And mine is no different.

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(This is more of a description of my path to divorce rather than a question. I needed someplace to vent my anger, frustration, and emotions. Fast facts - no kids, 3.5 years married, starting the divorce process now)

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I gave up my career to be with her. She works overseas we were posted to a foreign country immediately after getting married. I had been working in the same industry so I thought we would get through the stresses of living overseas and being newly married with relative ease. Boy, was I wrong.

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We went through the (what I thought to be) normal machinations of newlyweds. We argued; we tried to find common ground. The stress of being overseas, the stress of her new job, the stress of me not being able to find employment in our new country for well over a year all contributed to our problems.

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But we persevered. We got through the two years and returned home to our friends and family. Life was moving along swimmingly. We were trying to build a life for ourselves. It still took a while for me to find a job (displacing yourself and your life every two years is not easy on the job front) but I finally did find one a year after we returned stateside. Meanwhile I was freelancing, consulting, and keeping myself busy with designing/planning a business. She started a new job in the home office and was feeling really great professionally. We started looking at moving into a bigger home for a family that we were trying to build. We still argued a little bit but it was getting better and less frequent. I was learning how to interact and communicate with my partner.

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It all came to a head exactly one year after we returned to the U.S. I was still consulting/freelancing and was trying to find a full-time gig. I broke down while making dinner one night because it was so hard and stressful to find a job and was asking for help/support. She immediately clammed up and ten minutes later she said she was moving out.

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I spent the next four months in limbo trying to figure out what I did wrong. I tried to woo her back. I took her out on date nights, wrote love letters to her, reminded her of the good times we had. Unfortunately, every conversation we had during our time together in those four months always reverted back to the past, never to the future and what our life could be. She did not have the confidence that we could be happy together. We tried therapy but it never lasted more than two our three sessions with the four different therapists to which we went.

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She has toyed with my emotions for four months and finally said that she wants a divorce. I'm slowly realizing that I didn't do anything wrong; it's her. She gave up. She says she no longer loves me. She says that we do not see the world the same way and that we interact with people differently. All these excuses she gave me just made me more and more upset. I was looking forward to growing old together, continuing to learn more about her and myself. Now I'm sitting at my brother's house trying to pick up the pieces of what was and look forward to the future.

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Oh, and that job I finally got after a year of searching? It has now ended thanks to the government shutdown. The contract expired during the shutdown and there's no way that they can extend it without re-bidding it according to USG rules.

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TL;DR - I lost both my wife and my job thanks to the government and the shutdown.