Crosspost "Struggling" from /r/relationship_advice:

Apologies, because this is going to be long. The first few paragraphs are just backstory. The problems begin in the comments. Also, I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this but I'm doing it anyway because I don't know what else to do.

I love my wife. She is my everything. A little over a month ago she told me that I was a wonderful husband and person but she was divorcing me.

Backstory: I (33m) had been with my wife for six and a half years, married for over three and a half. We met in early 2015. I was about a year and a half out of a previous marriage that I had ended because my ex wife was abusive and manipulative. I had been checked out of that relationship for over a year by the time I finally ended it, mainly trying to stick it out due to my own stubbornness. Once I was out of that marriage my life drastically improved. I had two casual relationships between fall of 2013 and summer 2014. One I ended because I really had no interest in a casual relationship that I didn't see going anywhere and the other ended partially because she moved away and partially because I was more serious about it than she was. By the end of 2014, which had been a great year for me, I lost my job and was pretty down. I was basically drifting and my friend hooked me up with a job that I wasn't really putting much effort into.

In early 2015 I met my wife through a mutual friend on facebook. The first thing my wife said to me (over text) was "Marry me." We began talking. She had just gotten out of an engagement and lost her job, moving two hours away to live with her parents. Her previous relationship started when she was in high school and not only was her former fiance emotionally abusive, manipulative, and cheated on her, but their engagement ended because he was arrested and subsequently convicted of molesting his step daughter from his previous marriage. As soon as the evidence came out, long before the trial, she left him and moved to live with her parents.

We both attended the same high school, but not at the same time as I am five years older than her, and all her friends lived in the same town as me so she often visited and soon moved back, just a mile or so away from where I was living at the time. Pretty soon she was over at my house all the time as she was unemployed and I was functionally unemployed because the job my friend had gotten me was commissioned sales and I could set my own schedule. Due to my mental state (partially caused by two friends I had deployed with in 09-10 being shot in Afghanistan) and the loose structure of the job, that meant I rarely worked.

Over the next couple months I found myself with this girl who, despite me having very little money and not being all that excited, wanted to do nothing but spend time with me. She was always kind and caring and treated me better than anyone I had ever been with. She wanted to be around my friends and family, she was ok with me spending time with my friends without her, she was always supportive and didn't constantly ask for things, which is all the exact opposite of my ex-wife. But I was wary of things and wasn't on stable footing financially to be able to, in my eyes, be a proper significant other. And there was a little trepidation in me about being with her for some fairly shallow reasons. So I pushed things out. I lasted a couple months.

In the beginning of May 2015 we officially became a couple and shortly thereafter she moved in with me. It all moved pretty fast, but by that time I was doing better with work and bringing in some money and was really growing to love spending time with her and seeing her for what she was, a beautiful person who truly cared for me. I met her family and we continued to grow closer. It was a very different experience for me because we never fought and everything went really smoothly for us. In the summer of 2016 we moved into a new place together, along with one of her friends and her friend's sister as roommates. Things continued to go really well between us and everything was on the upswing as she had gotten a job she enjoyed and paid well and I had been promoted, but by late fall of that year my work went southward steeply and I began to worry that I wouldn't be able to provide for her.

On top of me beginning to spiral into a depression (I'm not a chronically depressed person. If there is a major problem in my life, I get depressed over it. That's all.) one of her close friends began specifically telling her that she didn't want me around and eventually basically said that she hated me even though I had never had a negative interaction with her and went out of my way to be friendly and not bring up sensitive topics around her. I'll refer to this friend as "A." A is a political radical who is openly racist and always second guessed and belittled my wife for her thoughts and beliefs, which are very different both politically and otherwise. My wife at that point made the decision that she wouldn't be continuing her friendship with A anymore because of those reasons, with zero prompting from me. I am not a controlling person and would never feel comfortable telling someone who they can and can't be friends with, but my wife made her decision and I supported it because toxic people are never great to keep around. Her plan was to just not be an active participant in the friendship instead of actually tell A or cut her off. After about a week A figured out what was going on and blew up at my wife about her being trash and me being trash and if she wanted to be stupid and with me instead of be her friend then she wouldn't talk to her anymore.

Our relationship continued to be strong, with my wife supporting me emotionally and bearing more of the financial burden while I was down about my job until the Spring of 2017 when I returned to a job that I had left in 2007 to enter into the military. After a couple months I was right back in my stride and making excellent money and I was out of my depression. I had a wonderful girlfriend who loved me and I loved her. She was laid off from her job and decided to pursue school instead, which I supported because I could financially support the both of us without her working now. We were building a life together and moving forward, still with no real problems in our relationship. She had integrated into my friend group and had become really close with one of my good friends' wife. She was increasingly hinting at marriage and I was planning it. In December she decided to join the Air National Guard to help get money for school and I proposed to her on Christmas day in a proposal that I won't go into, but am very proud of. We wanted to wait until she returned from her training to have a wedding, but she thought it made since to do the legal portion before she left and the way I looked at it there was no way that I was going to be with anyone else or either of us were going to change our minds, so I agreed. A week later, on January 2, 2018, we were legally married.

Things carried on just like normal, with us keeping our marriage secret from everyone except her sister and my friend and his wife (We'll call them S and V, V being my friend's wife who she had become very close to). In April of 2018 she left to go to her Air Force training and I continued working and living with her friend that had been our roommate since 2016. I visited her in San Antonio for her graduation from basic training along with her aunt and mother. I visited her twice more in Mississippi during her advanced individual training. We continued to have zero issues and every visit was wonderful. She told me about how guys in her training class would hit on her and she had zero interest in them because I was her perfect husband. Finally in December of 2018 she came home. She was openly talking about wanting to have a baby but we decided that she should finish school and we should have our wedding before we took that step. Beyond that, I wanted to buy a house and both of us have decent jobs with benefits before having a child as I think that's the responsible way to do things.

When she came home she dove back into school and I continued doing well with my job and we were planning our actual wedding. That Spring I became aware that the unit I had deployed with in 2009-2010 had an upcoming non-combat deployment that sounded like it was going to be essentially a paid vacation, so I made the decision to reenlist for a short contract just to go with them. This was partially a financial decision and partially because I had attempted to reenlist to go to Afghanistan with them and had some issues with me not being there when my friends were shot. All in all, 2019 was great. We were looking at houses to buy, our wedding was beautiful, our honeymoon was amazing, and we were on very solid footing both in terms of finances and our relationship. The only speed bump was that she had a falling out with her friend who was our roommate and we decided to save money to buy a house while I was deployed by having her move in with my parents, which we did at the end of November 2019.

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continued in comments

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Tl;dr

I had a wonderful and perfect relationship with my (33m) wife (28f) for six and a half years, three and a half of them married. Between multiple factors causing her depression and reconnecting with an incredibly toxic old friend of hers that hates me, she has become a completely different person and divorced me, filing the papers less than two weeks after telling me that she wanted one when I thought everything was great. I freaked out, and was close to suicide, now she won't talk to me and hates me because she thinks I tried to manipulate her by threatening suicide and turned her family against her. None of that is true, but her toxic as hell friend has spent the last nine months or so dripping poison into her ear. I don't know what to do and the only way I could spend the last couple hours not hysterically sobbing was spending time writing this.

Posted by quackers538000 | 30 September 2021 | Link