I have caused so much pain to so many people and it’s too late to fix it.

[wrongstation]

I was very insecure when I was younger and overheard my husband’s parents and siblings telling him they didn’t like me and to end our relationship.
He knew I was uncomfortable with him listening to people that were trying to persuade him to leave me all the time so he stopped contact with his family.

His friends were concerned that he didn’t speak to his family anymore and kept trying to get him to talk to them, he changed his number but his friends gave his new number to his mum even though he said not to, so he stopped seeing those friends too.
They didn’t give up and were constantly calling and texting and by this time I was pregnant and still worried that he’d listen to them and just wanted us to be left alone to be happy.
Eventually we moved away and got married so we could be together without judgment but I am a lot older now as this was 17 years ago and the reality is I isolated my husband from his family and friends because they didn’t like me and I felt threatened by them talking him out of being with me.
I literally just removed them like they were obstacles in the way of my happiness.
I hate that I did this to my lovely husband and I’ve apologised but he just thanks me for getting him away from there and says how happy he is and yes we are happy now but I can’t live with myself for all the heartbreak I’ve caused his family who don’t even know our teenage kids.
I am not insecure now I’m older and a lot more confident than I was but I know there’s no going back because his family didn’t like me to begin with and especially don’t now they think I am controlling and have isolated him from his family and friends which is 100% what I did and I am even more sorry that I did that to him and he doesn’t blame me and says he did it so we could be happy, which we are.
I know there’s no going back now, and what’s done is done but I wish I could have been stronger and it could’ve been different.
He just says leave it, we’re happy and that’s all that matters but it’s eating me up.

Where are people getting that every single person in OP's husband's life warned him about her? From the OP, it was her husband's family alone.

The reason her husband cut off his friends was because they gave his phone number to his family after he asked them not to. It's in the original post.

She literally said "I literally just removed them like they were obstacles in the way of my happiness." That is a direct quote from her OP.

Which bit of that are people missing? Or are they conveniently skipping over her admission that she did this because she's a woman?

Again, from her own words.

"the reality is I isolated my husband from his family and friends because they didn’t like me and I felt threatened by them talking him out of being with me.
I literally just removed them like they were obstacles in the way of my happiness."

You seem to have misunderstood/misread my post. I'm not talking about whether or not the OP isolated anyone. Reread my comment please.

"Where are people getting that every single person in OP's husband's life warned him about her?"

This was in response to you saying: Were they all in the wrong? All of them? Every single person in his life was wrong about her? All of them saying the same thing about her, yet they were all wrong? Here's a newsflash: if everyone else is saying the same thing, it's you that's the problem.

Every single person in his life being his parents and siblings apparently. OP did not mention anyone else saying those things.

Because from the rest of her post and reading her words in context of it, that comes across as a skewed opinion. There's little in her post to evidence it.

What she says is that she was uncomfortable and unhappy with how his family took against her and were always trying to break them up. That's pretty understandable.

What's not clear is whether she told, encouraged or coerced him into cutting contact or whether he saw how unhappy she was and chose her of his own free will.

This is a women with very low self-esteem who's written a very self-flaggelating post. It reads like she's convinced herself she's to blame.

And that may not be true.

Then why did she isolate him from his friends aswell?

I'm reading her OP that the friends were also trying to tell him to leave her, since she said "the reality is I isolated my husband from his family and friends because they didn’t like me and I felt threatened by them talking him out of being with me"

They, in the context of that sentence = his family and friends. Not just his family. Everyone in his life, apparently talking him out of being with her. Now, either she's so insecure that she's paranoid and imagined they were trying to do that, so she isolated him through her own paranoia, or, they really were all trying to talk him out of being with her and she isolated him so that they couldn't, in which case it's very likely that they could see something about her that he couldn't.

Since we know she did isolate him from his friends - she's said so in her own words - the logical conclusion is the latter.

This is a women with very low self-esteem who's written a very self-flaggelating post.

You can't possibly know that. She could equally be a manipulative abuser who's run out of options to keep her husband controlled and is starting to panic herself into "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, please don't leave me" - and her use of "I literally just removed them like they were obstacles in the way of my happiness" speaks volumes to the possibility of the latter.

That's how it reads.
Likewise you can't possibly know she's an abuser.

If you look at my previous posts, you'll see that I felt more information was needed to make a judgement one way or the other.

That's how it reads to you.
It reads a different way to me, and plenty of others on this thread. I find the phrase "I literally just removed them like they were obstacles in the way of my happiness" absolutely chilling, and I think she's getting an easy ride from some posters because she's female. If a man had posted that he'd done this to his wife, the responses would have been entirely different.

I can't imagine having such power. My husband wouldn't have cut off his family, he loved them, they were part of his life, neither would I have wanted him to.

Parents do sometimes have misgivings about their children's choice. My view is to keep quiet and let things run their course but not everyone is capable of that. My parents, my mother particularly, would have been very vocal if someone was considered unsuitable. They were extremely controlling or tried to be. Of course once I got past a certain age they couldn't do anything about it. It didn't apply to my husband, he was liked, but previous boyfriends were considered beyond the pale. I paid no attention, didn't live at home and made my own choices but I never cut my parents off.

If my husband's parents hadn't approved of me we'd have talked about it, tried to work out what the problem was. It's a very extreme reaction to cut off family unless there is abuse involved. The fact is people can be suspicious about a person but, with time, change their minds and actually get to like them. You say your husband not only cut off his family but friends too, who gave his parents your address/phone number so must have sympathised with them.

Do you know why they didn't approve of you?

it is clear in her posts that her husband seeing his wife not being accepted by the family decided to go no contact. that is his choice. he then decided to cut out his friends after they violated his boundaries by giving his number to people he clearly wanted no further contact with. imagine deciding to go no contact with your family and people you trusted felt it was okay to give them your new number

There is more to it than that, must be for such an extreme course of action.

The responses would have been different even if she hadn’t written that. This is Mumsnet, not Dadsnet.

Maybe, but are you then essentially saying that if this had been written on Dadsnet by a man, it would be OK for other men to rally around and say “well she had a free choice”? Because that’s what’s happening here in some of the responses: a woman openly admits to deliberately isolating her husband from his friends and family because she felt they were a threat to her happiness, and other women rally around to support and minimise that action because she’s a woman.

I don’t think that’s OK.

I also don’t think it necessarily would have happened the other way on a Dadsnet post; from my experience of men on forums (mixed forums, music, bands, cars etc), a lot of them seem to have far less of an issue calling out other men’s behaviour when it crosses a line into DV or control with a “nah mate, that’s not OK”.

i think what most of us see here is that her perspective is skewed. she did not isolate him he chose to step away from people that could not respect his boundaries or his choice of partner. how often do you see it here that when a guy does not back his wife from his family absolutely rightly be criticised and when a guy does grow a backbone it’s somehow the woman’s fault for him doing exactly what he should. protecting his partner

I’m not saying it’s okay and I’m not saying it’s not okay. I’m saying it’s orthogonal to how the self-flagellation should be interpreted.

Whilst families can have dysfunctional loyalties for all the friends to also not like someone enough to vocalise it is highly unusual.

At no point does the OP write what age her and her husband were when this happened They could have been very young, could have been under 18 which is when family do tend to comment.

the friends had no issues with OP. the issue DH had with his friends is that they without his consent passed his number on. you don’t pass someone’s number without their consent, especially to people they no longer want contact with

Don't know if the OP will return but I'd be interested to know if her DP has gone on to make and keep other friends.

If yes then I'd be more inclined to go along with the theory that he wanted to ditch his family and old friends. If no because the same thing happened with his new friends all telling him to leave OP because she's toxic and so they had to go then I'd be more concerned.

There's also option 3, where he maybe tried but like many adults these days struggled to make new friends but not because of OPs influence. That's neutral I guess.

I don’t think it is self flagellation. I am not reading it that way.

> I don’t think it is self flagellation. I am not reading it that way.

“I hate that I did this to my lovely husband”
“I wish I could have been stronger and it could’ve been different”
”it’s eating me up”

Your cherry-picking is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that people are projecting here.

I’m not cherry picking at all. She’s following a script, almost to the letter.

that is because she is writing seeing herself through a unreliable lense that has been skewed