I’ve been married for 13 years, together for 18. We have three young daughters, and honestly, they’re the main reason I’m still trying to handle all of this carefully instead of just walking away emotionally.

There’s no cheating. No other woman. I’m not leaving because someone else showed up, and this isn’t some impulsive midlife-crisis thing. It’s been years of slowly wearing down until I got to the point where, deep down, I feel like I’m already done.

I’ve always been the kind of guy who puts himself second. I swallow things, avoid conflict, try to keep the peace, and move on. But over the years I built up this constant feeling that there was no real partnership and no real listening. I would try to talk, but I didn’t feel heard. A lot of the time the dynamic felt the same: she was right, she didn’t back down, she didn’t apologize, and that was it.

Over time, that really shrank me inside the relationship. I was happy as a father. I love my daughters, and having a family was always something I wanted. But as a man, as a husband, as an individual, I started disappearing. At home I felt more like a dad, provider, and part of the routine than someone who was heard, desired, respected, or chosen.

One major turning point for me was the pregnancy with our third daughter. It wasn’t planned. Before that, my wife had gone to her gynecologist to talk about birth control, and I wasn’t part of that decision. Later she told me she wasn’t taking anything and had decided to use the “rhythm method.” But from what I understood later, it wasn’t really a proper method. It was basically just tracking her period.

That really broke something in terms of trust. Not because I don’t love my daughter. I love her deeply. But because a decision that big, something that changes the whole family’s life, didn’t feel like a decision we made together as a couple.

What made it worse for me was realizing there was also a religious layer behind it. She didn’t want an IUD because she saw it as abortive, she was resistant to condoms, and there were comments like “if God sends it, then it’s meant to be.” Over time she got more and more involved with church, including a pretty conservative group, and I started feeling like major decisions in our marriage were being guided by a worldview I don’t share.

The problem isn’t that she has faith. The problem is that this worldview started affecting our marriage, our intimacy, decisions about having children, and the way conflicts were handled, without it ever really being discussed with me.

Intimacy, which was already pretty limited, kept getting worse. Certain things just stopped existing. She became more closed off, less available to talk, and I started feeling like there wasn’t really any room for me in the relationship anymore.

We also tried couples therapy, but again I felt like I was putting in the effort and she wasn’t. When I stopped going and stopped paying for it, she stopped passing along the school reimbursement for the kids for several months. It’s a benefit from her job, even though I pay the tuition out of my own account. To me, it felt like retaliation. We keep separate finances, and I’ll admit I’m not great with money, but this put me in a really difficult spot. I started running out of money and had to push hard for her to pay me back and normalize the reimbursements.

The worst part wasn’t just the money. It was the pattern repeating itself: she acted like nothing had happened, didn’t really admit fault, didn’t apologize, and didn’t acknowledge the impact it had on me.

Around that same time, I had already started changing my own life. I started taking care of myself, losing weight, working out, taking care of my mental health, and trying to put myself first for once. That made it much clearer how many things I had accepted for years that I just can’t accept anymore.

At this point, if I’m being honest, I feel like I’m done. I don’t see a real path to rebuilding this. I feel like we have different worldviews, different ways of dealing with conflict, money, religion, intimacy, and partnership. And more than anything, I feel like there is a pattern in her that doesn’t change: she shuts down, doesn’t admit fault, doesn’t backtrack, and doesn’t really take emotional responsibility for what happens.

The hardest part is the guilt. I feel guilty for not loving her the way I used to. I feel guilty for wanting to end the marriage. It feels like I’m the one blowing up the family I always wanted to build.

I think about my daughters all the time. I’m scared of losing daily life with them. I’m scared of breaking their routine, hurting them, becoming “the dad who left.” But I’m also scared of staying in a marriage where I no longer exist as a husband, only as a father and part of the household structure.

I’m not trying to make my wife the villain. She’s the mother of my children, and she has good qualities. But I also can’t keep pretending I see a future in this marriage.

Has anyone gone through something similar? How do you deal with the guilt of ending a marriage when there are young kids involved, religion in the background, and this feeling that you spent years slowly disappearing inside the relationship?