So I (24F) met my soon to be ex husband(39M) when I was 18. I was in a bad situation and he offered a couch for me to crash on when I needed it. I ended up moving in with him a year later. He’s not from here, and one day when we were drinking he jokingly asked if I would marry him if he needed it to keep him in the country. I said no. Fast forward 2 years and we’ve become ‘involved’, but I’ve told him over and over again that I’ll grow out of him one day and that all of this is probably a result of my past (mother was very emotionally unavailable, physically and emotionally abusive stepfather, and bio father is a convicted pedo… you can probably fill in the blanks). We were very close friends, but I was certain I felt nothing romantic for him.
Something happens with his sponsorship one day and he’s asking me if I will marry him to keep him in the country or he’ll have to “go underground”. I said yes in the heat of the moment but wasn’t very comfortable. I asked a lot of questions and tried to find an alternative solution. He would get angry with me every time I brought up my doubts or if I cried about the situation, saying that he needed me to make up my mind so he could decide what he was going to do. I felt like I couldn’t say no, but honestly, that was probably my own misplaced guilt that had nothing to do with him. I felt like he’d saved me and I needed to do the same. No one in my life approved of the situation, saying he was taking advantage of me and manipulating me. The night before our wedding I was crying my eyes out and was completely inconsolable, but still I didn’t back out for some reason.
Within our first year of marriage, we’d had a couple of drinks and he wanted to have sex. I told him only if he wore a condom. He didn’t want to, but I told him he either wore one or nothing was going to happen. I should mention that I was on the pill and would sometimes allow him to not wear a condom, but I liked that extra protection from falling pregnant. I had also only lost my virginity after I’d met him when I was 18 (to someone else), so I didn’t have a lot of experience. He agreed to wear the condom. At some point during sex, I felt like something was off, so I reached down and realised that the condom was no longer on. I freaked out, thinking it had fallen off inside me. He told me it was on the floor, and when the realisation hit that he’d taken it off and put it there, I felt small and used. I started crying and he tried to comfort me, saying he didn’t think it would be a big deal and that it was a mistake. I thought maybe I was overreacting because of my trauma, even after I read up on stealthing.
I tried to get over what happened, but I just couldn’t. It took me a while before I opened up to anyone about it. I felt so much anger towards him, even though he apologised. We were constantly fighting, which wasn’t the norm for us before we’d gotten married. We stopped being intimate as often as we used to, and when we were, I would sometimes cry after. I had pity sex with him on his birthday, but I had a panic attack thinking that he’d taken the condom off even though he hadn’t. It was after that that I became very aware that something was broken that wouldn’t be able to be fixed. We ended things not long after that. I didn’t want to divorce him yet because he’d built a company up out of nothing and he would lose it all if I did so, but things between us escalated quite a lot when he realised it was truly over. I recently moved out with my dog to stay with my uncle 3 hours away. I called him from here and told him that I would be filing for a divorce soon. He didn’t seem surprised, but did say some things I’m sure were meant to make me feel guilty, like “I’m going to get deported, I’m sure you’ll be happy about that. I wish you all the best for your future”, and “I’ll be gone and everything I worked hard for was for nothing”, and “I was in love with you. I wanted a future with you”.
Anyway… I started talking to some people in my life about things that had happened, and they pointed out that a lot of things seemed off. Like the fact that he’d asked if I would marry him when he barely knew me. That we never REALLY fought even though I’m a pain in the arse sometimes. That he still wanted to have sex with me after I told him he was probably a daddy issue and I’d told him what that man had done to me. That he didn’t seem to know his condom size even though he’s in his 30’s, so the condoms would fall off or break. That he wouldn’t notice when the condom fell off or broke until after he was done. That, if he wasn’t wearing a condom, he couldn’t tell he was about to finish when I’d asked him not to do it inside me.
The big questions are, do I just divorce him, resulting in his deportation, or should I press charges as well? What’s the difference between someone ‘making a mistake’, as he calls it, and being a predator? I know that life isn’t black and white, that there’s a lot of shades in between, but how can we tell when someone is more bad than they are good? I feel like I’m drowning in this. I just need a little advice.
TL;DR I’m divorcing someone 15 years older than me because he stealthed me (took the condom off without my consent). Should I press charges while I’m at it?