I have two children 5 and 3. My husband is the nicest guy in the world but i feel suffocated by him. He has no interests and very few friends, his life is the family. He has no ambition, no drive and is the complete opposite to me. I have dreams and although he says he supports them he makes it very hard. The passion has gone from our relationship and i try to avoid intimacy with him as much as i can (and he has realised this).
I am the main earner, but we have a lot of debt. Our household income is too high to get any benefits. I can visualise my life without him and believe it would be more rewarding. I left him once before a long long time ago before we were even married but I came back because I felt so guilty. He said all he wanted was me and he really withdrew into himself. I love him like a brother and I do not want to hurt him but I am not sure I can stay with him either as I feel that is not being fair to my dreams.
I have felt like this for a year now and done nothing about it. We don?t argue, we just exist and I want to live not exist. I also don?t know how to leave, I want the girls with me and feel it would be very hard to tell him I want to separate and then ask him to leave the home. He has no where to go and because of the debt I don?t think he could afford to go anywhere. I am stuck just feeling so low and not knowing what to do. I love him but I have not been in love with him for a long long time.
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Do i leave and how?
MGIB33 · 11/10/2011 09:43
Poor you. Please stop feeling guilty. No one has the right to tell you that you should be happy with a relationship that has x, y, z. You are an individual and you have the right to your own thoughts, desires and feelings, regardless of other people's approval. It doesn't matter if you leave him because he's boring or because he's been beating you up every weekend for the last 6 years. The point is that if you are so desperately unhappy in a relationship then it's ok to leave. That is absolutely not the same thing as 'giving up too easily' or 'walking out for no good reason', which is what I'm guessing is going round in your head. Some people can settle for boredom and stability because the stability is what they value most in a relationship. If you're not one of those people, however, it becomes truly soul-destroying in the same way someone else might feel if they discovered their H was having an affair.
If you do still love him, but the spark has just gone, is it worth trying to get marriage guidance counselling? Some organisations offer a sliding scale of fees, and if you're in quite a lot of debt then you might even get it for free. If the truth is that you want out but you're struggling to justify it (to yourself or to others), you may still find that counselling gives you some clarity on things.
It sounds like your H could do with some as well TBH. Either he's mildly depressed or he's seriously lacking in motivation and being overwhelmingly needy (He has no interests and very few friends, his life is the family. He has no ambition, no drive and He said all he wanted was me and he really withdrew into himself.). That all sounds incredibly burdensome. It's not fair of him to place all responsibility for his personal happiness on your shoulders. That's not the sign of a healthy, well-rounded individual and it could be exactly this sort of behaviour that's responsible for all the problems in your life, not just your marriage. I bet he's a head-in-the-sand type, which probably partly accounts for your debt accrual as well. Counselling may well help him with this (though it could take years to take effect and you are under no obligation to hang around while he does it. He should do it for himself, not for you).
You only get one life. And it's short. We all have dreams and ambitions we cannot fulfil for sensible, valid reasons. But if yours are achievable and the only thing holding you back is an able-bodied, fully functioning adult, then that adult is someone who is a negative influence in your life, not a positive one. You owe it to yourself (and your DC by way of example) to be true to yourself and follow your dreams.
Good luck. 
MG I don't mind you asking at all, though I'm afraid you might not like the answer, which is I divorced him. He did take it badly initially and I did worry terribly about him and feel awful guilt. But it was without doubt the absolute best thing to do for both of us and if you asked him now I'm sure he'd say the same thing (he is now happily married to someone else).
In my case it was made easier because of our extremely precarious finances. I was the only one with a steady, full-time job, whereas he drifted from one part-time job to another, sometimes with no income at all, occasionally interspersed with self-employed business ideas that always folded and resulted in debts that I had to pay off as I was the only one earning enough to do so. The final straw came when he came up with a 'wonderful business idea' that he wanted to finance with a loan using our house as security.
If I was to describe my XH I'd say he's one of life's dreamers. In another world, with the right set of circumstances, one of his dreams probably could make his fortune. The world needs dreamers - their off-the-wall ideas are sometimes the ones that turn out to be the iphones of the future, etc. The trouble is, it's bloody hard living with these people as they tend to leave the ordinary mundane things (like buying food and earning enough money to pay the mortgage and gas bill) to their partners. It's ok for a while but it is selfish to expect anyone to do this long-term.
I say all this as if my XH was some kind of creative innovator, whereas the truth was that he lacked the ambition and drive to succeed in any conventional field so was trying his luck at one of his own making. He would never come up with anything spontaneous for us to do as a recreational activity, and left to his own devices would spend all weekend reading/watching TV/playing computer games, though would always happily do whatever I wanted him to do if I asked. He wasn't a sponging 'cocklodger' type, just a hapless but highly agreeable man who had spent his whole life surrounded by strong women who had looked after him and so didn't know how to take control himself.
I guess that in the end I just got fed up of being more like his mother than his wife. As I couldn't make him change his behaviour without fundamentally changing his personality, I recognised that the best thing to do was for us to call time on our marriage. I couldn't face the thought that if something happened to me (e.g. a long-term illness), our whole lives would fall apart because he was incapable of handling it all for even the shortest period of time.
Like I say, it was difficult, but after the initial hurt and anger on his part we divorced reasonably amicably and parted on good terms. People who lack the energy to take control of their life are rarely capable of sustaining anger either, which is at least one silver lining to this particular cloud. I'd say your DH will probably react in much the same way.
Sorry for the essay.
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