Disclaimer: This is a victim puke, and I'm not going to pretend that it's anything but. I want to make it clear that I know that I arrived here as a result of my own decisions and my own failures, particularly in the arenas of maintaining strong frame, leading the household, and enabling the behaviors described below for an extended period of time.

I’m mad, dammit

I’m mad and it’s largely impotent—I feel bound up, trapped, unable to move. I've been taught not to cause problems, not to make waves, to just buckle down and endure. That if something made me unhappy, I needed to adjust my attitude or change something about myself. Classic nice guy syndrome, I recognize that now.

I did everything right, and yet I’m miserable. I worked so hard, did everything I was told I needed to do, and I ended up with almost none of the things I wanted.

I’m saddled with thousands of dollars of debt, driven largely by errors that my wife has made.

I’m shelling out close to ten grand a year for her classes, and she fucking ditches them to go spend money on dinner with friends.

I spend hours every week tutoring her, trying to help her learn the material for her courses, only to have her bring home mediocre grades and waste hundreds of hours watching youtube and Netflix.

I work a respectable, full time, decent paying job, and then I come home and I make meals, do most if not all of the cleaning, do dishes, prepare lunches, tutor her, and then find myself negotiating desire like some loser chump on the street corner being taken for all he’s worth by a hooker who should have retired ten years earlier. This always felt wrong, I just didn't realize why until I started reading the sidebar material back in March.

She did plenty of sexually adventurous things with her two past partners—which is bullshit, by the way, since I saved myself for marriage and I ended up with someone who didn’t, but who conveniently when asked mentioned only being raped and never brought up her voluntary trysts.

I find myself laying down last night with someone who claims she can’t kiss me because she can’t deal with being breathed on. Nevermind that when we were dating we would fucking suck face for hours on end. "It makes me feel claustrophobic, like I'm suffocating."

There is no more genuine desire on her part, at least not that I can see. She doesn’t try. I work hard every day, lifting and running to keep myself in good shape. I’ve probably never looked better. Meanwhile, she’s put on near enough eighty pounds. We’ve been trying to get her to lose weight for three years, and she’s only gone up.

Why am I still here? Why the fuck haven’t I divorced her ass? I get hit on regularly, and if I put myself out there I could be fucking hot women practically every night. I have a master’s degree—I could be married to someone with a similar level of education, instead of this dumb bitch who can’t fucking figure out entry level college courses. Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I put up with her constant bad moods and bad attitudes, her bullshit excuses, having to bargain for sex?

Last night I fucking did everything. I cooked food, I prepared lunches, I cleaned dishes, I did laundry, I cleaned around the house. She was supposed to be in class. When she comes home she tells me she ditched both classes and went to dinner with a friend, spending money we don’t fucking have. I try to initiate at bedtime and I get shut down hard. “I can’t relax honey, I have so much to worry about.”

What the fuck do you have to worry about? I pay for fucking everything, I did all the fucking household work, what the fucking fuck else is there? Oh, you have school? You’re too worried about that to make love to me, but not too worried to fuck off and take the entire evening to hang out with your friend? What kind of backwards-ass pageantry is that? And if you’re too fucking stressed out by a 15 credit freshmen level course load to give me the tiniest piece of your energy, how in the FUCK are you going to do it when kids come along? When you’re working, part time or full? This shit hasn’t improved in three plus years of me doing everything I possibly could. Hell, even when I was doing grad school and you were “supporting me”, all you were fucking doing was working part time at rucking retail. Occasionally you might cook, but you cooked shit that made you fucking fat and you ate like a pig, leaving me with piles of dishes to clean up and a wife that was less attractive than she was the day before.

Meanwhile, I worked eighty hours a week in the fucking lab, killing myself, staying awake for 72 hours at a stretch to run experiments when I had to, only to find out that we had been “volunteered” to fucking watch the dogs and the house for your friend, meaning that I have to sleep in a fucking dog hair encrusted bed instead of my home, being constantly jumped on by a bullshit little rat-dog that was never trained. That one's on me, I should have said no, but I never did because I was told/taught that this was what you needed from me to be happy and unstressed and that doing so would produce desire.

But it was all bullshit. Right from the very start. You never cared one whit about what I wanted or needed. Maybe you thought you did, I don't know. I sure thought so. But you use me as a paycheck and as a support system, while never returning the support and love that I need.

You’ve had every fucking opportunity. You’ve been granted a free ride in school courtesy of my sweat, months on end where your only damn responsibility was to get in shape, free room and board, a personal maid and chef, and you fucked it. You fucking wasted those golden moments. You sat on your perpetually increasing fat ass in the bedroom and watched the same damn videos of people screaming at each other for three years. And the excuse is always the same. “My depression makes it hard, I struggle to get out and do things, it doesn’t make me feel good. These videos keep the bad thoughts away.”

I am so past caring about your feelings. Funnily enough, the same things that you complain about doing, like exercising, not sleeping til noon, going to work, studying, eating halfway healthy, are the same things that would help with your damn depression. Just fucking owning your responsibilities and acting like a damn adult would have helped. But you did the exact opposite of what you needed to.

I fucking called you on it last week. You were throwing a tantrum over your statistics homework, getting mopey like a child. I was explaining Z-transformations to you. You were stuck on a question. Lo and behold, when we flip backwards in your textbook, there’s a paragraph explaining how to solve this sort of question in detail. Did you read this, I asked? No, you didn’t think you had to.

I told you that you had to read the relevant sections, not get frustrated, and deal with your emotions like a grown woman instead of getting angry. I told you I was leaving to go get shopping done. (I was proud of myself--I kept frame, I kept calm, I went and did something useful instead of rewarding your bad emotions)

I come back, and you’re not hard at work. You’re huddled in the bed, crying your eyes out. “I wonder if it’s even worth it when you’re so mean to me!” You weep. “I thought about ending it! How can you be so cold?”

This is not the first time, nor the last, that you have told me that you have thought about killing yourself over something I’ve said or done, or some other trivial occurrence in the grand scheme of things.

I want to leave. I fantasize about going back in time and telling my younger self to stay away. How sad is that? I can’t even dream about divorcing your, I have to dream of roundabout ways to do it. I want to get away. I want to run screaming to a foreign country, disappear, start over. I want to flee back to the jungles of Ecuador and fucking collect insects, or return to Spain and learn to surf in the Canary Islands and fuck the hot college girls that would always hit on me when I was there. I want to fucking LIVE.

But I can’t. Because I’m fully convinced that you will kill yourself if I go, and I still love you. And the only way I can even express these feelings is by puking them out into a document that I’ll delete as soon as it’s written for fear of you seeing it. The only people who will ever see it are anonymous strangers on the internet.

This is bullshit.