I have just sent this message to my partner.
I'm 43 years old and I am fat and ugly. I know that I am ugly on the inside too.
I don’t know where to start.
I feel worthless and useless, everyday, I’m dying inside.
Whenever I try to speak to you there is always something more important or more urgent, always a phone call or a television program so I cant talk to you.
I know you work hard every day, but I’m shit at housework and I always will be and my efforts will never be good enough for you.
I will never be good enough.
You sideline me in every discussion we have, every time I speak you talk over me and every question I ask you is ignored until I repeat it over and over again.
You seem to think I want sex from you – I do – and there isn’t anything wrong with that, that is what lovers are.
But we aren’t lovers – sex has become something dispensed by you if I touch you in the right way or I do the right things – you even speak of it as a ‘reward’, when it should be an intimate way of escaping from the world and enjoying ourselves privately, together.
Parenting our children has become a battleground, you say one thing, I another, and the kids take advantage of our lack of mutual respect. I am beginning to resent you because of this.
I speak very badly to you sometimes, and you do also to me, you have been physically violent and threatening to me recently and you have tried to goad me into ‘doing something’.
I can’t live like this, and nor can you, I suspect.
I cannot go on.