I'm 28, had been with my husband for 10 years, where we were married for 9 months (we're still legally married, I left him slightly over a month ago). He was 33 when we met, and I didn't care about the age gap as I was fleeing my abusive parent's homes, and it was pretty cool to be getting attention from an adult like that.
He has always been abusive and controlling. Never cleaned and blamed it on me (I can't do the dishes without your help, you like doing laundry so I don't want to spoil your fun, you are the one that dirties the shower so you clean it, you wanted the pets so you have to clean up after them, ect).
He always told me about his castration fetish. Whatever, nbd, it's basically like getting a vasectomy right? 6 years in to our relationship he LEARNS about trans people. He at first just flat out refused to accept the idea. A year later he's pushing me to take testosterone because he thought it would be hot if my clit got bigger and I grew a beard. Being abused and manipulated my whole life by parents, Peers, partners, I am very easy to Gaslight and manipulate. I get on to hormones easy peasy because in the US all you have to do is ask a Dr for them, they get informed consent from you, and wham bam thank you ma'am you can mess up your body for life. It destroyed my wonderful singing voice. Luckily I wasn't on them for long because I'm a baby about needles, so I took 1 dose for every 10 I should have been taking, and I hated the changes my body was going through. He had magic mushrooms once and had decided that I was his gender and he was mine. He started making me wear his clothes and stole mine.
I put my foot down and stopped my hormones and took back my clothing. He told me I was delusional and that something was wrong with me, and took me to my Dr. He spoke for me, and she got me on antipsychotics, which were awful and basically made me a shell and question reality. I secretly stopped taking them. When he found out he tried to kill himself while I was away at work overnight baking. He said he definitely took enough pills to kill himself, but in the nick of time he realized he was a woman and puked it into the toilet. "Miraculously" he didn't have any liver, kidney, or stomach damage, which you would know by doing any kind of suicide research just doesn't happen if you take the proper stuff. In fact, taking things orally 99% of the time won't kill you, but you will be in and out of the hospital with comas, dialysis, liver transplants, ect.
8 years into our relationship he tells me that he's been on illegal hormones, as if I didn't notice the pills hanging around. He found all the resources from Facebook forums, what doses to take, where to buy them, how to buy them. I start calling him "she". We had planned on having our wedding that year, but he decided to postpone it so that he could "walk down the aisle as the blushing bride he always wanted to be". Whatever, the wedding was going to be in our backyard so it's not like we had lost any money. Pissed me off that he refused to look for a wedding dress. I had purchased mine from an etsy shop and he loved it so much (luckily he will never be able to fit in it) that he told me it was my job to find him one. But he wanted one that was more expensive, around $3,000. Mind you, our budget for the wedding was $2,000, and I had saved up and bought my dress at $250 so we could spend more on food and drink and music. We ended up getting legally married in the court because she told me that she would get a free name change and she needed it ASAP. Well, turns out you only get a free last name change.
9 years in and he's becoming me and distancing himself from me (and blaming me). He had been sleeping on the couch because he "doesn't feel close enough to me to sleep next to me", so I suggest we get him a bed and he can sleep in my sewing room. Which obviously means that it's ME not wanting to sleep next to him,despite every night me crying and begging him to come to bed. Nope, just got sick of it and became resigned, and was sick of him taking up the whole downstairs as his private bedroom that I wasn't allowed to. leave the upstairs till he was ready (the upstairs is literally just a master bedroom, no bathroom or anything).
He starts taking over everything that was mine, if he saw my friends give me attention for it. My pets that I take care of became his, the plants, my makeup subscriptions, my taxidermy hobby, my goth/high femme/vintage fashion pieces, even my stories of childhood magically were stories of his! He decided that he wanted to have a polyamorous relationship so he could "experience dating as a lesbian", whatever I had wanted that from the start. Plus maybe he'd find someone else and leave me. He was hesitant to let me date others. He would scream at me when I would go on dates about how unfair it was that he wasn't getting any dates and I would have more prospects than he did. Which, he only wants to date women, and they have to be OK with him having a penis. Whereas I'm a woman with a vagina, and I'm bi. My dating pool is just bigger, and it was mostly men.
I would wear dresses, he'd be jealous and steal them and whine because"I don't have any girl clothes and you have so many, it's not like you even wear this". I stopped wearing my feminine clothes and started wearing clothes that I joked as country lesbian comfy chic, which got me some attention from ladies at the breweries, so she took them because she's the real lesbian or whatever. She would get sooooo mad when women at the bar wouldn't give her the same attention that I got in the same outfit. Somehow she still had a huge ego and would leer at women and say that thwy totally wanted to have sex with her and would explain in detail about how she could tell that they "wanted her girl dick down their mouths", and would ask me if I thought she should go over and ask them to go to the bathroom with her to have sex. Because that's totally what lesbians do while they're hanging out with friends on the brewery patio.
I got a boyfriend. He slept over one day, and I started crying about how I hated my life. He offered me a place to stay, as a friend helping a friend first and foremost. At 4am I packed a small bag and we fled. I've been back at the house a few times, and he's been sorting through my clothes and choosing what he wants to keep. I've been bled dry of over $100,000 because of him and building our home. Furniture, electronics, cooking ware, decorations, rugs. He promised that once we got married we'd build a family. Now he's telling me that I'm not allowed in my own home without him being there, which lol nope not going to listen to that. I took 1 cat out of 3 and 2 plants out of 30, and he's throwing a fit telling me how unfair and unreasonable I'm being. Wait till my mom and me get the uhaul and I take his precious kitchen table that he refuses to give up (a family heirloom of mine, my great great grandfather made it by hand).