I posted the below in the r/Divorce subreddit about an hour ago, but was advised to post here. Apologies if you are reading this for the second time.

This is my first Reddit post. I'm grateful for all that I have learned from Reddit posts throughout the years, and now I would be grateful for some insight on my particular situation. Please excuse that a lot of what I write here will be in generalities as I think I have been through a fairly unique experience and would prefer to remain anonymous.

I met my wife in undergrad approximately 10 years ago. I was playing sports in college and getting ready for a military career, and she was finishing up her undergrad psychology degree. For the first year of our relationship, I noticed very few red flags. She would stay at my apartment nightly, but brought her bags of clothes and toiletrees back to her car each night for some reason. She would come in, throw her bags all over my room, stay the night, and bring all her stuff back to her car the next morning. I didn't love the mess and voiced my opinion about that, but it was not a big deal really. Other than that, we had very few arguments and things were great. She was fun, funny, sex was great, really enjoyed dating her for that first year.

I left for the military after that first year, and things went downhill in a hurry. She texted me every single day about how much she missed me, which sounds sweet but it was in a super negative tone - she seemed perpetually depressed about my leaving for a career she knew I was going to take on from day one. I was going through special warfare training for six months under these circumstances until I was severely injured in training and needed 8 surgeries (upper and lower body) as a result. After I was injured, I went through hell in the military. The military doctors didn't recognize any of my surgical conditions for approximately a year, and so my command began to think I was making up my ailments. I went from a leader of my special warfare class to a pariah. The psychological pain of seeing that community turn on me was even worse than the physical pain of my many injuries. On top of all this, my wife's depression sank further after hearing of my injuries, and she made it all about her. I was doing everything I could to get the right medical treatment, heal, and get back into training, which infuriated my wife. She began a master's degree program at around the time I was injured and fell behind in her studies because she was depressed about my situation. I dealt with her anger, the anger of countless military personnel, and the pain of untreated injuries for about a year and a half until I was finally diagnosed with at least one of the surgical conditions and honorably discharged from the military.

The day I got home from the military, my wife picked me up from the airport with anger in her eyes - no kiss when I got in the car. When we got home the first thing she asked me to do was to take care of hours of her laundry she had been putting off. It was a cold overall environment.

Within four months after I was discharged, civilian doctors diagnosed a majority of my conditions, and the surgeries began. As I endured approximately six years of surgeries, I prepared for the LSAT and eventually attended law school in that time period. From the day I got home until the day I graduated from law school, my wife and I argued near-weekly, if not even more commonly than that. I began leaving the apartment to get away from her screaming. This triggered something in her - her dad left her family when she was a kid, which may be related. Each time I would walk out the door to take a breather following an argument, she would lose her mind. On these occasions, she ended up doing things like punching me in the back, pulling on ligaments that I had just had surgery on months (or less) prior to such occurrences, which I am embarrassed to say did cause tremendous pain at the time and who knows what kind of damage to the ligaments themselves, and she would scream her head off. At times I would scream back, which is not like me. I consider myself to be a kind person but her abuse brought something out of me where I would lose my temper and yell at her in response to her actions.

In addition to this behavior, she seems to have developed a shopping addiction that began around the time that I was discharged from the military. She ran up credit cards three times total before I would bail her out. The first time, she ran up a $5,000 bill (on luxuries, mostly, like Sephora, eating expensive foods at expensive restaurants, discretionary purchases online, etc.), the value of which was a massive chunk of my enlisted military salary (something like 18k per year). I paid it off but told her that a condition to my paying it was that she needed to pay credit cards off immediately after use (she wanted to build her credit so she wanted to keep using them). Then, she did it again, to the tune of another $5,000 or so, approximately a year later (obviously breaking her word re the condition). This time I bailed her out again, but conditioned the bailout on her not using credit cards at all going forward. She agreed.

Some years went by. I graduated from law school and currently work at a large law firm (long hours but pay is great, making second-year salary which is about 235k after bonus, for context). We moved into a house and her mental health deteriorated severely. She has seemingly been depressed for the past two years. She is now in a Psychology PhD program (we're going on 7 years of post-graduate education at this point for her). She refuses to work on her dissertation, or to work more than 17 hours a week. Thus, she makes about 50k a year, but also is not progressing in her program. As my salary has increased, she has increasingly worked less and less and has depended on my income to take care of things that were supposed to be her responsibility. When we moved into the house, she agreed to cover expenses outside of the mortgage, car, phone and energy costs, but she has severely failed to meet her obligations. I now cover 95%+ of the household expenses. It feels like I work to fund her life while she sits around and watches netflix and plays su doku for days at a time. She could work/work on her dissertation another four days of the week (even ONE would be nice) but spends four days of each week doing nothing each week while I grind my ass off covering life's increasingly expensive demands. I understand she is depressed, but she refuses to eat right, exercise, get to bed anywhere near on time or do seemingly anything necessary to improve her mental health situation. I am presently paying for her medical insurance premiums and therapy.

Last summer, we began marriage counseling, and I expressed my grievances about this dynamic where I felt the relationship was extremely unbalanced to the marriage counselor. The marriage counselor essentially agreed and tried to get my wife to see what was wrong with the way she was living. We discussed detailed financial planning in these sessions, trying to resolve our differences. It turns out that after 20 sessions (thousands of dollars and tons of time), she was lying the entire time about her financial status and had run up about $30,000 of credit card and personal loan debt. I felt intensely betrayed after everything we had been through and have lost the ability to trust her. On top of that the screaming and abuse hasn't stopped - she kept me up at night, screamed at me, and slammed a door on my elbow a couple months ago.

I finally moved out. I'm renting a separate house while still paying the mortgage on the house she is living in. It's expensive but worth it - I have tremendous clarity about the hell I was living in, and am glad I escaped. I am selling the house (closing date in the next few months). We signed a postnup towards the end of last year that, in the event of divorce or legal separation, allocates all of her debt to her, mine to me (none at the moment), provides her with over 20k cash, the engagement ring, and the right to use a car, and provides me with the cash I have earned throughout the years, including equity in the house, among other assets.

Her mental health has reached all-time lows since I moved out. She came by to pick up the dogs (we are splitting the days of the week that we are watching them) and she took off speeding down my residential neighborhood road at dangerous speeds, then told me she wanted to drive into oncoming traffic but that the dogs were the only reason she didn't. In my opinion, that is homicidal behavior. After calling the suicide hotline four times on her behalf, I have been counseled that she is probably not a current threat to herself or others, but I am extremely weary about what she might do next. I am happy that I moved out and will move on with my life eventually, but (1) her safety is most important right now, and I think if I served her with papers too early she might actually kill herself and (2) she needs to be married to me for health insurance premium reasons for her therapy. So presently, I am just trying to keep an even keel until the house closes in the next few months, and then will try to convince her to initiate an uncontested divorce (at which point she could receive her 24k, in payments, among other things).

I could use some general words of wisdom as I feel like I am going through a hurricane right now and probably have many blind spots in my approach. Thank you for reading as much as you have here.