Thanks for person who suggested freedom programme. Perhaps the more harsh posters could gain some perspective from reading again that I was 23 years old he was nearly 40.
Yes I made poor choices and ignored red flags but I was very young and in the city away from my family. Prior to moving in with him I was a student finishing my degree - I had a nannying job lined up which paid £16,000 a year.
He did not really work much... did not have a job. Did some self employed work part time. I would go off to work every day 8.30am, he would stay in bed until midday.
He told me he had his own business but once I moved in, it became clearer that what he really did was smoke weed all the time (he hid the frequency from me before I moved in said it was occasional at parties) and made loads of phone calls but didn’t actually have a functioning business. I found this out 1 year into the relationship and after I was already in love. I was 23. I wanted to fix him. ...
I said to him before I moved in that if we were to have a baby (which he proposed to me he wanted to have babies with as soon as possible and marry me) then the lodger would need to move out.. I didn’t want to live with his lodger who was a man & share a bathroom with this other man ... I lived with housemates before in shared house, but because of the relationship I was spending 3-5 nights a week at his house - he didn’t want to come to mine very much because he was very attached to his house and only wanted to stay there. His house was nice and cosy & he had cats etc.
So I was paying £500 per month in rent in my shared house from student benefits & a small part time job but I was hardly living in that room ! Because always at his.
He did not want me to pay into mortgage or have any stake in his house. He did not want to move lodger out until just before baby was born. He did want me to be SAHM. I did too and he agreed that I would be. He knew I didn’t have a proper career yet to go back to & we couldn’t have afforded full time childcare for me to work in London on startup wage it wouldn’t be worth it - all my wages would go to childcare so I’d be working just to pay childcare for the baby. He didn’t believe in sending baby to nursery anyway he said it should be looked after by family not strangers. That was his views.
The lodger was paying the mortgage payments & then some! Mortgage payments were very low just the interest. And yeah I just shared his room with him as a roommate - yes he was my partner but he wanted me to pay proper rent something like £350 as if I was paying half of the room with him. Which would mean profit for him just going into his personal bank account. And his lodger was paying £750.
I said to him obviously I will contribute the food, bills etc but I think extra money from my job should be going to savings account for baby & stuff for both of us & our future - not just in his account.
The money I would have paid wasn’t going into mortgage, just his income so he had less pressure to work a proper job.
I wasn’t earning very much like I said £16000 a year and I wanted to save for the baby. My maternity pay paid for most of our baby stuff - clothes, cot, pram etc. He didn’t pay everything. Except the fact that he managed to get a mortgage on a 2 bed flat, with his Mother’s name and his Mother’s equity put a roof over our heads.
Yes I did have a baby with him. She is now 4. She is the most amazing little girl. I left him when she was 1 year old as he was verbally, psychologically, emotionally & physically abusive to me which started when I was pregnant. He abused me in front of her. Once the baby came he was so stressed because lodger had to move out and he had to be breadwinner - he couldn’t cope with working full time as it turned out he had bipolar & addition to weed.
Yes I learned my lesson from making bad choices when I was 23 ... I ignored red flags, I lied to myself, I wanted the fantasy love relationship that he seemed to give me at the beginning, always trying to get back to that. He made a good show of seeming stable at the beginning. And I did want a baby with him, and a life with him.. I loved him. Then he turned into Jekyll and Hyde.
When DD was 4 months old he started pressuring me to get a job and let him and his Mother look after the baby. But DD wouldn’t even take a bottle and I had not even had time to establish a career to “go back to”. He wanted me to go out to work to take pressure off him so he could be SAHD and give baby to his Mum when it got stressful.