By definition, marriages represent the bond between two people that love and support each other; however, many marriages can be described as a volcano constantly on the verge of eruption.
Here are some shocking moments people shared on Reddit that led to eruptions.
All posts have been edited for clarity.
Irresponsible
“I was with a guy that was slightly younger than me when I was in college. He was very smart, but did things that annoyed me. He would never clean things all the way, he always left a little that I would have to do, told me he didn’t know where stuff went (we lived together, it’s his place too he should know where things go or ask if he really doesn’t know). Just kind of irresponsible stuff, but it wasn’t killer. So that was already a pet peeve as well as some other stuff like maintaining boundaries with friends.
One day he was planning on going on a road trip with a friend; the two of them had breakfast at our place then they left for the trip after I left for work.
When I got home that night, before I turned on the light I noticed a weird blue light in the kitchen. I flipped on the light and went in to look- It was the burner on the stove. It had been on ALL DAY for over NINE HOURS. Next to it was a window that he had left open, we had curtains on that window too and there was a breeze. I just immediately went pale and was so thankful that the curtains didn’t catch on fire, or that the flame didn’t blow out and fill our apartment with gas while I was gone.
I called him and told him what I had found upon coming home and he and his friend started laughing. At that point I was like, forget this- this is beyond irresponsible, it’s dangerous, they could have burned down the building or blown me up or something and they don’t even understand the issue or how this is serious. I didn’t think he was that much younger than me but apparently, those were a couple of VERY important years that he hadn’t gone through yet.”
Cheapskate
“I started seeing this guy who was very attractive but had a lot of money issues. I still wanted to give him the benefit of doubt. I was a single mom at the time making modest pay since I was just out of school working my first professional job. He said casually that he was over a million in student loan debt. He went to medical school in the Caribbean, got bad grades, and several years out never was able to get into a residency program.
I kind of knew in the back of my head I would have to carry the relationship, like pay for more dates because he never had money. I just kind of accepted it in my head and told myself if it ever became too much for me to handle, I would say goodbye. My priority was my child, not some man.
The first few months we went on normal dates, movies, dinners, clubs. I paid for everything as he always stated he was in a financial bind. One day after a club, we were at a taco truck and I was thinking that he can definitely afford this because the bill was under five dollars. I waited for him to reach in his pocket but he never did. I remember how that bothered me but I kept silent.
Then, one weekend, he was hanging out at my house and asked me for ten dollars so he could park his car at a soccer stadium. I looked at him confused and he said his female friend invited him to go watch a professional soccer game. Of course, I wanted to give him the benefit of doubt, so I just reached in my purse and handed him the money.
What bothered me was feeling like I was handing a teenager money and not an adult man. Who doesn’t have money to pay for parking? But I once again ignored my feelings and let them go.
Then he called me one day and ask if we could go out to eat that weekend.
I responded ‘Um, okay, but please make sure it’s reasonable.’
I thought he would pick a typical chain restaurant but he took me to this very expensive French restaurant in Houston. I freaked out when I saw the menu. I am in no way wealthy and my internal thoughts were wondering why he would pick such an expensive place. The bill was over three hundred dollars, which was with no drinks. I saw him reach in my purse and grab my credit card when the waiter brought the bill. By the time the waiter came back, he signed my name on the receipt.
This really bothered me, but I thought maybe he was embarrassed and wanted to feel like he paid in front of the waiter. Again, we were only dating for two months so I didn’t think it was normal for someone to take my credit card out of my purse so casually.
The following weeks went by and I found out I had to go out of town for work. Being a single mom, I had to pay for transportation to get my stepdad and mom to come from San Antonio to Houston to watch my child. I did a big shopping trip and bought all the food and drinks they liked since I would be gone for a week.
The day before they were to come over, my new boyfriend was there and I asked him to please not take any of the food out of the fridge because I need everything to last a week for my child and parents since they were doing me a favor. When I came back downstairs, I saw him in front of the TV watching sports, drinking my stepdad’s favorite drink, and eating my kid’s leftovers that she wanted later.
I completely snapped at him and told him he had to leave. This is a guy that had a job and was just horrible with money. If he had five dollars, he would spend five dollars. He would never save for anything and needed a girlfriend to carry him since he didn’t have the life skills to do it himself.
When I asked him to leave and never come back, he looked confused as to why I was so upset. He tried for several years to friend me on social media or reach out in some other way. Never again would I put myself in this position, I would rather be alone than be with someone who acts like that.”
Passcode Locked for 9 Days, 13 Hours
“I had woken in a dreamy, hazy fog with my heart racing and skin buzzing. We had spent the night in a suburban hotel, drinking in a local bar and swimming in the hotel pool. It was the last of countless ‘reconnections’ we had, a perfectly rehearsed and executed reenactment of a once-functioning relationship. There was no talk of our chaotic past or the equally chaotic present we each resided in, separately. He spoke of the future, as he often did when fearful to face the present. I absorbed his emotion and submitted, my version of an equally unhealthy reaction to the same fear.
I had grabbed my phone to check the time because I wanted to sleep a bit longer, nestled in his arms and feeling cared for. I knew that night we’d be back to our separate existences with him holed up at his parents and me rooming with a stranger, barely scrapping by after our playing house experiment went up in smoke.
The screen said something like, ‘Passcode locked for 9 days, 13 hours.’
I don’t remember exactly what happened over the next hours. He shot out of bed, suddenly a tech genius and the only one capable of ‘fixing’ my obviously ‘defective’ device. He told me this happened with iPhones sometimes.
The whole conversation felt like I was out of my own body, watching myself and him, for the first time, as an outsider observing the way two people interact. He was fidgety and squirrely. He looked like he hadn’t slept. I was seeing myself, too- I was not okay. I was in danger. This man genuinely believed I was stupid enough to lie to me about anything- and he was doing it right in front of me. I felt my body language shift. I was not leaning into him. Not submitting. A thought occurred to me, might as well let him squirrel about a bit more so he can fix it instead of me. After hours on the phone with Apple Support, he finally unlocked the phone- through a factory reset that made me lose nearly all my data. He offered to back up my phone to his computer, so I didn’t lose data again. He told me he could store my texts, photos, etc on his laptop and update it every time we saw each other. When I declined, he shot rage through his eyes, concealing it much too late for me to miss it.
After that day, I cut off contact and began a transformation that landed me in a healthy state of mind, independent and strong. I did take a few calls from him in moments of weakness, but they were full of those somber, self-aware moments of dread- knowing what he wanted to do with me.
During one of these calls, I asked him to admit what he did that day. He did, saying he stayed up all night attempting to break into my phone, then frantically attempted to fix the passcode lockout before I woke up. He said he needed to find something I did wrong to justify it — he wouldn’t tell me what ‘it’ was, but I have a hunch he felt guilty about promising me a future and attempting to rekindle our relationship while draining the account of his new supply, a lovely girl who didn’t deserve the unfortunate role of his rebound.
As these revelations surfaced in the weeks and months after our relationship, I began to heal and forge my own path. I moved closer to family, found a great job in my field, & have begun to unravel the sordid psychological mess that got me so comfortable being treated like that.
Nothing is perfect, but everything is better.”
Christmas Morning
“My ex-husband and I were married for ten years. We married when we were young and the kids came pretty fast afterward. We were just struggling to make it through each day. We both couldn’t afford to work, due to child care being so expensive, he didn’t like working at all, so I worked full time after getting a two-year college degree. The plan was for me to work, him to stay home and do all the Mr. Mom things.
Well, it didn’t work out quite like that. His idea of all the Mr. Mom things was to put the kiddos on the bus and go see his girlfriend. After a couple of years (it took a couple of years because I wanted this marriage to work, I truly loved him) of pleading, begging, and questioning what I had done wrong for him to stray from our marriage that I was struggling to make work, I had had enough.
It was Christmas morning, the tree all aglow with the lights, kids happily opening presents, dinner cooking in the oven. When the kids finished unwrapping their presents and were hauling their loot to their bedrooms, I turned to my husband and I handed him 1 last present.
He looked at the long neatly wrapped box and asked smiling, ‘What’s this?’ I could read on his face that he thought it was a piece of jewelry. ‘Open it,’ I told him. As he eagerly tore the paper off the box, he tenderly opened it seeing papers laying inside. He looked at me confused. ‘Go on finish,’ I told him. He pulled the papers out, unfolded them, and started looking at the first page. It was emails that I had printed out of conversations between him and his girlfriend. The blood drained from his face, ‘Keep looking’ I said to him. He rifled through the top couple of pages to find divorce papers a few pages down.
‘You are to be out of my house by the time I get home from work tomorrow afternoon,’ I told him. ‘But today is the kids’ day and you will not ruin it. You will have visitation with the kids, but because of your indiscretions you will get nothing from me.’ My heart was so cold towards him at this point in our marriage I just wanted him gone. ‘Everything that I have bought you, your motorcycle, car, take it all with you when you go.’ I stood up and turned away from him and walked to the kitchen.
He didn’t fight me or even come to pick up the kids for his visitation after he realized that I was serious and was one hundred percent done with him and his antics.”
“The Fiance’s Brother Was In My Bed”
“I was nineteen, part-time at uni, and working forty hours a week at the same time. I had moved in with my girlfriend at the time. We found a place fairly close to work and uni, so I could make better use of my limited time. She was working in retail, and had regular shifts – usually during the day, as uni students & school kids got all the after-hours shifts to suit their schedules.
A few months in, I got a great job where I worked graveyard shifts and earned wonderful money doing so. This worked out well with my day classes, and because work was sporadic through the night, I had plenty of study windows (others would read the newspaper or smoke outside in the quiet blocks). I noticed she slowly but surely took fewer shifts so she could stay home and live off my increased income. Now, this is okay if you’re starting a family or semi-retiring, but I wanted to put my newfound additional income into two things – paying off uni fees, and putting any extra away to save for a house deposit. All she wanted to do was be lazy and go shopping every evening – when she finally dragged her butt out of bed. In this day and age, it would be online shopping, and she wouldn’t have to leave the house. But they say love is blind…..
I threatened to leave, and she promised to get more hours. I made her talk to her boss about rostering her on five days/week during the day, and he did. So for the next few weeks, I’d get home and she’d be getting ready to go to work. I trusted her, so I didn’t doubt she was going there. I was doing twelve-hour shifts, five days/week, with three or four lectures during the day. I was too tired to follow her around and make sure she actually did go to work. And I trusted her (big mistake).
I thought we were over the bad patch when the bank called one morning. In a haze, I answered the phone. There was not enough in my account for them to take the monthly rent payment. Each month I earned five to six times what that monthly payment was, and I knew I had well over twenty thousand dollars in that account, put away for the next semester’s fees, and saving towards a house deposit.
I woke up again at lunchtime, and the memory of the call struck me hard. I went to the bank to ask for an itemized statement (no internet banking back then). There were lots of cash withdrawals from ATMs, usually five hundred dollars at a time (the daily limit back then). There were also some EFTPOS payments to places I didn’t recognize. One was a catering company. Another was a dressmaker.
When she got home ‘from work’ I asked her how work was. I could tell she was lying. I showed her the bank statements. She claimed someone must have accessed my account. Later that night she went into her purse and did the whole ‘Oh my gosh’ fanfare. She claimed my second card was gone, and that someone must have taken it. But that didn’t make sense to me. She relied on that card and would have missed it weeks ago if it really was stolen. I didn’t believe her. Then it struck me. Her sister was getting married soon. Caterer. Dressmaker? Yes, she was effectively using me to pay for her sister’s wedding plans.
The sister and her fiance, as well as his brother, all came over the next night. I can understand why the sister and fiance came over, but the brother was the third wheel, and he didn’t need to be there. This fact would come back to me later. They apologized and claimed they were only borrowing the money she offered them, because the wedding costs were more than they expected, and they didn’t want to move the date out any further. I mentioned it would have been nice if they asked me first, and they claimed she said I was okay with it. A bit of a ‘she said/he said’ heated discussion ensued, and the fiance’s brother started actively defending her, saying she did the right thing. So theft is the right thing? Had they asked, I would have given, but if you don’t ask, it’s considered stealing. They couldn’t see this fact.
I had to go to work, so I left them to it. The good in me tried to convince my mind that they would pay me back, and they were in a bind, and I should help them. I decided that after work I would sleep in my car at the bank until they opened, and cancel my second debit card. If she wanted money, she could ask me for it, and I’d give her cash. That way any more money going off to the sister would be controlled.
I got home about ten am and was surprised to see her car and her sister’s car in our two parking bays. She was supposed to be at work, and the sister was blocking my spot. I walked into the flat, and the table was full of last night’s takeaway rubbish, that they’d obviously ordered after I went to work. There were empty bottles throughout the flat. Walking through the lounge to our bedroom I saw her sister and fiance on the sofa-bed, with another empty bottle beside them.
I opened the bedroom door & froze. The fiance’s brother was in my bed, his head on my pillow. The shock stopped me from doing anything instantly violent. I’m not a violent person anyway. I wanted revenge, and I wanted it now. I very quietly took my clothes, valuable belongings, and other stuff – as much as I could fit in my car. It was hard to disassemble an old ‘stacked’ stereo system quietly in the lounge without waking anyone.
I drove straight to the real estate office to explain about the rent payment is late, and asked to be taken off the lease. They wouldn’t let me, saying I had to see out the lease for another two months until it expired. I told them I didn’t want to renew the lease, and arranged to pay out the rent to the end of the lease when I got paid the next week. I ended up back at my parent’s place.
At work we had a phone we called the ‘bat phone’ – it was hooked up to a loud set of bells so you could hear when it rang. You couldn’t dial out – it only allowed incoming calls. This was a phone that all the wives/partners/kids could call in on to speak with their husband/father when the office had closed, and they needed to talk to them. She had that number…
She’d tried calling my parent’s place, and they wouldn’t entertain her. So she decided to blow up the bat phone. This annoyed everyone at work. The guy that usually answered the phone got to know her voice real quick and told her several times I didn’t work there. She didn’t give up. She also worked out if she called, and someone answered, the call would stay open, even if they hung up the bat phone. It wouldn’t cut off until she hung up. So she’d leave her phone off the hook, and everyone’s family would get an engaged signal when they tried to call in. Things at work were getting frosty real quick for me. She also started driving past work, looking for my car. Then she’d call and when told I wasn’t there, tell the person she saw my car there. I ended up swapping my car with my uncle for a week, and she gave up on the bat phone. But she soon worked out that car too – by stalking my parent’s house. I ended up driving to a co-worker’s house, parking there, and getting a lift to work with him until she followed me there one night, and after I’d left, harassed his wife about me.
I ended up going to the Police, who advised going to court. I had plenty of witnesses to her behavior and got a restraining order against her. She wasn’t finished. I wrote off a car a few months later, and she rang the insurance company to claim I was street racing. They held up my claim for ten months. There are also other financial things she did that took a while to sort out too. She even tried to get a second debit card activated on my account. It was nearly two years before I was free of her.”
“She Smashed My Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster Over My Back.”
“My ex-wife made a video with her father’s friend. When I confronted her, she flew into a rage. There was no denying it. I saw the thing with my own two eyes. We fought for several days, as she threw every item in the house at me. Destroyed almost every room. It looked like the house had been tossed in a police search. Even so, we were married. I was at least hoping to get to the whole truth of it before deciding what to do. We had been married less than a year. I took my vows seriously, but this was hard to accept and move on. Yet, I was trying to find a way to do so.
Finally, the fight erupts into an unforgivable moment. She smashed my Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster over my back. Not only was it my favorite instrument, it was by far the most expensive and rare guitar I would likely ever own, but WOW was it as solid as a baseball bat. I thought it broke my neck/back. I went black and just remember a huge crunch sound. I’m not sure what really happened after that, only that I eventually snapped out of the fog to be in my bed and extremely sore and groggy.
When I was knocked unconscious, she put prescription sleep medication in a syringe, shot me up, knocked me out, and held me hostage for the next several days. She was a nurse. All of this coming after two years of mental and emotional battery. As a man in an abusive relationship, no one takes you seriously. There aren’t many programs or outreach centers for battered men. In fact, just saying battered men is laughable to most people.
Law enforcement thinks you are joking or dramatic. Even as criminal as these acts were, I had a very hard time proving any of it. She was a great manipulator and was not known to be aggressive, abusive, or violent in any way. When this all came out no one believed it. My own family members questioned it. It was such an insane circumstance that it was unbelievable. I eventually divorced her, but not before filing criminal and civil charges against her.
Today she is in prison serving eighteen years for multiple felonies. This was in 2011. I am since very happily remarried and now a father.
Don’t let anyone hold you down, you deserve much more.”
“You Can’t Be That Tired”
“My house had burned down the October beforehand and it was now approaching the end of February to early March. I was still in college, and having a pretty rough time going through everything since the house fire. I got some money from student aid, but financially we weren’t doing the best, so I got a job to try and take some of that pressure off of my mom/sister/brother-in-law. This meant that on certain days my schedule was basically non-stop.
I’d get up around eight, head to class, get out at about noon, scarf some food down, go to my job at about two, get everything prepped and work until about five o’clock. I was technically a managerial-level employee, so I had to do attendance for anyone who worked under me and attendance for the students. I then had to hurry, in traffic, back to school for a six o’clock class. I then had to drive home around thirty miles which could sometimes take an hour.
My girlfriend was at another college some distance away. It wasn’t an impossible distance, but it was long enough that we didn’t see each other too frequently at this point. She had said that after this she was likely to move down to San Diego to be closer to her mom. I told her that the distance we have between us now is really not that bad, but even it is hard, let alone something twelve hours away. We sort of agreed that when that happened, we would likely need to go our separate ways.
This particular night I was dead. There was just issue after issue after issue that particular day. When I got home that Thursday night (at about ten pm), I don’t even think I had the energy to grab something to eat from downstairs. I hit the pillow and was just about out when my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. We tried to talk to each other every night, but some nights were worse than others. I do wonder on occasion what would’ve happened had I just let the phone ring and went to bed. Would I be where I am now? Would I have my kids? What butterfly-effect would that have had?
I suppose we’ll never know.
I answered the phone, and she apparently had a fabulous day. She was quite energetic and talkative whereas I was half a brain cell from comatose. I sort of dazed out and I remember becoming a human being again to some very accusatory noises. ‘Jim! you’re not saying anything!’
Well, yeah, because I’m dead and want to go to sleep.
‘You can’t be that tired.’
I’m fairly certain I laughed out loud.
‘My brother-in-law lost a part of his finger today, I took a midterm, the kids at the school I work at had a minimum day for some reason today so I didn’t even get a chance to eat lunch after my midterm, I had a student who was misbehaving so badly I had to pull in the head of the after school program to hold him off to the side while his parents came to get him, one of my students lost their entire laptop so I had to stay late to try and find it, on top of the usual roll taking + calling home for anyone who missed the program and any employee feedback, so I didn’t get a chance to eat anything before my six o’clock class. I then apparently left my lights on so I had to wait for AAA to come and give me a jump, but that took forever because someone out on the main road to the college was having an even worse day than I was so I just got home about ten minutes ago. I haven’t eaten, and I’m dead. I. Just. Want. To. Sleep.’
Any reasonable person, I think, upon hearing that should go something like ‘Oh, wow. Yeah, you know what, baby, you should get some sleep. We can talk tomorrow.’
Nope.
She broke off into some rant. I don’t even remember most of what she said, I was fighting for consciousness like an eight-year-old in the ring with Mike Tyson. Like obviously Iron Mike is going to annihilate me, but I tried to stay on my feet for as long as possible. All I can really remember is a sentence, something like ‘if you can’t even talk to me, maybe we should just end it now, instead of waiting for me to move to San Diego.’
You know what? Okay.
There was a long silence. Or perhaps it only felt long because I was effectively a mass of jello in charge of a central nervous system, who knows.
Her entire tone changed, ‘Wait, are you serious?’
Well, yeah. I’m exhausted and going to fall asleep really any passing second now. If you can’t understand that, then I guess we just need to end it now instead of waiting for the end of the school year.
‘… Oh.’
I’m going to bed now, good night.
I hung up, probably not the nicest way to end an almost six-year relationship, but I just could not keep using my brain for an instant longer. I don’t even remember going to sleep, I just remember waking up to my mom asking me if I had work that day.”
Co-Workers On Christmas Day
“We were coworkers. I was actually her supervisor. For some reason, she had gone from despising me to being attracted to me. I guess I was attracted to her but she made the first move. Actually, more like the first three moves. She called the office when I was closing up shop and invited me out for drinks one day. I had a few. She got my number and called me the next day.
Now the thing is, she was still living with her boyfriend but she told me they had broken up. But she made sure that I had no contact at all with him, which was suspicious. For example, she wouldn’t take my calls when she was at home and he was there. So after about a month of this, I tell her I’m not going to continue the relationship if she’s not going to move out of his place. She does within a week or two.
All the while by the way, no one but a few of our friends knows we are even seeing each other. It also happened that they were looking to promote another worker to supervisor. I recommended her strongly for the role above another better candidate. At the time my reasoning was sympathetic- I knew she was trying to make it on her own and she could use the extra money.
Now we were both supervisors. Still secretly together. My boss doesn’t know, my co-workers don’t know, and only one or two people know. She struggles with the job but eventually puts it together. I’m quietly picking up her slack all over the place. Now she’s living on her own, but I’m over there almost every night. She was extremely needy, she calls me pretty much every minute she’s alone. The only time she’s apart from me is when she’s visiting her father on Sunday afternoons. She didn’t tell her father about me at this point, she said she didn’t want him to think she had moved on so quickly from her last boyfriend.
Now, as we are approaching Christmas, I notice that she keeps calling me later and later on Sundays on her way home. Like eleven pm. She’s spending eleven hours at her Dad’s place each week? I think it’s weird for her to be leaving her dad’s so late. She then says one week that she fell asleep, and didn’t call me until the next day. I think that’s weird too. This is a person who is constantly calling me.
I get a funny feeling about this, and I almost hate myself for doing it, but I get in my car the next Sunday night and I drive by her ex-boyfriend’s house. And sure enough, her car is out front. I sit there and stake it out. After about an hour I’m ready to drive away but I force myself to stay there. I wanted to catch her in the act and confront her. After another hour she finally comes out and gets in her car. It’s around eleven-thirty pm on Sunday night. I don’t think she sees me.
She calls me about two minutes later. I say to her ‘Fell asleep again at your dad’s?’ And she says ‘Yeah, I was tired today’. I say to her sharply ‘You weren’t at your dad’s place’ she knows at that point she’s busted. She says ‘No, I wasn’t’. I meet her at her place and we talk about it. She said she’d understand if I wanted to break up, and that she was just spending time with him as a friend. I’m pretty sure they don’t have a physical relationship, but still, that should have been ‘forget this I’m out’ moment number three. Instead, I tell her it never happens again, and no more secrets.
But here’s the thing – it gnaws away at me. It’s always on my mind. I simply couldn’t get over the breach of trust, and no matter how hard I tried, I never fully did. Had I known it would’ve been so hard, I would have had a much easier time ending it there. But instead, I gave it one more chance.
So another two weeks go by and it’s Christmas. She requested several gifts and expected me to give her gifts on top of that. I spend maybe seven hundred dollars. She then tells me a couple of days before Christmas that she is going jean shopping with her ex. She doesn’t ask my permission, but I guess she didn’t lie about it either. We meet up on Christmas Day to exchange gifts because our families (and coworkers) don’t know we’re even in a relationship, even though by now it’s been like four months. At that point, she gives me like thirty dollars worth of junk, and I’m upset. In my mind, if you’re going to ask someone to spend hundreds on you, you should be ready to return to the favor. Or you know, you could just not ask for all that stuff.
I then ask her if she wants to come to Christmas dinner at my grandma’s. She casually sluffs it off.”
Too Many Video Games
“I was laying in bed with a fever from an abscessed upper tooth and my ex-boyfriend at the time was in the other room playing video games. I was texting with my friend in another state because they were checking in on me and they asked me why my boyfriend wasn’t taking care of me. Even more importantly they wanted to know why I wasn’t headed to the emergency room because the infection could have traveled to my brain. I thought about it and realized that I had enabled his indifference of me.
He would come home every day from work and play video games for hours. He refused to do anything around the house, so I ended up hiring people for the maintenance that I either did not have the time or inclination to do myself because of my erratic and busy work schedule. He would eventually complain that I spent the money to hire people, to which I replied, ‘Well, it needs to get done and you aren’t bothering to do it.’
I tried to have conversations with him to vent my frustrations but to no avail. Nothing changed, no matter how I approached it. When I would ask him to help with the yard work or something that I could not lift, he would begrudgingly do it. Eventually, I would ask him, ‘If I have to do everything by myself, what do I need you for? How much longer do you think I am going to put up with this?’ He shrugged and basically replied, ‘Oh well.’
Eventually, I became as indifferent as he. He would start going out at night drinking with his friends and come home late. He looked at me and said, ‘It’s like you don’t even care anymore.’ I finally replied, ‘You’re right, I don’t. I have been trying to work with you for months on this. I kept waiting for you to step up to the plate and man up and you never did. I don’t know if you thought I was joking all this time, but I wasn’t.’
I was always typically the breadwinner in my relationships in the past, even including this one. When I ended up in the hospital and almost died from sepsis, I still ended up going back to work earlier than I should have because he would not grow up and accept responsibility as an adult. He was a commercial truck driver and never seemed to take his driving record seriously throughout our relationship. When his CDL was suspended because of a traffic violation in another state, he refused to deal with it. I had to contact a lawyer friend of mine to reverse the ticket and get the points off so that he could get his CDL reinstated. During the month that it took for the situation to get resolved and him being out of work, he did absolutely nothing around the house and just played video games. When he did get back on the road, he would continue to drive irresponsibly, as if he had no concern for his driving record or a potential repeat suspension of his CDL. I told him then, that I would not suffer through another suspension.
After this relationship ended, I realized where I had gone wrong. Our age difference was not an issue in the beginning, because typically as you build a life together and grow, you mature. After seven years, I was done waiting for him to grow up and be the man that I needed him to be.”
Boss-Husband
“We had been living together about twelve years. We had a home-based business that we started together. It took about three years before we began making money. But once it started it started pouring in. He handled the advertising, printing, etc and I did the books and anything requiring typing. Neither could run the company without the other. We had a system and it worked for us. Working from home, being our own boss, it was great. The money and the freedom allowed us to do pretty much what we wanted to. We bought a nice home, we traveled, we were living the good life. We’d go to the local bar a few nights each week. We met lots of people, had parties at the house a lot. It was fun.
I’ve never been the type of person that had self-discipline. I never had a set routine. I’m more like ‘the spur of the moment’ type. Spontaneous. He was the opposite. He was up the same time every morning. I’d sleep in. He’d plan his day, week, and next month. I never knew what I’d be doing in an hour. I guess this is how this all came about.
He was always griping about my lack of structure. I agreed and began to do things as he did. He set timeframes and deadlines for me. He’d have a ‘to do’ list for me every morning. If I didn’t complete something he’d want a good explanation. At first, I felt like a child and he was the dad. A strict dad. But as time went by I became very self-disciplined. I was grateful that he had helped me change my ways.
I had a routine and my life was running smooth but he continued to boss me around. My friend would come over regularly. We had a pool and her and I would swim and work on our tan several days a week. But only after I had my ‘to do’ list complete. She said something to me one day that I had never realized until then. She asked me why I allow him to treat me the way he does. She mentioned situations where he was controlling, bossy, unreasonable, and how he had double standards for me. From that day on I saw what she meant. I began addressing these issues when I noticed them. He didn’t like it. Somethings got resolved and others didn’t.
A few years went by and my dad got sick. I was spending a lot of time with him. This created problems at home. He didn’t like me changing my routine to accommodate my dad. Every day was worse. My dad was moved into a nursing home. I helped him move. He was in the hospital a lot and I’d stop what I was doing and go to the hospital. I wasn’t neglecting my work, I’d complete everything in the evening instead of when he wanted it done. We worked at home, we were our own boss, my work was getting done, my dad was dying, give me a break!
His double standards got worse. He’d call me when I was with my dad and demand I get home and work. One night, I got home early and he wasn’t there. I found him at the bar kissing some woman. I should have left him then but the thought of leaving with my dad in such bad health was just too much to deal with right then. Plus, the money was so good. If we split up, I’d have to find a job and that was just too much on my plate at that time. So I forgave him and stayed. Things got worse.
It was after lunch and he wasn’t back from his errands. I finished my work and headed to get groceries. I saw his car at the bar and stopped. When I confronted him, he told me I needed to be home finishing my work. I said it’s done. He said ‘Then do tomorrow’s work so you can be caught up when you take off to go goof off with your dad.’ That upset me and he knew it. He went on and on talking to me this way in front of everyone at the bar. I left. I went home. My friend stopped by and we were talking. He pulled up and started complaining about how I’m always goofing off. My friend was getting up to go and he told her all the reasons why he didn’t want her coming around. He was out of line and out of control. My friend left. Then he was telling me that I was not going to do this or that. I wasn’t going to spend my time goofing off blablabla. I stood up and told him ‘Forget you! I quit! Consider this your two-week notice. You have two weeks to be out of my house!’
It felt so good to quit that relationship!”