Every time my husband and I argue he threatens to leave me. Sometimes he'll calm down, sometimes he storms off to the pub or out for the day, leaving me with the kids, sometimes he'll go to his mum's house for a couple of days a couple of times he's gone to a hotel. Where ever he goes, he always comes back and he then acts completely normally and expects me to too. He does it about twice a week. He's literally told me he's leaving me and wants a divorce hundreds of times. Then the next day he'll be telling me he loves me and planning going away for a weekend together.
Every time he says he's going I panic and get really upset and that this time he's really going. He says that he'll stop paying for everything and I'll be left with the mortgage and all the bills and I'll have to take him to court to get child maintenance.
These aren't after bad arguments. He usually does something really passive aggressive and then when I react and get upset he calls me a psycho and says he wishes he hadn't married me because he could be happier with someone who wasn't such a miserable bitch etc. He used to call me a slag and a slut a lot. He has been physically violent with me but has stopped since I called the police on him. He always says that he'll find someone else and have a happy life and a new family with them. He basically knows how to press all my buttons and I fall for it every time.
I tell him I won't accept his behaviour but I always do. In fact I beg him not to leave and then beg him to come back.
I told him that he's a bully but he says that calling someone a bully is actually being a bully and that actually it's all me and he won't put up with me. He's started accusing me of all the things he does to me and saying that I abuse him and make him feel vulnerable.
Aside from all the arguing, he also cheated on me when our baby was 8 months old. He didn't admit it but I could just tell he'd done something. I asked him and asked him and asked him, but he denied it. It got to the point where I couldn't think about anything else and I felt like I was going crazy and ended up going to the doctors and getting anti-depressants (which I never took). He only admitted it a year later. He let me think I was paranoid and crazy for a year.
In my sane mind I know he's awful, but he manages to twist everything and blame it on me so that I end up doubting myself and thinking I'm crazy. In between him storming off we get on well. Basically he's a good husband as long as I tell him he's brilliant and don't say anything negative. I never seem to learn though- he's really opinionated and disagrees with everything I say or want to do. I should just back down for an easy life but I stick up for myself. I always forget that he'll flip out, start calling me names, say horrendous things and then threaten to leave.
I don't know where this post is going but I need to get it out. I'm sitting home alone, kids are in bed and I've no idea where he is. I feel like my friends (I actually have hardly any left since I met him) must be sick of hearing it and of telling me to leave him. I don't know what's wrong with me because I know I would be so much happier away from him but then I beg him not to leave whenever he says he's going. It's like I'm brainwashed.