This is the OP back again - and in response to someone's query, no, I'm not a journalist (nor a 'snobby journalist'), just an observer of life around me.
It's worrying to see so many people responding with me too stories, even though it doesn't surprise me; I just hate thinking that people out there are still having to endure this sort of thing. But I suppose immaturity, spitefulness, incompatibility and controlling behaviour will always be with us. LTB is fine if you're free to up sticks and scram, I suppose, but easier said than done if there are children in the equation, asleep upstairs while all the unpleasantness is going on down below. I myself wasn't able to LTB till the offspring had flown the coop, but I was off like a long dog when the going was good, believe me.
I love reading, not least because it can temporarily transport you away from the circumstances you're having to endure (just think of all those men who get into reading when they're in prison), so I generally read in my teabreak and lunchbreak at work, which of course can lead to accusations of antisociability or assumptions that what I really need is a member of the opposite sex to sit down with me and offer me a preferable alternative to book-reading. I've also worked alongside various men who've confessed to 'hating' books, whatever that means, as if books are things which are out to cause trouble, but I've never heard women say it, even if they don't read books themselves. At home, I used to have to put up with my ex-husband telling me to 'stop rotting your brain with that rubbish' whenever he saw me pick up a book, which basically translated as 'I want all your attention because I'm a big selfish baby,' and he wasn't above playing really loud music in a deliberate bid to destroy my concentration, as well as hiding books he knew I was reading.
As for TV-watching, he only ever watched light entertainment and would walk out of the room if I put a documentary on or a costume drama. He said I was only interested in 'educational' TV, like I was a school swot for wanting to know about the world around me, and he said all the male characters in costume drama were poofs. Sometimes he'd go and sit up in the loft on his own, doing nothing, just to make me feel bad about watching a documentary which didn't even clash with anything he wanted to see, or he'd take off his wedding ring and leave it lying around for days on end as a way of saying 'If you don't do what I want you to do, you're no wife of mine.' When we had a TV in both reception rooms and I retired to the other room to watch a programme I liked, there'd generally be a row afterwards or he'd stomp off to bed early and lie there in the dark with a newspaper over his face as a sort of 'I don't want to know you' sign.
And no, we didn't live together for years before getting married. Probably we should have.