At wits end - Considering Divorce

  • Thread starter Thread starter DazedANDconfused
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
D

DazedANDconfused

Guest
New here, sorry it had to be so negative a reason to join.

Whenever we fight about something, I try to get us to talk it out. I try to explain my position and how her actions influence me. She will usually scream, break things, cuss, and threaten divorce. Quite a bit much from someone that is obsessed with the Saints and Mary. We have catholic stuff all over our house! She always has some odd way of tying this back to me. She says that I make her that way and that I’m a bad person for this.

The latest fight is over something truly bizarre. We just got back from visiting her family, out of state. I had to get back a day earlier than she was willing to come back, so she rented a car. She also needed to move more stuff from her parents house.

She calls me when she’s at a rest stop to tell me she’s an hour away and headed home via interstate. Two hours go by and she’s not home. I call, no answer. Text, no answer. I turn to panic realizing she’s called me from a rest top that’s an hour from our home and it’s two hours now! Now it’s almost 1am and I’m driving down the interstate to this rest stop looking for her. I call the police begging for help. They tell me to go home and they’ll meet me there. We wind up officially putting her on the missing persons list. At 3am she calls and says she got lost. How do you get lost on the interstate???!!!

She gets home and acts like I’m way overreacting and that it’s easy to get lost on the interstate and that her phone had Randomly stopped working while lost.

She criticizes me for smelling like scotch (you can bet I had poured some after filing a missing person report) before going to bed, refusing to talk.

Next morning, she acts like nothing was wrong. I eventually confront her and she has an episode. She winds up suggesting that the stunt was a stunt directed at me cuz she’s frustrated with me over something, in general. Feeling her threat for divorce was coming, I chose to beat her to the punch this time by asking if she’d be happy if we went our separate ways. She’s locked herself in the other room and calmly told me to leave her alone, again, acting like I’m some monster.

As an engineer, I try to find fault in myself. The only thing that I can think of is that she has become extremely religious lately (she talks incessantly about the Saints and Mary) and that I am not, and never have been. I’m very faithful, but care little for rituals. I am a convert from a non denominational background. She also refuses sex on the grounds that I don’t have a passion for the religion like she does. So despite some very personal showings of faith that she’s seen from me, Saint level stuff, she seems to have a serious issue that I’m just not into the Saints like she is. She was never ever this way until about a year ago.

I love her deeply and used to have so much fun with her. I’m at the point where I hate life and fantasize about death. I have abandoned my own family (she hates them now) and have no more friends. I left my home for a new state because she hated our home…I feel alone. I’m not the type to end things, but don’t know how I can live her anymore.
 
Hello, welcome to CAF. I’m sorry you are having troubles.

I would strongly suggest that the two of you speak with a) your priest (if she’s as Catholic as you say, she should agree to see the priest) and b) a marriage counselor. It may be that the priest can give you some recommendations for a Catholic counselor, which your wife might prefer.

If for some reason she refuses to see the priest with you and/or go to counseling with you, you should go by yourself so you can discuss this one-on-one with someone who can help you.

I will pray for you. Good luck and God bless.
 
I went one time to see her counselor. Counselor seemed to side with me, very one sided, which seemed to irk her as she changed counselors.

I guess I should blame myself some more: I have always given in and apologized knowing full well I felt to be right.

Did I marry a Nun? She has no interest in a job, or a hobby. She just watches the Catholic TV channel all day while I go to work. I come home and she’s going on and on about some Saint or Mary. Any physical advances are now taken as totally inappropriate.

Maybe she wasn’t supposed to get married? Maybe she’s supposed to be a Nun? I know it sounds funny, but could it be similar to a wife finding out her husband is gay?
 
This is not a situation where you should be looking for people to “side with you” or “side against you”. This is about working things out with your wife, if at all possible…as a team.

This situation is also not something anyone here can reasonably help you with, as it seems like something has gone very wrong in your relationship and we are only hearing one side of the story (yours).

One additional thing I forgot to mention is that, if your wife seems obsessed with things to the point of not behaving as she did before, she may be suffering from a physical or a mental disturbance. If there’s some way to get her to see a doctor, that would also be a good step to take, just to rule out an illness cause. Also, you don’t mention if she has had any stress in her life in the last year or two, such as a significant death, or having to move away from a support system of parents/ friends, etc.

Bottom line is you two need to communicate, with each other. You asking a forum full of strangers to opine on your situation is going to get you absolutely nowhere.
 
Let’s say that the next counselor seems to side with me, again? I’m not looking for anyone to side with me, against her, as it just makes things worse. Honestly I’m afraid that a Father would side against her and I’d pay dearly for it when we got home…The one that married us started to pry into things when he learned that she holds lifetime grudges, which unleashed hell on me.

We moved several states away, with her pushing me to do so, to take a job leaving everything we knew behind. When I mentioned that it might not be the great idea it seemed, she started up about how our marriage needing saving and all. All of the big changes have been for her. After moving was at this point that she went full on “Nun”.

Has anyone out there been through this before?

Edit- She sees a psychiatrist regularly. No new prescriptions to suggest a new diagnosis has been made.
 
Last edited:
Hi @DazedANDconfused,

I’m sorry about your marriage issues.
It seems to me at least, that a lot of this is just down to different communication styles between you and your wife?

The Insterstate incident, Imo (and this is just my opinion) could have been handled differently.
It’s awful to be worried that something bad has potentially happened to your wife, but our best decisions are not made when we are a panicked state.
In this circumstance perhaps it would have been better to wait till the morning before filing a missing persons report and thought of other alternative possibilities why she wasn’t home yet.
I understand that’s hard to do when in worried state.
Bad things do happen to people sometimes, but statistically they are quite rare (at least in my country).

If you are trying to have sex on a background of while there is still hard feelings between you and your wife, then to be completely honest, many women would not want to have sex under these circumstances.

Can you try to work first on your relationship to get to a better place and then focus on the sex?

If you think your wife is just focusing “one track” on religion solely, have you considered perhaps suggesting to your wife that you go to the movies together or out somewhere in the evening for a change of scenery?
 
Yup, that’s definitely crossed my mind. But I’d assume that the psychiatrist would be prescribing something else than for ADHD.

The issue is that we can’t have a discussion that involves her being wrong. I have to think up some excuse for me acting poorly. I know that’s wrong, and definitely making this worse, but I have to go to work the next day and manage a lot of people 🙂

I guess I’m really asking: At what point would you consider a marriage to have been a mistake? I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed and only see things getting stranger and more bizarre. I’m truly wondering if I took someone away that was meant to be a Nun? She’s OBSESSED with all things Saints, Mary, and Catholic stuff. She has no other interest anymore. When I mentioned this to her one day, after being rejected for some bedroom action, she told me that I needed to be like her first…

I’ll never be this into Saints and Mary and all…
 
The interstate fiasco went down like that because she called to let me know where she was and how far away she was. There is only one possible route to go at that point, and it’s 11pm 🙂 No friends or family here, we moved a few months ago.

I’ve never tried to be physical when we are at odds with each other, I’m not in that mood either. It is usually pretty spontaneous that I initiate anything anyways, and it’s usually when she’s done something suggestive, which you can imagine without me going into details 🙂

If I change the subject on her when she’s gone all Saints on me, it seems to annoy her. I may try it though.
 
Personally I still would not have filed missing person report at this stage but this is just me.

Try to meet somewhere in the middle:)
 
The issue is that we can’t have a discussion that involves her being wrong. I have to think up some excuse for me acting poorly. I know that’s wrong, and definitely making this worse
Yes, you are making it worse because you are enabling her bad behavior. If she is wrong, she needs to hear it. Calmly, politely. If she reacts with throwing things, leave the room. And tell her you will no longer listen to her while she is like that and that when she calms down you will talk.

You really need to lay your cards out on the table and stop taking responsibility for her wrongdoing. She needs to hear and deal in reality.
 
Personally I still would not have filed missing person report at this stage but this is just me.
I’m actually surprised if the police even went along with him filing it that quickly. Often, in the case of an adult who isn’t somehow “at risk” (like elderly, disabled, etc.), no signs of foul play, and it’s just a few hours of them being late, law enforcement will make you wait a day just to see if the person returns home of their own accord or checks in by phone.
 
Last edited:
To be honest, I didn’t call to file a missing persons report, I had called to see if there had been any accidents along the way. That’s what got them asking me a lot more questions which then got me a one on one with a cop. He decided that this didn’t sound okay and raised the alarms.

A year before we got married, she has gone missing. She had been arrested for DUI and hit and run. So, I’m thinking she’s had an accident or been arrested when she’s now an hour late and not answering her phone.
 
OP, how long have you been married? And was she always like this or is this something recent? (The screaming, cussing and breaking things part.)
 
5 years now. Been together for 16 years. The violent stuff stared AFTER getting married. I’d never had married her had I seen this behavior beforehand.

Or, I’d have made sure to have gotten this behavior fixed before marriage. We were very happy before marriage. She was a completely different girl.
 
Last edited:
I agree that you should go to marriage counseling, (and not to her psychiatrist.) If she won’t go, I think you should go to someone for yourself. You need to learn how to change what is going on. You need to see why you are willing to give in and take the blame. I guess you want to keep the peace, but clearly, that isn’t working.

Do you have children?
 
No kids. I will definitely try to setup something with a Catholic counselor (the last one she was seeing was one, which she stopped seeing after they sided with me).

I’m definitely a peace keeper type. But I never had to deal with this until after getting married. All of a sudden, it’s coming at me thick and hot and I’m trying to balance that with work.

It is just really feeling like marriage upset her.

Edit: To be honest, it’s not like it’s been an easy breezy life for her. She had high hopes for a career which didn’t go well for her. For me, I wound up getting pulled high up in the ranks, for no apparent (to her) reason. She reminds me that she could have been a doctor or engineer too…We also had a miscarriage right off the bat and then shortly after, her family begins having babies.

I guess all of that is probably why I’ve given her a pass on so much. But we are going into year 6 and shes changing for them worse.

She’s in her room, rosary and candles and all, and talking to family about how bad I am 😦
 
Last edited:
It sounds like a pretty bad situation. I too am an engineer and trying to employ logic against emotion never works out too well for me. I had a nice 15 minute fight with my wife two weeks ago about the difference between a dirty and a wet diaper, neither of us won but at least we now better understand what the other is thinking, hopefully improving our communication. We’ve thought about seeing a priest before to discuss marriage problems but we’ve yet to run into anything we can work out ourselves. The biggest thing we’ve run into in the past revolves around physical relationship. On here, several times I see people referencing the need to see a priest. My concern is with physical problems, I’d like to speak to someone with experience, not just the rules set forth by the church in hand. Speaking to a priest about sex seems to me kinda like talking to a transmission guy when I need my bumper painted?
 
Dern, I wish we could fight about diapers instead of how much she hates my family or how she could have been just as “successful” as me (she has no idea what it’s like being an engineer having to manage other engineers now, like herding cats sometimes).

Sometimes I wonder if being an engineer just makes this harder? As an engineer, I think deeply about issues rather than feel? I look at actions, history, context…

As for sex, there’s no way I could talk to a counselor, let alone a priest, for this. It’s too embarrassing. Makes me feel like a perv trying to corrupt someone whenever I try anything. I don’t like the Bible’s take on submitting to the Husband and “duties” and all anyways, which is what I’m afraid would be brought up.

I’d settle for some sanity, humility, and reason. Did without before, can learn to do without again if it means peace.

Maybe if the Priest/Counselor asks me in private how “it’s” going…
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top