Men who got divorced, what was the first indications that your marriage was going wrong?

25 comments

  3. Twenty years of marriage, and my body count was one: only her.
    She gave me a hall pass. Checked and checked again to confirm. Then she claimed that using it was cheating because “you should have known I didn’t know what that meant!”
    Then I found her secret online hookup profile, in which she listed “hall passes” as one of her turn-ons.
    The whole thing was a setup so she could cash in on a divorce, and make it somehow my fault.

  5. It wasn’t just one thing. Lots of minor differences blew up. Demands and expectations increased. She wanted control of the money to the point of paying interest for no reason at all. I mean beyond a house or a car.

  7. When I came home and sighed in relief that she wasn’t home. Happened for months, maybe years, before the divorce started.

  8. She said “I hate you, I’ll never accept you as my husband, and I’m going to be a bitch to you until you leave me.”

  10. I would largely agree with the top comment. Though, it ends up being “death of a thousand paper cuts”…

    Lack of relationship maintaining activities.

    Lack of any interest in common activities.

    Lack of a willingness to extend grace and understanding.

    i.e

    We lacked sex because it was “messy” and she didn’t want to “spend her spoons” on that. However it extended to any effort to maintain the relationship: no date nights, no activities of any kind…

    Though I eventually gave up asking, she refused to join me in watching anything I liked, preferring to hang out in the corner on her “social media” sites. (I, however, did and was expected to join her, in her interests.)

    She would routinely accuse me of various things, mostly made up. She would also _tell me_ what I was supposed to be thinking and feeling. Going so far as to construct week long sagas to justify her being “hurt” over trivial statements.

  11. Damn, came her to write the same thing as /u/hujambo11. My list was five things:

    1. **Sex** – reduced frequency, enthusiasm, and unselfishness – was absolutely the canary in the coal mine.

    2. **Appearance** was the second – First, the slinky / sexy / seductive clothing she’d enjoyed teasing me with disappeared, then she switched to “comfortable” clothes for my presence. She would only get dressed up, put on makeup etc, when going to work or out to group events.

    3. **Nagging** was the third – she started to expect to be the “manager” of all the things that needed to be done, rather than equals, and her to-do list grew faster than two people could get it all done. She wouldn’t accept time-saving alternatives like hiring assistance or meal delivery services.

    4. **Dissatisfaction** was next – the sweet things I did for her weren’t good enough, and would be thrown in my face, even if the problems were things out of control.

    5. **Verbal abuse** was the end result – the dissatisfaction became constant criticism, the nagging was replaced with character slurs, and my attempts to breach the divide were rebuffed.

    I reached the point of “giving up”: if I couldn’t prevent the verbal abuse because nothing I did was good enough, and no matter how hard I tried the to-do-list was always overwhelming, I might as well stop trying and do things I enjoyed, for my own self-care. That brought us to

    6. **Tag-team parenting** – one of us was watching the kid all the time, and the other was doing their own thing. For me, that tended to look like: get up, play with kiddo, work, come home from work, watch the kid until bedtime, do the bedtime routine, come out, find ex- already in bed and watching shows she knew wouldn’t interest me. There was literally zero connection time.

    By that point, sex was a once-a-year thing, and I’d decided that if we went a calendar year without, I was done. Happened at year 17, but by then the verbal abuse and sexual rejection had whittled my self-esteem down and kicked off a major depression I haven’t recovered from.

    The lessons I took?

    Next time, I’m hitting the eject button at #3, and treating #1 as a sign of a serious problem, either physical, mental, or relationship, requiring immediate attention.

  13. I had to keep asking if we could finally have sex tonight, usually only getting a “yes” once a month. She stopped talking to me as much. Spent almost all her free time (including on my birthday) playing some Naruto MMO. Started taking hours long baths and locking the bathroom when she did, when before this we showered together to save time and water.

    Eventually she approached me for a divorce because she had become romantically involved with someone she met online who lived halfway across the country. Couple days later she came back and said she wanted to make it work, and that she cut off all contact with the other guy. Only about a week later I found out that was a lie. That’s when I decided the divorce was happening.

  15. First indication was the constant arguing.

    I knew it was over when she stopped talking to me because I wrote a list of basic boundaries I wasn’t going to let her cross anymore like taking her off my bank account if she wasn’t going to use “her money” to contribute to household expenses.

  18. My ex and I got into some serious credit card debt..I worked my ass off to get all of them paid off (overtime, weekends etc). So I got a promotion and had to travel out of state for work for 3-4 days. On day 2 I got a call regarding fraud on a CC ($4700). I said no that definitely hadn’t been spent and asked where it was spent at, it was Macy’s and Nordstrom. Called the now ex and she so nonchalantly said yea she had gone shopping for new work clothes…I lost my shit and filed 2 weeks later. To this day I guarantee she’s up to her eyeballs in debt

  22. She started getting really irrationally angry over the most ridiculous things. I made a lot of excuses for it as it transitioned into emotional and verbal abuse and spent years trying to understand how to make her happy again.

    It wasn’t until later I learned about Borderline Personality Disorder and how they start out nice and fun and loving but once they form an attachment the other part of them comes out. Understanding that something like Borderline could even exist would have saved me years of pain because I didn’t think it was possible for someone to change that much but they do.

  23. Making a Reddit post asking “men who got divorced, what was the first indications that your marriage was going wrong?”

  24. I remember walking into her bedroom one day to ask her a question.

    She screamed, slammed the lid of her laptop closed and huddle over it shivering.

    I just walked out but i knew what she was doing. But you can’t make someone love you, or even be faithful…if that’s what she chooses to do she gets to do it. But from then on I knew we were done..in my heart, at least.

    Were there earlier indications? We argued a lot, but we never got physical. I did notice she no longer listened to me..about anything. There were only two ways to do a thing: Her way, and the wrong way.

    That might have been endurable if she at least had the habit of being right. But she didn;t. She made noticeable errors of judgement..severe ones, some of which almost lost us a lot of money.

    She also decided she was my boss, and treated me like an employee If she had a problem, I was expected to fix it. no thanks, and often criticism if I didn’t do it fast enough or the way she wanted.

    I remember once she gave me a list of medicine she wanted. She wrote the list herself. I took it to the chemist, they gave me all the things, then I took it back.

    One of the things was NOT what she wanted. She yelled at me, then insisted I go back. I said no, go get it yourself, that way there will be no mistakes..and she was furious with me.

  25. She sat me down and told me she’d never had any feelings for me. Just wanted kids and someone to pay for them.

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