How could I have put up with this relationship?

[SLJ161086]

I was with my exH for over 11 years, married for 3 of those years. I have a 2 year old with him. Now divorced after finally realising he was as lousy a father as he was a partner. He had a drink problem (functioning alcoholic - hiding empty drink bottles round the house, replacing vodka with water in bottles etc), never spent money on anyone but himself, sat on his computer when he was at home, had no friends / social life, made no effort with my own friends when he ran out of excuses to come to things. He shared our finances with his mother for years and she snooped / moved money around regularly. We didn't have sex for four years either can you believe, including none on our honeymoon. I always tried to initiate it but gave up as he rejected me or never came to bed at the same time as he would be drinking / playing computer games when I wasn't around. We had talked about having a family and I did wonder how the hell it would ever happen when we hadn't had sex for 4 years :( I'm mortified just thinking about it. Guess we got lucky as I fell pregnant really quickly and we never had sex again after that. I don't know what possessed me to think this was acceptable on any level. I cry myself to sleep night after night thinking about how I wasted my life on an absolutely awful, verbally abusive (swore at me often, although only after we got married), gave me the silent treatment on a regular basis and never took responsibility for his actions. I am destroyed. Will I ever have a normal relationship? I don't know how I will ever get over this.

You poor thing, it sounds like you’ve been through a lot. You will feel better, you can have a normal, nice relationship if you want. Try not to think of it as wasted time - you have a child, and you gave your marriage your best shot. And now you’ve realised you deserve better, which is positive. I’d suggest spending some time working on you, relearning who you are, what makes you happy, and maybe try and delve into what meant your expectations of how you should be treated were so low.
Good luck - you’ve absolutely got your whole life ahead of you, you’ve got out in time to still have a great time for decades and decades, and learn a lot about what you do and don’t want from a relationship. The only way is up!

My functioning alcoholic h moved out at the weekend
Sometimes I wonder why I put up with it for so long but we are not alone in this, many many people stay too long in toxic relationships for one reason of another
I'm concentrating on myself and my baby now . Don't look back only forwards .

I never had boyfriends when I was younger, the odd date here and there but nothing ever blossomed (I don't know why tbh, I'm slim, attractive, got excellent grades at school, uni etc). No one was ever interested in me. I met him soon after uni so I think part of me thought I'd never meet anyone else because no one had ever really shown much interest in me before. Just don't know why it took me so long to throw him out after how manipulative he was - if I asked why he hid cans under the sofa for example he would say because you would go mad if you saw them in the bin.

@SLJ161086 I met mine on the rebound
I have very low self esteem. Just kept thinking I couldn't do any better and don't deserve to be happy etc . I still think i might be right on that but I can not be arsed with relationships now it's the last thing on my mind . Having ds changed a lot for me, it's all about him now
I possibly put up with it because dm was a functioning alcoholic too

Sounds like you could do with some support with building your self-esteem and recovery with what you went through. You need to get to a place where you're happy in your own life and any bloke would need to be adding lots of value to your life for you to consider him, otherwise you'll end up with another loser, user or abuser if you do start dating.

It's worth going to therapy or counselling and sort out how you're feeling, any issues with co-dependence you might have from being with an alcoholic, and ways forward, essentially how to build a good "shark cage" for the future.