I need help. I am a very angry wife, but I don't want to be angry. I want a happy, loving peaceful relationship. I have no plan. I need a plan. Can someone help me save my marriage? Right now all I can think about is leaving to save my sanity.

My marriage has a lot of baggage (don't they all!), but no deal breakers (doesn't beat me, doesn't cheat). I feel very ungrateful like I should be able to work through everything else.

We dated for 3 years then due to my ultimatums, we became engaged. We began planning a big wedding. There were HUGE red flags every step of the way, but I turned the other cheek. Two weeks before we were to be married (in front of 250 of our closest friends and family) he told me he couldn�t do it. Again, I turned the other cheek. He said he wanted to be married to me, just not the big to-do so I said do you just want to go to a justice of the peace and get married. He said �yes� and we did.

We then had to tell our parents there wouldn�t be a wedding that we were already married. My parents asked to throw us a party which would have been our wedding reception. Dh agreed then days before said he couldn�t do it. I conceeded (again!) and we left for a 6 week long honeymoon to hopefully recover form the stress and pain.

I was raised that marriage is a commitment through good times and bad. I hated that I was starting off so bad, but I was married and that meant something to me. I stayed and tried to move on, but I was (and still am) very angry. Not so much at the event anymore, but just because this selfish behaviour and telling me what I want to hear instead of the truth has continued for 9 years in some form or another.

I now know that when I married him I knew I wasn�t going to change him so that is why I gave in to the selfishness. I now know that I did that because although I knew I wasn�t going to change him, but I genuinely thought children would and that he would be a good dad and we would have a happy family life.

Two years after we were married we started trying to have children. No luck so on to fertility treatments. I was already angry at him, now I was pissed at everyone, everything and I was on fertility drugs which make you a raving lunatic under the best circumstances. Needless to say, it was ugly. I left (for a day, for a week) many times in the first 4 years we were married.

After trying to get pg for 4 years we decided to adopt. I now have the most amazing three year old. I never imagined I could be so blessed. Before my daughter we received notice that we would be adopting a baby boy. To make a long story, short, it has taken us over three years to complete this process and my son still isn�t home. Needless to say, this is UNBELIEVABLY stressful and no one should have to withstand this kind of stress in a marriage.

Prior to my daughter coming home, dh had a very successful business. Money was never a worry for us. At the same time that my daughter came home, the bottom fell out of my husband�s business (and millions of other businesses) so here we are, still today, our first child (extremely stressful!), forclosure notice on our home (extremely stressful!) and we are waiting for our second child to come home (very stressful!)

My husband started a new business which is slowly getting better, but he works all the time. He ended the forclosure proceedings on our home, we continue to work towards bringing our son home and he parents our daughter the best he can, when he can (he takes her to school twice a week, picks her up one night a week and usually gives me at least a few hours to myself on the weekends�.today he took her to the zoo).

He said he wants to do marriage counseling and would find a counselor for us. He�s never done it. We saw the movie Fireproof and he said he would buy the book and we would work on it together. He�s never done it. He says he loves me and does not want to be apart and that this is just an over-the-top stressful time for us and we will get through it.

I am left to feel ungrateful and maybe I am, but my love bank is so totally empty. Everytime I even begin to feel the slightest bit of good will towards him, the littlest thing will happen to throw me over into a huge deficit again. I am tired, deeply and profoundly tired and I feel like I may not recover my love this time (I have recovered my love before).

I have asked him to move out. He refuses. I have the perfect job and no one in this city to turn to (my family is 4 hours away). If I were to leave, I would have to move my daughter four hours away then commute myself two days a week to my job. All this while waiting for my son to come home. My son is extremely attached to dh and I would hate to finally get our child home only to have him enter a wrecked family.

I am babbling, I know, but I am so lost, so confused, so tired. Can someone please, please help me? Thank you!
Chris

Hi Chris, welcome to Marriage Builders. It's the weekend and traffic is slower now than during the week.

You are posting on the Divorced/Divorcing forum but you haven't said that you're headed in that direction.

Are you familiar with the Marriage Builder concepts? If you aren't, click on the Most Popular Links area to the right and read up...

If you want to try to save your marriage and build it into something better than it was before, you might first ask the moderators to move this thread to the Marriage Builders 101 forum. You might also consider counseling with Steve Harley (this site's founder's son and a recognized specialist in his own right). Steve seems to have a unique knack for putting marriages on the right track even when one of the spouses isn't "on board" with it just yet.

Good luck, and hang in there.

I agree with Fred 100% on everything.
Move the post, start reading MB concepts. Read some threads. Listen to feedback on the other board - I think there are others there in similar situations.

Don't give up yet Chris. You have tried a lot of other methods to make your marriage better (mostly survival-type methods, but still...). However, MB has saved many marriages from the brink of disaster. Read Dr. Harvey's letter about how he got into saving marriages from adultery. Read about the LB's and EN's. Read the books - His Needs Her Needs.

Don't do anything just yet. After you've done some of these things, you will feel like you have at least an understanding of why you are where you are. All this may not even solve your problems, but it will lead to more sanity.

I can identify with getting married in spite of some red flags. I was purely ignorant when I got married, then as things started to pile up, I (we) continued to walk around issues until now we are in the D process. It has taken several months since finding this site just to unravel the emotional history of our Marriage. I regret we let it get this far, but at least I have a handle on the situation because I've been able to apply the MB concepts and make some sense of it all.

Hopefully it's not too late for you Chris. But you won't know until you learn everything you can here.

opt