If you've left your spouse - when did you really know you had to go?

[dellacucina]

Subject line says it all, really. How and when did you know that there was no salvaging things, no turning back, time to go it alone?

About 3 years before I actually left. I waited for all sorts of reasons. I didn't trust my young kids with him and I wasn't working.

There wasn't one big event for me.

I just reached a point where I had been through all of the phases of grief while the relationship was still going. The arguments, the constant bickering, the fact that he would whine every time he was asked to pick up a hoover, his uselessness at anything practical, his stupid career decisions - I just got sick and tired of dealing with it. I can remember sitting opposite him and having him needle and complain and generally be an arsehole, and just feeling... alm.
Because I felt nothing at all. I realised that the love had just burned away and that it was time to move on.

It has been horrific for years (arguably our entire marriage) then something started shifting/coming to a head about 6 months before. It was like my eyes started to open and I realised I didn’t have to have this as my entire life. Then one day I woke up and was just crystal clear that I had to escape. That same day I started looking for a new house to rent, got legal advice and secretly packed a suitcase under the bed. 2 weeks later I got the keys to my new house and left him the next day.

We were arguing more than we weren’t. Some days it seemed like every little thing was a battleground or could turn into one. We didn’t enjoy each other’s company most of the time. I was utterly miserable.

I just remember seeing a “memory” / “x years ago today’s” pop up on Facebook from several years previously from my “old life” before I met him and it triggered a pang for how brilliant my life had been back then. I knew I had to leave. On the spur of the moment I applied for a job back home in London. I got it, unexpectedly. That was it.

Within two months of the initial realisation that things were over, I was gone. I’ve been incredibly, brilliantly happy ever since. My life now isn’t how I expected things would work out, but it’s everything I needed.

When he said some girl Fancied him at work and I said jokingly is she prettier than me and he wouldn't answer.

Eventually he said "of course she is" and then followed that up with "she's stunning"

Straw that broke the camels back right there.

He was a cunt, battered the shit out of me many times, threatened to throw me over the bannisters, threatened anal rape, spat in my face, broke my ribs, punctured a lung, could go on and on. Then he slapped my little boy across the face and that was it, he was not going to hurt my lovely children so left him.

He made my life a misery for a while but thankfully he returned to England in 2014.

I lived away from family with exh and came home to have my 2nd baby because he refused to help unless I had another csection as he didn't want anything to change down there but also refused to take time off to help with the recovery.

Despite me living with my parents and him working and eating on camp (was in army) we were constantly broke and he kept blaming me for buying nappies and milk (was breast feeding) even though the statements showed it was him spending the money. He came to take me home once I was recovered but I couldn't face sitting next to him for 8 hours in a car. I couldn't even look at him. I had a strong feeling there were others too and he was cheating on me. I told him there and then it was over, I took the car off him (in my name and my parents had helped us with the loan which hadn't been paid because he was too busy getting drunk with the money instead of paying bills) and my mum dropped him at the bus stop to get the bus to his mums.

A week later I discovered for certain he had been cheating as he left notes with her name on it laying all over our marital home and he had used up his paternity leave on her, had taken our 2 year old to meet her, spent New Years with her when he claimed he was working and had been out drinking and sleeping around while I was in hospital.

Three years! How did you manage all that time???

That last one was for @Musti

@itsbritneybiatches that's very unkind. Was it part of a broader pattern of behaviour?

@downcasteyes how long did it take you to go from that feeling of realisation to taking decisive action and actually walking out the door?

I knew for 3 years it was over. We had a small child at the time and I didn't have anywhere to go. He wouldn't let me leave whenever I tried. So I stuck it out for years, it almost killed me. Trying to keep my family together for my child.

I saved secret money in that time, got a better job with better money and hours. So I knew if I left I could manage without him.

In the end, it didn't workout as I planned. I woke up one morning and said enough. I packed a bag, grabbed my DC and left to stay with family at first. I took nothing else from him. Signed over my home to home

15 years later it's still the best thing I did, I just wish I had done it earlier.

lifegoes mentions a good point that I should have said.

Leaving was the best thing I ever did. Literally the second after I walked out of that door, despite leaving and losing nearly everything to do it (including the house), my life was a million times better.
It is the best thing I have ever done and also wish I had done it earlier.

I knew things hadn't been good for several years, but since all marriages go through rough patches, I assumed we would come out the other side. Then I got an anonymous phone call, telling me he was cheating on me. I emailed him (he was abroad for work) and when he emailed back the next morning, he told me it was true. He then refused to come home to sort it out. The final straw was a couple of days later, when he emailed me a joke that one the secretaries at work had told. I replied telling him not to bother coming back, because I didn't want him. I removed my wedding rings (4 days after he confirmed the cheating) and packed most of his clothes into a big bag. (I did hold his kilt hostage for a while though!)

It will be 10 years ago come Tuesday and I don't regret leaving him for a moment. It was tough at first, but life is so much better.

Della- I decided to separate then and started sleeping in a separate room. I couldn't afford both the mortgage and a place of my own, so I had to stay. It was really miserable. I had no support from my family at all, so there were times when I had to sleep in my car because I didn't feel safe.

I met someone else a year later and he kindly let me move in with him at a very early stage, rent free. It took a further 2 years to sell the house because of the credit crunch and the fact that my exP deliberately flooded it, ruining the entire ground floor. (1 year of drying out and redoing).

I'm now very much mor happily married to the guy I met! :)

Yep massive pattern of previous behaviour.

He'd disappear for days in end with no contact.
Cause a row on a Wednesday then go out Thursday because of the row then come
Back Sunday night because he needed work clothes.

Ignore me and our daughter for weeks on end. Literally not one word.
Gets quite lonely when you are miles from family and friends.

Emotional and financial abuse.
Just nasty most of the time and one
Day I just woke up and thought fuck this.

I'm really happy now. It's taken me years to feel like myself again. To get back to how I was before him. My
Confidence still isn't what it was but I did the right thing leaving him.

He's a narcissist. The absolute carbon copy of one.

I started working more hours just to be away from him. We'd been sleeping in separate rooms for months and sex hadn't happened for well over a year.

He also battered me and cheated on me for years.

I went away with work. Again to get away from him and met my now DP there so I went home and told him it was over. So I got battered again.

However I stayed there for a couple of months until I got my own flat. Kept seeing DP and he moved in a year later. Then we had DD and now engaged and I couldn't be happier.

I should've left a lot earlier than I did but he had it in my head that no one else would want me and so when i met DP i knew i could do it.

He shouted at me to take my boots off, in my own home. Sounds small, but literally it was the final straw. Separated that day, amicably, have known peace of mind ever since.

I had been thinking ab out leaving him for 3 years (21 years together) as he was becoming more and more emotionally and verbally abusive. He was never happy, I was never good enough. We had daily shouting and I felt like I was constantly walking on egg shells.

One of the final straws was he had eaten (not once but twice) an egg custard tart I had saved for my youngest who was only 5 at the time. DS was distraught Daddy had eaten his cake (that I had replaced that morning and told ex). He screamed at me, shouted at me when I asked him where it had gone, denying he knew it was DS's. I was very calm, but when I looked at DS's little heart breaking I knew I couldn't continue putting us all through that. I posted on here at the time and someone wise said "What would have been a normal persons reaction to realising they had eaten the last cake" and it was like the penny dropping.

Another one a bit like PP was he was standing over me telling me how to cook and cut a shop bought pizza. And then told me not to drop any crumbs because he had swept the floor that day. I was 37 at the time and never had an issue cooking or cutting pizza in the past!!!

He could have simply apologised and gone to get a new cake. No he abused me and my son instead. There were many straws (that camel was strong) but in the end I could see the effect it was having on my two boys and I would be devestated if they ever treated a woman like that.

Thats was 2 years ago, he still causes problems but I couldnt be happier now. Looking back he totally eroded my good self esteem, made me feel like I was last in the order of needs and was a nasty bastard. I think when you know, when that penny drops, you know, its just whether you can execute the break and stay away. I dont think we could have ever worked it out, my respect went long before I finally said I was done.

that camel was strong :o mine was too!

It was 4 years between me realising I hated him, and leaving. 4! Because I had kind of cognitive dissonance and kept on trying to make it work while somehow at the same time knowing the end was inevitable, but not being ready. My youngest was v young and he was crap with the kids, so I wanted them to be older. And I was scared how he would react. This was after a long and difficult relationship, but I'd always managed to tell myself we loved each other and he wasn't really a lazy selfish twat underneath it all!

There were several "last straw" moments that just got bigger and bigger - things that I knew I couldn't come back from. The first, 4 years before the end, was looking at a photo of him and realising that the phrase "dead behind the eyes" applied to him. Another was a particular passive aggressive act that would be outing but just made me think "I can't get past that". Towards the end I was playing bingo with his PA and gaslighting behaviour and I was so desperate to end it, I promised myself it would be over the next time he lied to me. He lied within about 2 hours of me having that thought, and I told him there and then.

That would be when he manufactured a huge argument on my birthday because I did something he had told me not to do. Then he told me that I wasn't getting my birthday gift because I didn't deserve it.

Then later that day acted like nothing happened in front of family.

It took me another 6 months to get out.

When you look back and you remember things you had previously forgotten about or just blocked out it's mad.

When he refused to let me buy any sanitary towels (or to get any for me) and I had to spend the evening sitting on folded bath towels.

There were another 6 years of stuff like the above but that was the final straw.

The thing is it is possible for a nice person to be thoughtless or lazy occasionally, or have an off day or whatever. That's why you can keep telling yourself it's not the real him, or he'll improve once you can make him see why he upset you etc.

Then when the penny drops that it's a pattern of behaviour, he's not a nice person, you've been trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear all these years - and then you look at stuff that happened and think "how did I put up with that?". But I can understand why, it's because you were trying to see the best in the person or not have to admit to yourself that this person who was supposed to love you was treating you badly.

It was building for a long time but when my late father had a severe stroke and my DH did absolutely nothing to support/take care of me or our children. I came home emotionally and physically exhausted after spending 10 hours at the hospital (he refused to go) and found the kids had been dumped in front of the Xbox all day and handed a packet biscuits. He told them I’d feed them dinner when I got home whilst he lay in bed watching sports and gambling on his phone. I realised I was completely alone in our relationship. If anything bad ever happened to me or the kids we could not rely on him in any way. There were lots of other things too but I broke up with him the next week. That’s not love. X