This is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

The BBQ Pit
1

Just shitty.

It’s been a very busy week at work with a lot of needless extra work due to various snafus, some forseeable (VLAN issues) and some not (switch randomly dies in the middle of a deployment). Then I was surprised to find I was “oncall” this week and of course got woken up around 1am due to an email failure overseas, etc.

Tired. God I am fucking tired.

Had a glimmer of optimism about my marriage which has certainly had its share of troubles but then it blew up last night with my wife stomping out of the room and telling me I “better talk to a lawyer”. I fell asleep on the couch, then she woke me up around midnight trying to get me to sleep in the bed so that she can sleep on the couch. WTF? Hell if it comes to that we have multiple couches so we can both be mad and not sleep in our bedroom. That evidently makes me (more of?) an “asshole”.

Fall back asleep. 1:30am, back she comes, turns on all the lights, we continue fighting. Did I mention that I have to get up at 5am every day for work? I am chronically sleep-deprived as it is, even on a good day.

More arguing. She now doesn’t want to go to a wedding (good friend of mine getting married, I’m one of the groomsmen) that we’d already planned on attending. We have plane tickets, a hotel, car rental, etc.

Side note, she has done this before - wait until we have set something in motion and THEN go ballistic about how she didn’t want to do it in the first place (never voicing any objections, concerns, etc while we were planning things).

Money has been tight, complicated by our complete inability to have a budgetary discussion during the course of our marriage (we’ve been married just over 3 years now). We both work and have good jobs but mortgage, taxes, kid (braces, yikes), commute (she has a monstrous daily commute that costs a lot) and so many other things have just taken it over the tipping point. I’ve always been pretty financially conservative - live well within my means, max out my savings, don’t spend spuriously, etc. Now…expenses exceed income. This is not long-term survivable. I’ve had to tap into emergency funds I put aside years ago to pay some routine bills, to take care of a big tax hit we got due to changing our filing status, etc. Now I’m not even sure that I can go to my friend’s wedding, this is not the time to spend over a grand on a weekend trip to LA but I’ll feel like a complete shit if I have to cancel on my buddy days before his wedding.

And it feels like our marriage is just crumbling. We’re both good people but I guess not good for each other. Been looking at how to get divorced and thinking of consulting attorneys. If it comes to that, as I feel it is, some things will hopefully be simple to resolve (child is my stepson so no custody fight, she’s a good mom, house is mine from before we got married) but all I can think is that at best it will really suck.

Huge headache all day long, stress plus lack of sleep. Trouble focusing on work.

I just want to curl up in a ball someplace peaceful, shut out the world and not have to deal. It’s just too much.

2

um, I’m sorry to hear that. Is this your first marriage?

3

Thank you.

My first, her second. I’m 45, she’ll be 40 this year. One ongoing issue for us is that we’d both been on our own (me single, her a single mom) for years before we met and so both certainly used to our own way of doing things. That has been hard to navigate.

4

Wish I could send you a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a offer you a few days off. Won’t solve anything, I know, but damn, it would sure give you a break from this.

5

Sorry to hear of your troubles.

Divorce may be necessary, of course, but have you considered counselling before handing over more of your limited funds to attorneys?

6

We’ve been seeing a couples’ counselor every two weeks since a few months before we got married (triggered by a huge fight during wedding planning).

It takes a LOT to get me really angry; my friends know me as the calm, mellow guy. Unfortunately one thing that will do it is when my wife gets mad and lays into me. Also unfortunately my wife has a bit of a hair trigger and whatever she’s angry about, if I’m there then she directs it towards me. So the vicious cycle of she gets upset about something, starts in on me, I start to get mad and any hope of resolving things goes right out the window.

It’s awful. It’s like being in a car and you can see that you’re starting to drive it off a cliff but you can’t steer the thing back onto the road or hit the brakes.

7

I’ve certainly had thoughts along those lines. Maybe I’ll go to the wedding anyhow, I’m supposed to go down there early with another friend, we were going to hang out with the groom before the event.

8

Time to head home, pick my kid up from his afterschool program and pretend everything is okily-dokily for the next couple of hours until my wife gets home. Tonight will not be much fun I’m sure.

9

Are you hoping to salvage the marriage? Sorry to be so blunt.

10

Sorry to hear this. If you have time off from work, now would be a good time to use some. Have you guys considered counselling?

11

I hope you see my advice the way I intend, to help, not to minimize your situation. I have trouble with depression. My troubles are different than yours but I have a pretty significant set of problems. Nonetheless, my advice is: be grateful. I often think of those pioneers living on the prairie 20 or 30 miles away form the next nearest house or town. In those sod huts and flat boring plains with nothing but dirt and wind. No books (new books at least beyond the few you already read/owned), no radio, no TV, no internet, no refrigerator, no electricity, and only the same few people you see every day, day after day. Or you could be a serf in Medieval France working 12 hours a day 6 days a week. I am kind of reluctant to post this but honestly, realizing what I have to be grateful for helps me through a lot of bad days.

12

Are you busy dying?

Until you are, you DO have the ability to direct your life.

Yes, most people seem to run on autopilot - “this is how my life is treating me”.

Bullshit.

Ultimately, either you decide what you are going to do with life.

Yes I’m old and never married.

I’ve also outlived both of the “might have been”'s.

13

I don’t know at this point. During previous squabbles when divorce has come up, or she says “Why do you want to stay married to me anyhow?” I’ve told her that I do want to stay married…but I don’t want our marriage to be like this. We both need to change our behavior. I at least pledge to try. I don’t feel that I get the same in return.

We grew up in very different households. Hers was not happy. A lot of drama and some serious problems. People yelling and slamming doors and threatening to leave.

I grew up in a stable environment, always felt loved and secure. With one exception the only fights between my parents that I can recall were of the “normal” variety - somebody would be grumpy and get pissed at having to (make dinner/clean up a kid’s mess/whatever) and they’d bark at each other and sort it out and everything was OK.

I guess that it’s easy to regard how you were raised as “normal”, whatever that was, and consciously or otherwise try and recreate that.

Our family recreating hers is not something I can be part of. It’s just not. We’re always fighting, it’s uncomfortable, I know it’s not good for her son (he’s 10). I can’t do that indefinitely. It’s not like arguing about something that you can fix, it’s fighting for the sake of fighting.

If we’d had this kind of interaction in the first few dates we’d have broken up a long time ago, but I’ve always thought that being married means you’re going to have to work through problems big and small in addition to enjoying the happy times. We don’t have a lot of happy times and we don’t seem to work through the problems, of which there are many.

Maybe a lot of my stress is knowing how this has to go and not having had the guts to do it.

14

She sounds like a super fun person. Still, she is your wife. Try not to make a big decision about the marriage while you are sleep deprived and on the ragged edge. Can you take the trip without her?

15

I think a lot of your trouble is not getting enough sleep. Seriously. Sleep deprivation makes everything seem more hopeless.

I think you should do two things for sure: first, go to that wedding and have a good time and think of your friends and not your life.

And second, explain to your wife that if you can’t start getting enough sleep you are going to snap, and she can do whatever she likes the rest of the time but from whatever time to whatever time (hopefully at least 7 hours) she has to leave you alone, or else you will be leaving. Maybe not making that threat, but you really, really need to get her to stop interrupting your sleep. If you don’t things will never ever get better. I bet you could even get your doctor to prescribe that! Best of luck to you and GET SOME SLEEP. (I speak from horrible experience.)

16

To be honest, the fact that she’s 40 and doesn’t understand this yet probably, to me, means that she never will. I think the OP should address this with her, but I doubt it will change.

17

Then he should move. You can’t go without sleep for a long time and remain sane and healthy.

18

But see, I didn’t want to just come out and say that. But I agree. I mean, she MIGHT listen if he brings this up. But in reality? I’d say it’s 90% certain that nobody can peacefully live with this woman. There’s a REASON she is about to go through a 2ND divorce, hmm?

19

Trying to be the steady, unshakable pillar of stability in a marriage can get extremely weary.
I strongly suggest you spend a good long amount of time away from her, to let yourself get proper rest, and to give her some time to reflect on your absence.

20

I’m very sorry. Living in such a situation is horribly stressful.

I know how difficult it can be to make the break, but you don’t want to waste years of your life like this. If it can’t be fixed, then better to move on and find peace at least.

But I agree that making such a decision is better done after catching up on your sleep.

Best of luck to you.