Do you think that there are some lies out there that your spouse can tell that are so big and bold, there’s just no coming back from them at all?
This 35-year-old woman has been married to her 36-year-old husband for 13 years, and they have a four-year-old child together. She’s the breadwinner in their family, and she has a few certifications and advanced degrees.
Over the years, she came to grow upset over how her husband’s drive and ambition evaporated into thin air. It’s like he woke up one day and made the choice not to be her partner and put in equal effort.
She would address this with her husband, and he would promise to try for her, but that never happened. Additionally, she was left to pretty much do all of the housework alone.
“I should note, he would work when it was convenient for him. But he never really made any effort [to create] a career. I kept asking him about it, and eventually he agreed [he would] go back to school and finish up his undergrad (backstory: he dropped out of his undergrad shy of 2 classes because he ‘was embarrassed to go back for a quarter load’),” she explained.
“About 4 or 5 years ago, I found out he’s had a bunch of secret credit cards. This made me upset, and I brought it up to him. I asked him why didn’t he tell me about it? He said he was afraid I would be mad about it.”
“I told him I was more mad that he kept it a secret because now I have to fix it. I asked him about what he bought, and he said, ‘collectibles, books, music, things like that. ‘ I never noticed it because it was like 5 or 6 cards all pulling at minimum payment, until one day I went to buy coffee and we had insufficient funds.”
She generously brushed the credit card mistake off as a momentary lapse in her husband’s judgment. He came up with a plan to consolidate the credit cards, and she appreciated his initiative, even though she had to pay for his error.
As all this was going down, she was continuously following up with her husband about his college classes and how everything was working out. He would tell her all about the papers he was writing and mentioned that classes were going well.
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Her husband was supposed to graduate in May, so she brought up how they should be submitting job applications for him now that he has a degree.
Her husband responded that he had to go find his transcripts. One hour later, he confessed to her that he lied about going to college!
“Of course, ever since he came clean, he’s been cooking and cleaning and taking care of our kid to try to make up. But, this person LIED TO MY FACE for years. Even after I told him that it was important to me that he put equal weight into our relationship,” she continued.
“We had a child together because I believed he was trying to be an equal partner. I’m utterly devastated and feel this overwhelming sense of depression (Yeah, I get it. [The] job market is [trash] right now. And degrees don’t really mean a lot, but that’s kind of beside the point to me).”
“Now I want a divorce. I’m so over our relationship, and I’ve completely emotionally cut him off.”
She wants to know if she’s overreacting.
This is the kind of lie that someone can tell, and there’s just no overcoming it. A divorce is entirely reasonable. I’m really curious what he spent all of his days doing when he wasn’t actually going to college or helping out around the house.
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
