I have a feeling this is going to be a bit lengthy but please read as I really need help:(
Im a guy. My wife and I married approx 4 years ago and have been together for nearly 9 years in total. She's 39 and I'm 31. We're having some problems and have been for a while and I don't know how to sort them out. I need help and opinions! I love her and I fear that if we don't get this sorted we're not going to last much longer. A lot of it is my fault but we're in a bizarre situation that has lead to some incredible stress which has lead to some bad behaviour and poor decision making.
I'm going to explain a bit of history and then I'll tie it all together so don't worry if it sounds a little random at first.
My wife has been ill for the past 20 years with Addison's Disease. She has it under control to a degree with medication but she still has good and bad periods of time. Sometimes she can feel pretty good and other times she struggles to walk, think and generally function. She has lots of food intolerance's so has to eat a squeaky clean diet. I do most of the cooking though as I enjoy it and I cook her some tasty food.
When we first met my wife had a full time job that she enjoyed. I set up my own business just after we got together. For 3 or 4 years things were going great, we had plenty of money and things were expanding nicely. I had a friend who was closing down his business and was selling some machinery that would benefit my business. One thing lead to another and after talking with my friend we decided to buy his entire business. This meant my wife left here job and came to work for 'our' business. The office was based at home. Working together took a bit of getting used to. We had quite a few arguments at first, as anyone would expect. I'm a bit of a control freak too when it comes to work and I want things done my way. Unfortunately it turned out that my wife, partly due to her illness and partly just because of how she is isn't really cut out for being self employed. She can't handle the stress. Anyways..... without getting into major details our 'friend' who sold us the business turned out to have an illness we weren't aware about and was a schizophrenic. To cut a long story short him and his wife turned out to be complete nutters and shafted us out of approx £350,000.00! He since beat up his wife, put her in hospital, he tried to commit suicide a few times and ended up in jail several times!
He also did everything he could to put us out of business as well as harassing myself, my wife and our staff. We received death threats and constant hassle day and night for 2 solid years. They also tried their best to split us up which nearly worked until we figured out that they'd been playing us off against each other.
Basically we closed down the new business and turned all of our attention back to our original business as we had acquired a new £350,000.00 debt which had to be repaid. We were so stressed and on the run up to closing the new business down my wife had cried herself to sleep for 2-3 months. Nothing was worth that and it was destroying here health as stress is one of the worst things for people who have Addison's.
When we were looking at buying this second business my wife was quite happy and up for it but when the sh*t hit the fan she got depressed and decided she never wanted to do it in the first place. I've been blamed for the disaster which I can see her point as she's not a risk taker whereas I am. We'd also remortgaged her mums house for £200,000.00 which was one of the worst things we did and I've learned my lesson there. Never borrow from friends or family.
From the above you can see that our personal and business lives are incredibly deeply interconnected which is not an ideal situation to be in.
Unfortunately, because of my wife's health being up and down a lot of the time she's not up to the job and I reckon she's built up quite a lot of anxiety and negative feelings towards the business due to the far from ideal way in which we started working together. It also doesn't help that I want things done my way. The business has done incredibly well because of the way I do things though so I feel my way is the best.
When she's feeling good and on-form she's great but when she's not she can't do here job and the business suffers. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't be so much of a problem because when I say the business 'suffers' we're still nearly taking a 3 figure salary between us but because of the debts a lot of this money gets wiped out repaying them.
Every year our business gets bigger and better but our relationship is taking it's toll because I've pretty much managed to destroy her confidence and made her feel worthless. I don't do this on purpose. It's just the pressure of having to make as much money as possible from as few a staff as possible in as shorter space of times as possible and if she does something to bugger this up I tend to get annoyed with her. If we could survive on 50K per year it'd be a piece of cake but we need to do 100k every year just to survive and pay enough of the debt back to keep the bailiffs from our doors.
Another side effect of our business problems is that our sex life has died. I've never been great at affection. It doesn't come naturally. In the early days of our relationship our sex life was great and we had amazing sex. My wife was very open minded and would try anything (no threesomes or anything, I'm not interested in sharing her). I ended up working 16 hour days 7 days a week for approx 4 years and it destroyed my sex drive as I was incredibly fatigued and had so much going on in my head 24/7 I couldn't relax and just very rarely felt up for it.
We've built a really good business with our first business. We have great staff, we do a fantastic job and our customers love us. We've worked very hard and we have an excellent reputation in our industry. We now have an abundance of work. More than we can do. In the last couple of years I've started to structure the business so that I'm now down to 5 days a week and work within normal office hours. This has made a huge difference. We structured it so that my wife doesn't have to do more than 2-3 days a week and we've actually increased our income. Unfortunately it's all still getting swallowed up by debt repayment. We live OK but we only had two holidays since we met and one of them was our wedding abroad. Now I work less it's hard to get back into the touchy feely affectionate kind of relationship we had before as it seems very awkward and alien to both of us.
I do have a plan over the next 4 years to be able to get out of our awful financial situation. It's going to take a lot more work. However our marriage isn't going to last that long. My wife is miserable, she has no confidence (mostly due to me) our sex life is nearly non existent. I don't want her feeling like this.
Another issue is that when we met, both of us said we didn't want kids. It could be difficult for her to conceive due to her illness as her hormones are all over the place but it might be possible. Especially if we got some medical help. Just recently I've ended up with a new nephew and after spending time with him my opinion about kids is changing. One of the issues making our marriage even worse at the moment is the fact i'm 31 and my wife is 39. She's 8 years older. For the last two years she's been saying she's running out of time to have kids but she has also said she doesn't want kids. I think she's getting a bit panicky because of her age and I can fully understand this. I'd be quite happy to have kids if she wanted to but due to our business and her illness I don't see how it could happen. There's no way she'd be able to get up through the night to tend to the baby and I fear that if I had to our business would suffer.
Normally I'd just say stuff the business.... Family first! If necessary I'd have been willing to ditch the business and go and get a normal job but if we ditch the business we loose everything we've got and my mother in-law becomes homeless at the age of 61! She has no pension and barely any savings. Therefore I'm absolutely screwed which ever way I do things.
I love my wife. I still find her incredibly sexy and good looking. She used to love making herself look good by keeping slim, make-up, nice sexy clothes....etc. Now she's unhappy and depressed and stressed. She's gained a little wight which means she doesn't wear any of her nice clothes and doesn't bother with her hair or make-up much. I know she's dying to be how she was previously and I'd love her to be too but the situation and my attitude has destroyed her.
At the moment she's moved out 3 days ago and is back at her mums. She's coming back tomorrow but we need to get something sorted once and for all or that's going to be it!
I hope some of you have read all of this but I could understand if you couldn't be bothered! Please help and give me your opinion.
I've even thought of posting my story up on crowd funding sites such as Kickstarter or Crowdfunder in the hope that a miracle might happen and people might take pity on us and pledge the 300k we need to get out of this mess.
If I could I'd be totally happy to declare bankruptcy, loose the house the car, everything, if it saved our marriage and allowed us to have a child and make my wife happy but I can't bare the thought of loosing my mother in-laws house too! My father in-law would be turning in his grave. That's not an option. I'm truly a decent, honest hard working guy who just wanters to do well for myself and my family but it's all gone badly wrong. What a mess.
Any opinions or advice?
Thanks in advance,
Rob