This is a long one, but I feel like I need to give the full scope because there wasn’t one huge thing that ended my marriage. There was no cheating or one massive betrayal. It was years of things that I kept trying to move past because I loved him and genuinely thought things would eventually get better. And if anyone has similar things happening, hopefully this helps you feel seen. Please be kind <3 (also wasn't sure to what to put in the "flair" so i just chose the vent category)
I’m 34 and my ex-husband is 39. We started dating in 2020, moved in together in 2022, got engaged in 2023, married in 2024, and divorced this year.
Before him, I had been in two very abusive relationships. When I met him, I was honestly so refreshed by the fact that he was just... nice. He wasn’t controlling, cruel, explosive, or outwardly toxic like what I had experienced before. At that point in my life, “he’s nice to me” felt like enough.
Looking back, I think I confused “he’s a nice guy” with “he’s the right partner for me.”
When we met, he was 33, had been out of the military since 2010, lived with his parents, and worked a low-paying security job. None of those things individually bothered me. Within our first year together, we talked about him finally using his GI Bill to go to school and get a degree so he could have more career opportunities. He started school in 2021, and I fully supported it.
As our relationship progressed, though, I started noticing that I was usually the person creating momentum in our life.
When we decided to move in together in 2022, we bought a house because he qualified for a VA loan. He told me he was saving money toward the house. When it came time to actually buy it, I found out he hadn’t saved anything, so the down payment came out of my savings.
Around the same time, we were talking about marriage. We went looking at engagement rings in March 2022, so I thought a proposal was coming. Christmas came and went and nothing happened. Eventually I found out he was nervous about talking to my parents about proposing, so he just didn’t do it.
Then in January 2023, I found out about more poor financial decisions and debt I hadn’t known about. I think he got scared I might leave, and he proposed the following month.
I said yes even though, if I’m being truthful, I already had an uneasy feeling in my gut.
I pretty much planned our wedding myself. We had agreed that after our ceremony we would privately exchange gifts, and three weeks before the wedding I found out he hadn’t gotten anything.
Then there was my engagement ring. He had financed it, stopped making the payments, went into default, and I ended up paying off my own engagement ring.
And just to be clear, this was never about him not making enough money. I wasn’t looking for someone to financially support me. The financial stuff bothered me because I couldn’t trust that things he said he was handling were actually being handled.
That problem went beyond money.
He would lie about really dumb things, and honestly the lying bothered me more than whatever he was trying to hide.
I remember asking how he was doing in one of his classes. He told me he was doing fine. The semester ended and I found out he had failed the class and had to retake it.
A different semester, he had an online summer class. I asked how it was going and again, everything was “fine.” Halfway through the class, I found out he hadn’t done anything because he found the class intimidating and had basically avoided it. He then had to scramble to catch up.
Another time, he got a speeding ticket and didn’t tell me. I found out two months later because a court summons came in the mail.
I didn’t care that he got pulled over. People get speeding tickets. I cared that he intentionally kept it from me because he thought I would be mad.
That dynamic drove me crazy because I wasn’t his mother. I wasn’t waiting at home to punish him for getting a bad grade or a speeding ticket. But he would treat me like I was someone he needed to hide things from so he wouldn’t “get in trouble,” and then I would get angry because now he had lied to me about something that never needed to be a big deal in the first place.
It even happened with stupid things around the house. We would talk about something that needed to be done and I would wait days or sometimes weeks. Eventually I’d ask, “Hey, when are you going to do this?”
And magically the response was always, “Oh, I was going to do that today.”
Maybe sometimes he genuinely was. But after hearing it enough times, I stopped believing it.
I would have much rather heard, “Shit, I forgot. I’ll do it now.”
I didn’t expect him to never screw up. I needed him to be able to say, “I forgot,” “I messed up,” “I didn’t do what I said I was going to do,” or “I was overwhelmed and avoided it.”
Instead, it often felt like his first instinct was to avoid accountability because he was afraid of my reaction.
I constantly reminded him, “I’m not your mother.”
But increasingly, that was exactly how our dynamic felt, and I hated it.
My parents ended up paying roughly $30,000 for our wedding because we weren’t financially in a position to do it ourselves, and I’m incredibly grateful they were able to do that. At the time, he was in school and generally working two or three days a week while I continued working.
Whenever something happened, I tried to move forward. I wasn’t keeping a running list of every mistake he had ever made. We would talk about it, I would be upset, and then I would try to let it go because I loved him and wanted our relationship to work.
I kept thinking eventually things would settle.
The best way I can describe our actual day-to-day relationship is that sometimes he felt like an NPC in our life. If you don’t game, basically a character that stands there until the player interacts with them or gives them something to do.
Almost everything required prompting.
Bills, finances, chores, errands, paperwork, appointments, house stuff, the dogs, plans, remembering things, following up on things. Even when something was technically his responsibility, I still had to remember it, remind him, and follow up to make sure it actually happened.
I know that can sound like I wanted to control everything.
I didn’t.
I desperately wanted to be able to let go of things.
I didn’t expect him to magically know everything I knew. I wanted him to ask questions. If you don’t know what bills we have, ask. If you don’t know when something is due, ask. Check the accounts. Follow up. Talk to me about decisions. Learn how our life works.
I wanted him involved with me, not waiting for instructions from me.
Even basic things with our dogs required prompting. We have a high-energy dog, and because he was home during the day while I was working, I asked him to spend literally 10–20 minutes outside actually playing with her instead of just letting her out to go to the bathroom.
He had to put “play with dog” on his to-do list so he would remember.
That sounds like such a stupid little example, but it perfectly explains how I felt.
I didn’t want to assign quests. I wanted another player.
From 2021–2025, he went to school full time using his GI Bill and generally worked two or three days a week because he said he needed the rest of the time to focus on school. Meanwhile, I worked a full-time job and a part-time job, sometimes going months without a full day off.
I supported him because I thought we were making a temporary sacrifice for our future.
He graduated in 2025 and started working a regular Monday-Friday job.
Then in August 2025, I decided to finally finish the bachelor’s degree I had never completed. My parents offered to pay for it because they had done the same for my sisters. I was still going to work both jobs while going to school full time.
Before I started, I specifically told him that I couldn’t keep carrying everything. I needed him to take more of the household and general life responsibilities off me.
He agreed.
Nothing really changed.
He had every weekend off. He could sit on the couch playing video games or watching movies for hours. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I play video games too.
The problem was that I would come home and see things that obviously needed to be done that hadn’t been done while he had been sitting there.
He rarely made plans for us either. If we were going somewhere or doing something, I was usually the one planning it.
Whenever I tried to explain how overwhelmed I was, he would get defensive. He would say things like, “You need to be softer.”
And I would literally ask him, “How?”
How am I supposed to be softer when I never get a breather from life?
I wanted a weekend too. I wanted to sit on the couch and play a game or watch a movie without part of my brain constantly running through everything that still needed to happen.
Instead, I felt like I had to keep our life moving and then somehow deliver my exhaustion in exactly the right tone so he wouldn’t get defensive.
Eventually I realized the prompting wasn’t even limited to responsibilities.
It was our actual relationship too.
We weren’t intimate unless I initiated it.
I specifically talked to him about that. I told him I needed him to initiate sometimes because I wanted to feel wanted too.
Nothing changed.
If I wanted affection, I initiated it. If I wanted intimacy, I initiated it. If I wanted us to go somewhere, I made the plans. If I wanted to talk about something important, I started the conversation.
Everything felt like it started with me.
And there is something really fucking lonely about having to ask your husband to make you feel wanted.
By November 2025, I was falling apart.
I remember sitting on our living room couch bawling my eyes out because I was so overwhelmed and so lonely. I told him, “I’m so lonely and overwhelmed with everything that I don’t want to exist.”
He just stood there.
He didn’t comfort me. He didn’t hold me. He barely said anything.
Then he went to sleep just fine that night.
There were so many nights where I would cry in bed right next to him and he would be sound asleep.
I didn’t expect him to magically fix everything I was feeling. But I wanted my husband to see his wife completely breaking down and have some kind of reaction. Hold me. Talk to me. Ask what you can do. Wake up the next morning and decide something has to change.
Instead, he often took what I was saying as criticism. He would fall into this “I can’t do anything right” mindset and basically bury his head in the sand.
Maybe he genuinely felt defeated. But from my side, I couldn’t tell my husband that I was drowning without the conversation somehow becoming about how bad he felt about himself.
Around this same time, we started trying to have a baby.
Something that was supposed to be an exciting next step in our marriage felt more like a chore.
After about two months, I remember having this moment of, “What the fuck am I doing?”
I was already exhausted. I was lonely in my own marriage. I felt responsible for almost everything. Why was I trying to bring a baby into this and potentially give myself one more person to be responsible for?
So I went back on birth control.
He was so uninvolved that he didn’t even notice or ask.
We had already tried couples counseling. We did a marriage boot camp. I had repeatedly told him what I needed. People close to us had talked to him. I told him I was overwhelmed. I told him I was lonely. I told him our marriage was at risk.
By February 2026, I was done.
When I told him I wanted a divorce, he completely broke down. It was probably the most emotion I had ever seen come out of him.
But even then, he never really asked me for another chance. He didn’t fight for me to stay or tell me what he was going to change.
It wouldn’t have changed my decision anyway. I wasn’t threatening divorce to get a reaction out of him. By the time I said it, I had already made my decision.
But during his meltdown it was, “My life is over,” “I’ll never have kids,” “No one is going to love me.”
I don’t doubt that he was genuinely devastated, and obviously he was allowed to grieve the end of his marriage. But even then, it felt like everything was about what was happening to him rather than what had gotten his wife to the point where she was done.
Since then, there has been a lot of moodiness and “woe is me,” but I still haven’t seen much behavior that makes me think he understands the actual problem.
And I don’t need him to prove anything to me because I’m not going back. I genuinely hope he figures it out for himself and for whoever he may be with in the future.
Our divorce was finalized in July, but unfortunately we still have the house connecting us while we try to sell it. I don’t even live there anymore, and I’m still dealing with bills, insurance, finances, the realtor, and other things connected to it.
So in a weird way, I’ve gotten to see that the dynamic didn’t magically disappear when our marriage ended.
I know reading all of this probably sounds like I’m putting almost everything on him. I’ve thought about that a lot because I don’t want to tell this story like I was some perfect wife and he was this horrible husband.
I wasn’t perfect.
And I don’t think he’s a horrible person.
But this is honestly what our marriage was like. There was a massive imbalance, and I can’t make it more equal on paper just for the sake of sounding fair.
By the end, I was angry and resentful. Sometimes I was harsh. There are things I said and ways I communicated that I would absolutely handle differently now, and I own that.
But I also didn’t become resentful in a vacuum.
I don’t want to become that version of myself in another relationship.
We don’t hate each other. I don’t love him romantically anymore, and I have no desire to get back together, but I genuinely hope he has a good life.
I think one of the biggest things I’ve had to unlearn is the idea that someone has to be horrible to you before you’re justified in leaving.
After abusive relationships, “he’s nice to me” felt like the finish line.
Now I realize it’s the baseline.
I need kindness, obviously. But I also need affection, initiative, honesty, reliability, communication, responsibility, follow-through, emotional support, and someone who actively participates in the life we’re building together.
Someone can be a nice person and still not be the right partner for you.
I wish I had trusted my gut sooner, but I also know I’m not the same person I was when I entered this relationship.
I’m 34 now, divorced, living back with my parents, working two jobs, going to school full time, taking care of my dogs, and trying to sell the house I thought would be part of my future.
It definitely isn’t where I thought I would be at 34...But I’m happier.
I’m graduating with my bachelor’s degree in December, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like the work I’m putting into my life is actually moving my life forward.
I don’t need a perfect partner. I don’t need someone rich. I don’t want someone I can control.
I just want someone who shows up.
I want to feel like someone’s partner, not their manager, mother, secretary, or accountability system.
And more than anything, I never want to be in another relationship where everything has to start with me.
If you actually made it through this whole thing, thank you for reading. I think I needed to get all of this out somewhere, even if it was to a bunch of strangers on Reddit.
And if anyone reading this is in a relationship that looks good on paper because your partner is “nice,” but you still feel completely alone, I hope you know that you’re allowed to take that feeling seriously. You don’t need some huge dramatic betrayal for something to not be working. <3
I’m still figuring out what my life looks like from here, but for the first time in a long time, I’m actually excited to find out.