People aren’t always who they say they are, or they turn into somebody else over time. Unfortunately, this happens in marriages and it is sometimes best for people and their kids to separate. Folks who were previously married share stories about the moment they knew they didn’t want to be with their spouse anymore. This content has been edited for clarity.
Disappearance
“My husband disappeared one night and said he had to fly to a different country for business. He left me with a house full of our small children. My youngest were one-year-old twins and the oldest child was not more than 10 years old. Days went by without me hearing from him. I was sure something catastrophic had happened to him, but lo and behold, after about two weeks, he called and he was fine but needed to be there ‘longer than expected.’
I broke down and cried and said all the usual things like, ‘How could you do this to me? Why didn’t you tell me? How will I manage financially?’ He had no answers.
Strange people started knocking on my door. It turned out he had borrowed money from all of them and left them checks which had subsequently all bounced. Some of the people understood my predicament and left me alone. Others were not so patient and made threats against me and my children. I scrambled around looking for work. I found a job editing a newspaper and slowly started paying back his debts plus supporting my family.
From time to time, an envelope would arrive with some money, so I knew he hadn’t abandoned us completely. Months went by, he would call sometimes, and would be very vague as to when he was coming back. After all that time, I saw something change in me, in my children, and in the atmosphere of our life. The children were better behaved, there was more happiness in the house, I wasn’t as tense, and checks weren’t bouncing anymore. I realized I wasn’t even waiting for him to come back because my life was turning into something so much better.
If you’re thinking I was ecstatic, I wasn’t. It was very sad to realize I was better off without him. It made me feel like I was saying goodbye to something and someone I had imagined would always be a constant in my life. Had he not traveled and left us alone (he was gone for almost a year), perhaps I would never have thought about leaving him.
When he came back, he thought things would be the same as when he left. But I had changed. My life had changed. Even my appearance was different. He had left a cautious, ‘dependent upon him’ wife and came back to meet a woman who held down a job, was in charge of an important newspaper, and did not agree with his every word.
After many arguments, we finally divorced. I knew I could make it on my own but it wasn’t easy. Many of my dreams had to make way for keeping a roof over our heads, paying rent, and making sure the children were clothed. I’m no longer the young and innocent girl who was so sure there was always a ‘happily ever after.'”
Total Madness
“There were various moments when I knew. One day, I came home after work excited to see my wife and first-born son, let myself in, and called out to them. I realized they were upstairs but they couldn’t hear me. I started up the stairs and then realized why. She was changing him and screaming at him,
‘Your father’s a prick!’
My poor little son was about three or four at the time and tried to defend his daddy but that just set her off screaming even more. That moment is indelibly etched in my memory. I walked in, picked him up, and comforted him. Later, I asked her what that was all about and she told me she didn’t know and that it was the first time it had ever happened. She was a very good liar with many years of experience, but there was something about the way she said it that finally made me realize just how duped I had been over the years.
For the first time, I told her I didn’t believe her. I’d finally realized why my son would cling on to me the whole time when I was at home and would try not to be in her company, even though I tried to encourage it. I decided to watch her more closely.
Her parents would come over once a week and whenever I left the room for a while, I would often come back to find my wife and mother-in-law locked in a screaming match. This time, I pretended to leave but listened to the dynamics of their dreadful violent discourse. Far from being my mother-in-law, I was shocked to find the violence was initiated with gratuitous insults by my wife.
I foolishly thought she was unaware of it and tried to talk to her about it. Her reaction was total and vehement denial. I realized I had had the wool pulled over my eyes for years. A while later, I got a phone call at work from the babysitter who told me she was resigning with immediate notice. She had walked in and found my son happily sitting and drawing at his table with his back to the door. When he’d turned around to greet her, she saw a bright red palm print on his cheek where he had been slapped. My wife was the only person who had been in the house in the hours before.
I tried to initiate counseling but my wife was having none of it as she thought, presumably quite rightly, she would have to confront her madness. I felt rather liberated and at the same time distraught at the failure when she then went and found another man who would believe her catalog of lies. I think the moment really was when I realized I had seen through her and had for all intents and purposes given up on her. I no longer cared about our marriage, only how to rescue the kids from so much pain.”
“Clean Slate”
“My ex had ADHD which he had overcome as a young adult to become a workaholic overachiever. We deliberately took one weekend away a month to enjoy private time together away from all of our responsibilities.
On one of these weekends, it was six p.m. and I was exhausted but he was still raring to go. I suggested he go out to the casino and find something fun to do for an hour while I drank a cup of strong coffee so I could keep up with him later. I could tell he was disappointed but he always stated a ‘normal’ person could not keep up with him.
When he came back, I was sufficiently caffeinated to go back to the casino with him. I tried to give him an affectionate hug but he started saying mean and critical things to me including the assertion my excuses were made up because I really wanted to play on the computer rather than be with him.
It was so mean, childish, and uncalled for that I felt myself tearing up so I threw myself on the bed, hiding my face and telling him I was not going anywhere with him in a bad mood. He sternly told me to accept his ‘leadership’ on the matter, get up and apologize for my bad behavior, and then we could go out and salvage the evening.
There was in no way anything wrong with what I had done. He was going to learn I was impervious to gaslighting. I became coldly angry and told him we were not spending the evening together and I did not accept his ‘leadership’ which was unfair, cruel, and biased.
He left and was gone for some time. I went to sleep. The next morning, he woke me up and told me I had twenty minutes to get ready. Since I did not accept his leadership, our vacation was over and we were going home. He would not help me carry my baggage, open the door, or acknowledge me. A few hours later, he deliberately parked in a snowbank so I could barely get out to go to the bathroom.
At the end of the evening, I told him our marriage was over. I was not the wife he wanted and needed. A few weeks later, he found marriage counseling and we signed up for a retreat. He gave me a generic apology for any ‘wrongs’ he ‘may’ have committed and begged me to make a ‘clean slate.’
I agreed, but it turned out I did everything by myself: stress and anger management, EMDR, and marital therapy, which helped me through the bad situation and diffused his gaslighting and emotional abuse. I saved enough money to make it comfortable to finally leave and filed for divorce.”
Projecting
“We had a massive blowout argument on our last anniversary. She had said the only reason she hadn’t left me was that we didn’t have any money. All that really meant was in her heart, she was already gone. But this doesn’t describe the ‘moment’ – and there was a ‘moment.’
After the blowout, she told me I should see a counselor. I told her I would see one if she did. She had really serious anger problems. I started seeing a counselor and within two sessions, he was concerned my perspective on her might be biased. Ya think?
After a few more sessions, he asked me if I trusted her, and I said no. With false accusations flowing from her practically daily, it was old, and I was worn out dealing with it. She had expressed her hatred to me in more ways than one, but still feigned that she loved me. The counselor said the false accusations are borne on a guilty conscience.
‘Guilty? Of what?’ I asked.
‘Of what she’s been accusing you of,’ my counselor responded.
‘Infidelity?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. She does this in part from guilt, and in part to make a smokescreen. She wants you to focus on you and what you’re doing wrong to make her mad because it takes the eyes off of her,’ he replied.
Well, that was a twist. The counselor also said there was no way she could be that venomous and still say she loved me. He gave me ten questions to ask her. The questions were innocuous but he said a guilty mind answers the questions differently from an innocent one. He said to sneak the questions into our conversations and get her responses and body language.
In two more sessions, I had them all done and written down. Her answers were as innocuous as the questions and I couldn’t see any guilt at all. He showed me a book with the potential answers. One list of textbook innocent answers, and one list of textbook guilty answers. I was stunned. Every one of her answers was in the guilty column. He said he’d never seen anyone hit all ten.
Two of the most important moments in the Q&A led her to two actions. One was when she came to me in the evening and unloaded a lot of ‘past lover’ information she’d never shared. In all our years, I never knew any of it. The counselor told me this is how a deceiver tries to show ‘cooperation’ as a smokescreen.
He also said she would try to narrow the definitions of ‘cheating’ or ‘intimacy.’ One evening she walked through the bedroom and said,
‘How do you define intimacy?’
There it was, an attempt to narrow the definition. I told her it was basically an exchange of deeply personal information, body fluids, kissing, or hooking up. She then asked if that included doing things orally with another person.
That was the moment. The very moment I knew it was over. All those years of accusing me of infidelity and here she was doing it. From that very moment, it was like a neon sign was across her forehead: cheater.”
Absent Father
“Sometime between November 1998 and January 1999, I woke up around six a.m. to the sound of my baby crying. I got out of bed, fixed a bottle, and laid on the sofa watching TV as I fed her. She would have been about six weeks old if I’m remembering correctly. The house was quiet and dark except for the TV with the volume on low. No one was home but me and the baby and our two cats. My husband had gone out the night before and had not come home yet and I didn’t know when he would.
He had done this often since our daughter was born. He used a food poisoning incident as an excuse to ‘quit’ a job he had probably gotten fired from when I was midway through my pregnancy. At first, he was home with me most of the time. But when the baby came, he was suddenly not there more and more often. He was there the day she was born but the next morning, I waited and waited for him to come to the hospital to see us and finally had to call and demand he bring me something to eat because the food they served was inedible and I hadn’t been able to eat much over the three previous days as I was in labor the whole time.
He had been playing video games. He came with the wrong order and left almost immediately. The next day, the same thing happened. He was too busy playing video games to come see us and we were being discharged that day. I had to call and beg him to pick us up. He showed up just as I was being discharged. After we got home with our new baby, he started going out and staying out all the time.
Once she had been fed, she fell asleep on my chest as I was lying on the sofa, and in the quiet of that morning, as the sun was coming up, I realized that I didn’t love him.
I remember crying silently before going back to bed. This was not what I had envisioned when I married him and we decided to have a child. I wanted him to be a partner. Instead, I was just the person who stayed home and took care of things for him while he went out and lived his life unchanged from what it was before we married. He used our daughter as a way of controlling me and keeping me chained to him, thinking I would stay because of her no matter how he treated me. He was wrong. Two years later, I left him for good.”
Aging Frat Boy
“Every evening instead of ‘goodnight’ we would say ‘I love you’ and then quickly slumber off. For eighteen years, whether I truly felt that way or not, I said it until one night, I realized I didn’t. I quit saying it and just muttered something else or grunted some sweet non-commital sigh. He must have noticed but didn’t push it.
We got around to discussing unhappiness in our marriage. He was rough on me and the kids, a weekend binge drinker, and narcissistic or borderline commingled with bipolar attributes. He was a real piece of work that I tried to love with all my heart and soul for 18 years, through thick and thin.
But my compassion was wearing down. I told him I would do anything to reverse course: give up my successful career, move wherever might bring him greater pleasure, or into counseling with him. I just needed him to quit the drinking and the abusive behavior.
We went to counseling and quit after each first session. Each therapist truthfully revealed that the outcome of counseling might not offer the results my husband was looking for: the resumption of his unfettered married life. He only wanted to work with someone who would get me to accept him on his terms, without changes in his behavior. Even his friends would say things to me like,
‘He was like this when you married him. It is not fair for you to ask him to change.’
He was an aging frat boy who wouldn’t give up his party lifestyle. His need to be the center of attention would prevent him from altering his well-practiced patterns even after his children were born.
I remember looking at him one day, as a disconnected observer, seated behind him where he wouldn’t notice me. It was perhaps the first time I realized that this self-absorbed lecher with his middle-age, paunch-wearing, ill-fitting rocker clothing was NO LONGER attractive to me in any way. This was my moment of revelation.
‘What do you want?’ he asked dramatically. ‘You can have me inebriated and happy, or like this.’
He was miserably sober and strutted around like he had a broomstick stuck between his cheeks.
‘Neither,’ I said.
And that was that.”
New Life
“I stuck by my husband’s side during verbal and physical abuse because I was convinced I was unworthy of anything or anyone else. I also stuck by him through his substance addictions. I put up with a lot.
Only when he got mad enough to throw me on the concrete patio while 12 weeks pregnant with our child did I finally decide I was done. I didn’t decide for myself because, at that point in our marriage, I felt unlovable, worthless, and ugly. I did it for my unborn child because he deserved better. He had made no decision on who his parents would be or their circumstances, but I could decide he deserved to know love. I told my ex to get out or I would be pressing charges against him. He left, and never looked back.
My ‘oh so wonderful’ ex decided to clean our joint bank account, leaving me with 2.76 USD. I had to rebuild my life and bought a lot of the items my son would need second or third-hand. I gratefully accepted any hand-me-downs freely given until I could afford to buy new items. My family helped me when they could financially, but more than money, my family became my support network. They helped me rebuild my self-confidence and self-esteem because those had become foreign concepts to me during the duration of my marriage.
In March 2013, I found out I was having a boy and vowed I would never accept anything less than I deserved. A year later, I was divorced officially and received full physical and legal custody of my little boy with no visitation granted to his father.
There is a happy ending though. I managed to meet an amazing man with his own little ones who loves my son as his own. He’s the only father figure my son has known and they are the best of friends who do everything together.”
Deal Breaker
“Although I knew for a while I would not be able to continue my life the way it was going, there was a specific moment I remember clearly.
My ex was a womanizer and a gaslighter. Because I was so used to his behavior and was a teenager when we began dating seriously, some part of me believed he might grow out of it. Ha!
Things changed for me on the day his mother and father got into a big argument because his father was flirting or otherwise being inappropriate with other women. I never knew the entire story, but I remember my mother-in-law– a woman I admired for her strength and independence– crumbling over the discovery of her husband’s behavior. He was close to 70 years of age and STILL womanizing and acting ridiculous. These were two people I considered to be as close as my parents. They had been a pillar of strength and consistency for my ex and me, and when I watched this woman, the matriarch and glue of the family, sob and get into her car and stay at a hotel, something snapped inside my soul. That is going to be me.
I did NOT want to be the 70-year-old woman in my rocking chair wondering where my husband was. Not only was I crushed by the realization that my ex learned this behavior from his father, but I was also made painfully aware this would one day be my fate.
When the time came for me to put my foot down and draw the line in the sand for what I would no longer tolerate, no one in their family could fathom why I would leave their son because of this behavior.
Everyone has deal breakers, I explained, and this was mine. If his mother chose to stay and deal with something she felt was worth it then it was not my place to judge. However, I was the author of my own life, and being second best to his plethora of women he kept on the side to boost his ego wasn’t something I wanted any part of anymore. I remember how angry the two of them were when I finally left him. A few choice words were ‘selfish,’ ‘splitting up the family,’ and ‘insecure.’ I pushed through anyways and began to create my new life.
Although I often shake my head in awe that such a powerful woman would be reduced to telling me it’s my cross to bear if my husband cheats, I also wondered if her look of despair when I finally left her son wasn’t anger towards me, but more of a sadness that she didn’t make the same decision for herself.”
Big Mistake
“Before we married, my partner and I had an idea about how our marriage should work. But we were young: I was just 18 years old and he was 20 years old. We rushed into getting married because I didn’t want to live with my family anymore and according to the church, we could not live together before marriage.
Four months in, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. He stopped letting me have any access to money and I was not allowed to work. He said I didn’t need money because I didn’t have a license to drive myself to the store anyways. After a year in, he said I couldn’t get my license because we only had one car and he had to take it to work. He wouldn’t let me buy the things I needed and I had to ask family and friends for menstruation products for a while until the men of the church took him aside and told him he had to provide for me.
After two years in, I could no longer see my family because ‘they were a bad influence.’ After three years in, I was no longer allowed to go with him when he visited his parents about an hour from home. Next, he started disappearing for days at a time saying he was at his parent’s house. We didn’t have a home phone or cell phone so I had to trust him on that.
After four years in, I was pregnant with twins. Suddenly, I was allowed to do things again. He was taking me to his family’s house and my friends and family’s houses to show off my belly. After having the twins, everything went back to how it was before, only now I had to have diapers and formula too. We didn’t have any money which meant no heating or air conditioning and no cable or internet. I had no clue where the money was going.
When the twins were six months old, I decided I had to do something. We couldn’t go on like that so I lied and said I’d been cheating. I knew the only way he would leave was to hurt his pride and it worked. After taking him off the lease and putting the bills in my name, I found out he was only paying them except when they were in danger of being shut off. About three years later I learned the truth. He was an addict. He was a cheater. He was doing it the whole time we were married.”
The Last Straw
“A few hours after the San Francisco ’89 earthquake, I was home alone with our three-year-old daughter because I worked nights and my husband was a cabinetmaker out on a job site. I was born in San Francisco, so I’d been in many earthquakes, but this one was particularly bad. I was lying on the bed with my daughter and hanging onto the mattress for however long it lasted. I heard crashing in the living room – a large bookshelf my husband had bought had toppled over.
I got up, put my daughter under the sturdier kitchen table, and started to gather my wits. I needed to find the gas turnoff, radio, cats, and get that bookcase out of the living room as I never want to see it again. I lugged and pushed the bookcase outside of the apartment and left it on the sidewalk.
I got settled with news reports, calmed my daughter, got the neighbor to shut off the gas, and tried to figure out what to do about work. My husband, who had been working on a high floor of a new high-rise, managed to get home a few hours later and walked in mad about his bookshelf being on the sidewalk.
I felt a wave of disappointment when he walked in and realized I hadn’t once even thought about him or his welfare and I wasn’t happy to see him. That was the moment.
It wasn’t like I had just stopped caring about some really great guy. He was an addict and sometimes physically violent. He was going through a religious extremist phase which was contradicting some closeted behaviors he had and I was dealing with the ups and downs of someone at war with themselves. He also didn’t contribute to the rent or the food because he said he could live with his mother instead of me if I didn’t like it that way.”
