In summary, I’ve just discovered that my husband gambles.
I’m 31, he’s 33 and I cannot stress what a happy marriage we have. We rarely argue and are both pretty low drama people. We’ve been together 12 years (met at Uni).
He always liked a ‘go’ on online gambling sites and racked up quite a bit of debt at Uni. Said he was clearing it.
Fast forward: I am finally pregnant after a long struggle to conceive and am 14 weeks pregnant. We both have well paid jobs and a nice home. Our finances have always been separate. He always said he didn’t want me to be responsible for his debt so we just paid half for everything. I have always said that I don’t like the separate finance element but we’ve never missed a bill or mortgage payment so didn’t have any obvious cause for concern.
I started having strong feelings that something wasn’t right. He asked to borrow £2,000 from me to ‘tide him over until his expenses were paid’ and I gave it to him.
Fast forward and I caught him gambling online early Saturday morning and was furious.
He’s confessed that his debts are still at circa £20k and he has been regularly gambling. I feel like my world has shattered. He’s distraught.
Looking back, I have enabled by always jumping in to pay for everything as I thought he was working hard to pay off debt (he pays about £700 per month on a consolidation loan). He won’t admit it but I suspect he gets back to square one by using a credit card to get by after wasting hundreds in a gambling session. He confessed that he does this a few times a week.
By contrast I am cautious with money and save. I always planned to take a short maternity leave (not too short, 5 months perhaps) because it was always in my mind that he we wouldn’t be able to survive without my salary and I would need to use a lot of my savings to cover our mortgage. Talking of which, I have savings of approx £25k. Just trying to paint a full picture.
Does anyone have any experience of this? What on earth do I do now? I feel utterly fraudulent being pregnant, life looking rosy on the outside when in reality, my marriage feels like it’s over this morning.