I have been married 10 years and have young children.
Although we have times we are happy, most of my marriage has been filled with conflict. The conflict usually relates to my husband’s desire to have certain things his own way, but his decisions are often emotional/irrational and he struggles to articulate the logic behind them, making him frustrated when I don’t agree with him. He has a very short fuse, he will shout and swear at me in front of the children on a regular basis, the environment has become quite toxic. I often agree with him, just to avoid an argument, but this ends up with me feeling resentful about some very poor decisions.
An example of his decision making process that has caused disruption to our lives was that we agreed to sell our BTL house. It was our old family home, but we had moved away and bought somewhere else. It held sentimental value to him due to a tree he had planted in the garden. Just before we exchanged contracts the sellers wanted to knock a few thousand off the asking price due to an issue picked up in the survey. The estate agent negotiated them down on our behalf to get the deal over the line, and then presented a solution to us. My husband was very angry with the estate agent for “lying” to the buyers during the negotiation by stating we were willing to negotiate on the price. He refused to negotiate and pulled out of the sale. The buyers were so keen to buy, they asked to pay the full asking price, again he refused to sell to them because he had a “bad feeling” about the estate agent. To my deepest regret, I went along with him to appease him/have an easy life. We put the house back on the market, received an offer, but the buyers pulled out as the market crashed. We have a new offer, but it’s about £150k less than before.
Things have come to a head recently with a disagreement we had about our current house. When we bought the house, he dug up the front garden with a view to laying new turf. He never got round to it despite me asking repeatedly over a 3 year period. He would often go out there, sift the soil, but essentially it was a pile of soil and a real eyesore. He went away for work and I paid someone to landscape the garden and lay the turf. It looks great. My husband is furious- he said he wasn’t given enough time to do it, and that I should have looked after the kids to enable him to do it. He said he would never forgive me and it escalated to “let’s get divorced then”.
My husband has many positive attributes, he is loyal, he has at times been very kind to me, he loves the children very much. But I feel there is a real conflict of personalities that make it impossible for us to function as a unit. This is the first time we have both agreed to a divorce, and I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing.