wife, not me), and my wife ALWAYS fights nasty the way her parents did, she says absolutely horrific things, digs very deep with the insulting rhetoric towards me, and again is not above telling my son things she thinks about me. She even once started hitting me in front of my son. I’m no saint with my mouth either when she pushes me like this, but I don’t take it to her level.

I have BEGGED her to go to marriage counselling and/or get therapy for herself for her obvious chronic depression. Between her horrible upbringing to her lifelong financial woes, my wife has a lot of demons and is very negative. For a while, our romance brought her happiness, but the ugliness deep inside her has come out as years have gone by and several people in both of our families see it. I always get the same excuses for marriage counselling: “You are the one who has the problem,” “I don’t want everyone to know we have problems,” “I don’t have time for that,” or “Marriage counselling is just a gateway to divorce.” For individual therapies it’s either denial or “I don’t have time.”

The sexual relationship continues to be lacking, the closeness seems to come and go, and I feel like roommates raising a family and household together.

I have considered cheating just for sex or having an actual affair to find emotional connections, but that hasn’t actually happened, other than talking to women online, and I actually did turn down offers in real life. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Or maybe I did the right thing, I don’t even know anymore.

So why won’t I leave her? I’m asked a lot. It’s somewhat simple. Because I love her and know she is damaged goods, but she is a good person under all of that, because I remember how in love we were and how special it was and want to bring it back, because we have kids (especially my special needs son who really needs me) and can’t disrupt their stability, because of financial reasons and our house, and all I really want is for her to make the effort to fix all of these things. I still believe she is the love of my life, but that that love is dormant right now. I get a lot of lip service about how much she loves me and how she does want me sexually, but actions speak louder than cheap lip service. But yet, I have to hold on to the idea that the happiness can come back, that we can be a wonderful lifelong union. I want that. I want that to be our reality and I can’t let go of it. I’m in love with her despite all of this.

Right now though, I’m very unhappy and the stress is affecting my health. I see therapy on my own because my wife won’t go, but I am in a state of sadness often.

A lot of people tell me I should just leave, that life is too short. I just explained why I won’t. Others, especially my family, encourage me to work it out.

If you read this whole thing, thank you, I know it was a lot, but we’ve been together for a long time so there was even more I could say.

I welcome any helpful advice or support. My heart is broken right now.