Argument over a £1

[ForGentleBeaker]

Years ago my best friend and her husband ran into severe financial difficulties and were going to lose their home. I was pregnant, hormonal, emotional, my head was all over the place, and I desperately wanted to help them.
At that time I had no money but we owned a property in an absolute rundown part of London - my husband purchased it with a gift from his parents and I was added to the deeds after we were married.
Long story short, my attempt to help my friend went awry, and my husband had to sell the property. The property is worth an absolute fortune now. The whole area has undergone gentrification, and we missed out on the crazy London property boom.

My husband doesn't ever want to discuss and I had thought we had put it behind us. I have immense guilt.

Last week, whilst grocery shopping with him, I exchange a premium product for a store brand, and he went ballistic. He started mumbling about why I was saving pennies when I happlynlissed away so much trying to help my friend.

In the car, I was called a jumped up bitch, and he spent the journey home ranting at me for making him sell the property; being a SAHM when the children were younger; spending money; and diminishing his role and magnifying mine.

He is refusing to speak to me because he doesnt want to listen to the verbal diarrhea coming out of my mouth - his words.

I don't know where we go from here. We have 3 children, and he is an excellent father, and husband, till now. It seems he has been harbouring this resent towards me but there is nothing I can do.

No, she hasn’t provided a lot of detail that people have asked for – me included (I asked if her DH was aware that she was taking out the bank loan at the time that he did).

It’s not unusual for OPs to largely disappear when they receive such a pile on, so I’m not surprised.

Sorry but OP clearly didn’t even consider what might be going on under the surface because she was clearly shocked at how little it took for him to blow the lid and let it all out. The fact that she took his silence to mean that everything was OK and they had moved past it is quite shocking when you consider the ramifications of what she did. And to me, and quite a few other posters here, that indicates a lack of care for his feelings that makes it more likely that any attempt he made to talk about things was quickly shut down because it was too uncomfortable for OP to talk about.

And even if that wasn't the case and he didn’t want to talk about it, most people would recognise that as a red flag and try to help before he blew his top. I simply don’t believe that there weren’t other signs of building resentment during that ten years given everything he said to her in the car.

Then stop bringing it up.

The OP said that while shopping, she swapped a premium brand product for store brand product which implies that her DH had put the higher cost item in trolley and she took it out, put it back on the shelf and put the cheaper item in the trolley instead. What else could it mean?

I should imagine the OP lied to her friends/family and said the money was for her, not her 'friend'.

Sorry OP, and I'm saying this as someone who suffers from severe anxiety/depression myself, but if I was your husband the marriage would have been over the minute I had to sell my inheritance to bail you out. At the very least, your days as a SAHM would also have had to be over and you would have been required to get a job to start paying the money back.

You threw his good money after bad. How on Earth did you think your 'friend' who had already fucked up spectacularly financially was EVER going to be in the position to pay you back? And not getting a written agreement to do....that's so stupid it's staggering.

Even though you were on the deeds to the property, it wasn't just 'your' money to risk. Were you married when this loan happened? Did you even discuss/ask your husband about making the loan?

I would never be able to forgive a spouse for what you did.

It wasn't a bad choice, it was a series of bad choices. The OP's OP gives the impression she took a one off bank loan (in a moment of hormonal madness), but her subsequent, significant drip feed - after many pages of requests for more information - is that she not only gave this person her own savings but borrowed from other family and friends for this person before then having to take out the loan for herself to pay these lenders back. So it was not a loan on behalf of the friend per se. And she only confirmed it was "over 10 years ago" (which is frankly not that long an amount of time in the context of marriage and the hard yards of keeping a young family afloat) after many hours and pages of comments and questions.

Women are not immune from criticism, and her supporters here would be singing from the other hymn sheet if the sexes were reversed in this scenario. He can't win. If he'd spent the last 10 years complaining about it, he'd be an abuser. He hasn't, according to the OP, he's been an exemplary father and husband. But something (according to the OP, possibly job insecurity) has resulted in an uncharacteristic outburst. So he's an abuser anyway.

I'm not sure it matters whether the DH knew or not. Being married does not prevent one person in the couple taking out a personal loan. The husband clearly didn't want her to take it out, as per the OP's own words.

So let me get this straight. Against her DH’s wishes OP borrows what sounds like a significant amount of money from family and friends to bail out a friend who then can’t repay her, so she gets a bank loan to repay those she borrowed from, which she clearly can’t afford because her DH then has to sell an investment property to bail her out. Then it transpires that the investment property which he would otherwise still own has increased significantly in value and instead of benefiting from that he is the sole breadwinner and now possibly facing losing his job. And you think the fact that he’s finally blown his top after ten years and let it all out is The Script ? OP is lucky he’s still there ten years on - it would be marriage ending for most people.

I’m arguing the point because people are replying to me about it and only circulating around why I have an issue with it and not the actual reason.

Most of them are truthful rather than hateful.

They can be both – and they there are a great many hateful ones.

And yet it’s never crossed her mind that he’s dangerously bottling things up and that he may need therapy, as she did, to come to terms with it ?

What needs to happen for her to know he is dangerously bottling things up? And how do you know (or what suggests) he has shown these things? For example, in your marriage (if you are), what tells you that your DH is harbouring resentment?

The fact that OP is surprised at this incident triggering him indicates that she’s only ever thought about how she feels as the perpetrator, and not how he feels as the innocent party.

Again, how is she supposed to know how he feels if he doesn’t tell her? You say ‘if she is to be believed’. What indicates that she is not being truthful about that aspect?

And no, it doesn’t state that he actually wanted the premium item. But a monkey could interpret the meaning of him kicking off when OP swapped it for a cheaper version - especially when OP actually clarified what he meant. So why on earth are you still arguing the point ?

That her attempting to save money is triggering yes, but people are using it beyond that to say that it indicates 1) financial ruin that they have to ‘penny pinch’ and 2) that OP does not care what items he wants when grocery shopping, showing that she doesn’t care about what he wants in life.

The first is a a stretch because this is how the vast majority of people shop. The second is just plain made up.

Wow. Pot, kettle, black.

Indeed.

I swap products that I have selected by myself all the time. So does my DH. I don’t think that’s an alien concept – or even a remotely strange one. You pick something up, you see another and you get that instead.

Yes I agree.

Yes it is - people are far less sympathetic to self inflicted illnesses (eg you break your leg you get sympathy but if you did it blotto drunk after tequila shots the sympathy comes alongside the line you’re a nobhead). Or the person during covid who was tomb stoning off durdledoor - they got lots of very angry and negative comments that were louder than the sympathy.

I'm now wondering whether the huge favour the OP's friend did in the past was actually lending money to the OP. So the OP was, in effect, paying her back.

OP can't even answer a straight question on here.

She got into massive debt without talking to him and by burying her head in the sand.

He has brought stuff up several times and its not gone anywhere because she likely shuts it down as she views it as 'the past' and 'unchangeable'.

Now a new event has brought it to the forefront and she is STILL manipulatively twisting things (the title, it is NOT an argument over £1 she is trying to separate it and shut down the blame for her past actions).

She won't face it and he has been forced to power through because financially she has trapped him.

I would agree that building resentment often shows signs. What they were and whether he was showing them is still unknowable without observing them directly, and not through someone else’s report.

We also don’t know if the DH was building resentment for the long term. He may have gone an awfully long time not being much affected by it. Recent financial or job worries may have made it surface relatively recently. We don’t don’t know how recent or long-term his job concern is.

Yes, I said earlier it means people are less sympathetic to it. It doesn’t change the condition or diagnosis though – it just changes an outsider’s sympathy for it.

If that were the case then she wouldn't have expected the friend to repay her.

But I think it does change the prescription/advice. Pills are not going to change the situation so that needs to be handled differently and that’s the part where the op needed to show ownership and make an effort to increase family income.

What needs to happen for her to know he is dangerously bottling things up? And how do you know (or what suggests) he has shown these things? For example, in your marriage (if you are), what tells you that your DH is harbouring resentment?

OP said in an update that he had sometimes made passing reference to what happened. And as with so much else, she doesn’t go into detail as to her response to the fact that it was still on his mind. You keep going on about him not telling her how he felt, but clearly he tried and only OP knows whether she tried to go deeper, or brushed it off because it made her feel uncomfortable. The fact that ten years later he blew his lid seems to suggest the latter.

And l and many other posters here can see exactly why the incident was triggering. OP even says it herself - he mumbled that she was worried about saving pennies when she’d pissed away his inheritance without a second thought. It’s clear from OP’s posts and from what her DH said that they are not in a good financial position - evidenced by the actual action of swapping out a premium product for a generic one, and the fact that OP says he’s worried about his job. And it’s also clear that it was DH who put the premium product in the trolley - why else would OP have put it back in favour of a cheaper item ? So given that she didn’t care about what DH wanted when she pissed away his inheritance it’s not hard to see why he would think she still doesn’t care about what he wants by her actions in the supermarket. As l said, it’s not rocket science.

Come on no one is going to be unaffected by this - not a single person wouldn’t feel some resentment over this over the years and have it festering in the back of their mind. Yes I suspect the recent financial worries have brought it to the fore but no one could forgive and forget this

😆🤣😆🤣

I woke up this morning to you going on at absolutely everyone on this thread, and all I could get from it was "we don't know the DH wanted the premium item". I didn't keep bringing anything up!

I have a cramp in my finger from trying to scroll past all your posts. 🤪
Ah well less than 80 posts left until thread is closed - every cloud and that ☁️ 😶‍🌫️

No, I don’t look down on anyone who is a SAHM. I actually think it’s a very difficult job that I would not have been able to do (well). I gratefully went back to work after having both my DC to get a break! I would simply advise any woman with children to consider their long term financial future before deciding to become one.

If you are independently wealthy and have financial security then by all means, stay at home with your DC if you so desire.

If, on the other hand, you have minimal financial resources and you are completely reliant on your DH (or worse, a DP as you are not married) then it is madness to not work at all and not build up your own financial reserves and secure a pension. I hear of so many women who haven’t worked in decades saying they are not concerned because they have their DH’s income/pension to rely on in their old age etc, refusing to believe their marriage may end. Then there are the threads on here from a SAHM woman in an abusive relationship who feels she cannot leave as she does not have a penny to her names.

It’s not about thinking a SAHM is ‘less than’ but simply recognising that being one places many women in a very vulnerable situation.

I’m now going to waste one of the few remaining slots to go off topic entirely and say that I’m very much appreciating your username @LesCigaresVolants 👌