I'm going to do my best not to drip-feed information, but I'm scared of outing myself.
My marriage is utterly miserable. I married my husband when I was 21 and getting over a nervous breakdown. I'm now almost 36 with 2 kids, a 7yo and a 3yo. Our marriage has always been hard; I knew within a year of getting married that I had made a mistake, but I stuck with it partly in the hope that it would get better and partly because I felt trapped. We are part of a culture that almost entirely forbids divorce. In the direst cases of horrible physical abuse it might be deemed 'excusable' to divorce, but neither person would be allowed to remarry. I'm estranged from most of my family (history of abuse), DH didn't like me working and I dropped out of university on the strength of a false promise he made me, so I didn't have anywhere to go.
My husband isn't a bad person necessarily - he provides for us and the kids adore him - but our marriage is really unhappy and, I think, emotionally unhealthy. Women in our culture are supposed to be dependent and submissive, and that isn't me, but I feel like my husband tries to pressure me into that role. He has no faith in me in terms of day-to-day things, eg I've homeschooled our kids for years partly because our culture likes to keep kids away from 'the bad influences of the outside world' but also because DH announced that he has too much to do and he 'can't possibly do the school run on top of everything else he has to do to keep this house running'. Because I'm incompetent and can't manage to walk the kids to school. (For clarity, I do the cooking, shopping, laundry and homeschool the kids. He occasionally cleans the bathroom or washes his own work shirts.)
I hit a complete crisis point a few months ago where I was so badly burnt out I just couldn't stop crying, couldn't carry on the way things are. This has happened several times before where I've said I can't carry on but he's finally agreed to send the kids to school because I absolutely insisted I couldn't keep going. I feel like it shouldn't have had to get to that point before he would agree, but in our culture men are in charge and women are supposed to 'follow their lead' and do as we're told, even if it's half killing us.
The only life I have outside of our culture is an online qualification I'm doing, which DH agreed to to keep me happy. When I finish it in a couple of years I'll be able to get myself a reasonable job and in theory I'd be able to support myself and the kids. I wouldn't deny DH access, but I'd want the kids living primarily with me so they don't get further indoctrinated in his beliefs. At the moment we live as housemates, friends and co-parents and I wish so much that he could face facts, admit we're making each other miserable and separate willingly and continue to co-parent. That won't happen though, because divorce is forbidden, and he's so thoroughly entrenched in the rules that he can't contemplate anything outside of them. (There's going to be a row soon because a friend of mine is getting married - once he finds out she's gay I know he'll refuse to attend the wedding and won't let me take the kids.)
I've tried talking to him about things, trying to couch it gently by saying things like I feel that our culture pressures people to get married too young and too quickly, and I feel like maybe in hindsight we might have got married too quickly. His response was "I don't think we got married too quickly." Effectively shutting me down - no "it didn't feel too quick for me but maybe it was too quick for you". He won't acknowledge anything wrong with the way we did things, which is probably to be expected because he can't admit wrongdoing in general. If he does something clumsy and accidentally hurts one of the kids, I have to force an apology out of him. Likewise when I recently got him to admit that he sometimes hides food from me (he disapproves of me eating chocolate or biscuits, and yes admittedly I do comfort-eat when I'm stressed, but still...) it took about 10 minutes of arguing to get a half-hearted apology from him. His excuse for this is that he 'doesn't like making mistakes'.
There's no romance between us at all; the thought makes me cringe. It would be like kissing my brother. I do my level best to avoid him trying to touch me, because in our belief system I'm not supposed to refuse (if we refuse our husbands sex, it's then our fault if they have affairs or get addicted to porn), so I try to make it so he won't try. For context, I'm a sexual assault survivor, he knows this perfectly well, and he still does things that make me feel threatened because he 'can't be expected to remember' everything. I sleep in the 3yo's room because I can't bear to share a bed with him in case he tries to touch me. Sex has always been unpleasant because he's so rough and clumsy (and doesn't listen when I try to gently correct him - whether he can't understand or doesn't bother remembering I don't know), but the thought of it now makes me feel like I'm about to have a panic attack.
Sorry, this has turned really long and rambly - my question is basically, is it awful of me to be thinking of getting out in a few years? The kids adore their father and he is a good dad, but I don't want them growing up in this belief system. I don't want my daughter to think that this is the sort of life she has to live just because she's female. Or am I kidding myself? I often feel like it's too late, and I made this mess so it's my job to learn to live with it.