Verbal Abuse Before & After The Affair

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-23-2004
Verbal Abuse Before & After The Affair
1
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 3:31pm
Hello to all! I'm glad I found this board although I'm not sure how well recieved my post may be given the nature of my situation. Here it goes:

Four years ago I moved in with my fiancee' after we both finished college and things didn't start off so well. I became depressed (clinically) due to the inability to find a job and gained approx 40 lbs in about 6 months. Because I didn't have a job I was struggling financially with medical bills so we decided to sign papers and became legally married so among other things, I could be covered by his health insurance. We figured it was the only way to make it work financially and after all we were planning on having a wedding in a couple of years.

My husband was kind and sweet and tried everything to cheer me up during my depression but I was pretty miserable. Slowly, my unresponsiveness to his attempts at 'making me happy' made him frustrated and we now know he became resentful and angry. We started drifiting apart and began living an invisible divorce. Sure we would do things together but we would often spend hours in our home office each of us at our respective computers playing games or surfing the web... together but separate.

About two years ago while all this was going on my husband was laid off. We went from having a $60K combined income to barely getting by. He finally got a job offer six months later and we were forced to move to a different city. During those six months things became worse for us as we struggled financially and emotionally and my husband began to gain weight and lose interest in things he used to enjoy. By the time we moved we were really not getting along too well and then we really started falling apart.

I spent almost a year searching for a job after our move and although my husband would cover our expenses (his bills, my bills and household expenses), I could tell something was very wrong. He would get angry whenever I asked him for money to pay my bills or sometimes even just asking to get groceries. It was like talking to a wall a lot of times and although I can't pinpoint a date in time that's when he started moving from joking around to downright hurting my feelings by calling me 'retarded' and 'stupid'. I withdrew and stopped helping around the house. I had never been good about housekeeping, I guess because I was just too depressed to care but now I REALLY didn't care anymore. Whenever I tried to offer constructive criticism or suggestions I'd be met with a 'shut up!'. This made him more resentful because now he was not only paying the bills but trying to keep the household afloat. He made it out to be like I wasn't even trying to find a job although I'd tell him about my job interviews and applications. I guess I really should've gotten us help at this point or at least picked up a book about relationships... ANY book! I was too numb, depressed and hurt to even think about finding help.

After a couple of temp jobs I landed a fairly good temp job with a major retailer and was really thriving there professionally. I was good at my job and enjoyed it... but I also used it as a way to avoid coming home to the emptiness and numbness. Then all hell broke lose. A coworker who had befriended me my first couple of weeks there began flirting we me and about two months later I ended up having an affair with him. I was only with him twice and was so overcome with guilt and shame and sadness about where my marriage had gone that I confessed. Because the job was only a temp job until the end of the year I was transferred to a different store around the same time. I had contact with the person once more to admit that I had become emotionally involved (we had agreed to keep it casual) and tell him I was no longer interested in continuing the relationship because I was desperately trying to save my marriage.

My husband was outraged to say the least and we've been in therapy for six months. Through therapy we discovered he had been suffering from depression for several years undiagnosed and is now on medication. I wish that were the end of the story. The verbal abuse is now a million times worse than it was before the affair and even our therapist now feels that maybe I need to get out. I've tried to meet his needs in every possible way and be subservient because, after all, this was all my fault, yet somehow I feel resentful. Like yes, I made a horrible decision but I acknowledge that and am remoresful for it and want to make things work and fix the problems that got us into this invisible divorce we were living for so long. But my husband now is more concerned with 'making a new life' and stays out until 3 or 4 in morning some nights at local sportsbars playing pool (something he would never do before) rather than taking the time to work on our marriage (doing 'homework' or reading material from our therapist). He's told me he is not interested in a relationship right now and that things would be better for me if I moved on and found someone else. He's not good enough for me he says. He's always had self-esteem issues; we both have. So... I started to look for apartments and started to pack and he broke down and told me not to leave and that he couldn't deny any longer that he still loved me but just didn't know how to get through this. I really had renewed hope after this but now we're back to the same old thing. He belittles me, calls me names, tells me it's my fault he gets angry and his latest 'antic' was refusing to buy groceries. Every time I would bring it up he'd look at me like I was asking the unthinkable or tell me to 'shut up!'. I spent the last month living off ramen noodles (on my barely above min. wage part-time job that's about all I could afford) and the food I could scarf down whenever we'd go out to dinner or lunch several times a week.

I know what I did was horrible and I don't expect him to forgive me easily, however, it's been six months and his verbal abuse and emotional abuse has escalated to the point where I'm afraid all the time and cry or become saddened whenever he gets angry at me. I guess this situation is difficult because not only do I feel like I deserve to be treated this way because I had an affair but also because HE feels he has the right to treat me worse than before because I had an affair.

I'm seriously considering moving out just to keep my sanity no matter how much he begs me to stay but at the same time I feel like I owe him something for having betrayed him the way I did. Our therapist says maybe my leaving will be the real wake up call he needs to realize that our marriage is salvageable and that his abusive behavior has gone too far. I just don't know what to think or do anymore. I'm so alone and confused.

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-12-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 5:19pm

Hi Discoverer, and welcome -


I'm not going to beat you up over the circumstances which led you here (the affair), because there's something else that's going on here, and that is what nudged you over into the affair.

CL-Blueliner4