"Bankruptcy Hell": 80 People Share The Moment They Knew Their Marriage Was Beyond Repair

Husband went off meds for 5 years ended up having a mental health crisis that cost me my career and feels like he was wronged in the whole ordeal.

She developed bipolar. Realised it couldnt be fixed once she became delusional and refused to believe she had a serious mental illness. .

He couldn't choose between me and his girlfriend so I made the decision for him.

Ex wife cheated and tried to blame me. After 11 years of dealing with her, I was done at that point. Kept my house and dog. Got 6 additional years with my dog. Recently lost my dog, he passed at age 14.

My ex was controlling and physically mistreating. He gaslighted me constantly. I spent six years being treated like a child. He wanted to drive across Africa. Since he was mostly blind and couldn't drive I had to. About 5 months into the drive we were in the democratic Republic of Congo. I was very unhealthy. Too skinny. Sleep deprived. He would look at me and say, "but you love driving." One day I had been driving for 12 hours and was exhausted. I looked over at him sleeping in the passenger seat and knew it was over. It took me three months more to actually leave him.

He had a gambling problem he wasn’t willing to admit was a problem, despite getting us into 6 figures of debt in 8 months and getting fired from his job for stealing from them (after our divorce they pressed charges against him and he had to do time for that).

On the surface, the issue was gambling and financial infidelity because he hid credit cards o didn’t know about, lied about where money went, opened secret accounts etc. but the underlying issue that was the nail on the coffin was that he wasn’t willing or ready to change and I couldn’t wait and hope and beg for some indeterminate amount of time for him to get better. I remember asking him to tell me what he had done with a specific check we had received and I kept pressing him to quit deflecting and tell the truth and he just wouldn’t. I told him “you love keeping secrets more than you love me” and he said of course that wasn’t true, but it hit me like a ton of bricks that he loved his dependency more than me. And he wasn’t ready or able to see that. For me; honesty is number 1 and your partner can do a lot of stupid stuff and if there’s honesty, I think it’s possible to forgive and work through it. But if you don’t have honesty you don’t have a relationship.

Ex blamed all of our problems on me. I was the reason the house was a mess. I was the unreasonable one who has mental health issues and needs to be medicated.

Well, I went in good faith to numerous specialists and therapists who told me otherwise. It wasn't just one opinion. When I told my ex what they told me she told me to see someone else, so I did. Same result. Our problems were still there and there wasn't some cut and dry blanket blame she could throw on me. In our next marriage counseling session she insisted in front of our therapist that I get on meds. I told her no and again cited all the specialists I'd spoken to. She said it was done and I realized I felt more relieved than upset at that point. I'm far from perfect, but I turned myself inside out in a loveless marriage trying to make things work for our kid.

3 years on I'm still occasionally distrustful of my very awesome current girlfriend because I was so accustomed to being manipulated and I'm still trying to repair my self esteem. It's something I'm constantly working on. Also, my house is clean and my ex's place is a pigsty and my ex has since alienated numerous friend groups with her antics and narcissism. Every time I speak to them, they ironically have some new variant of ADHD, PTSD, autism or whatever to justify why their behavior is so terrible and that the world should meet them halfway instead of vice versa. I would think it was hilarious except for the fact that we share a child and it's in my kid's best interests to have parents that are both thriving.

When I realized she wasn’t willing to put in the work. I asked her to go to marriage counseling and not only did she refuse, she got extremely belligerent about it.

Over the next few years I went to therapy myself and asked several more times. She didn’t agree until after she was served the divorce papers.

She decided without talking or wanting to work on things. Cheated with a co-worker of hers. She said she didn’t know why at first, but then it was “is this all there is to marriage?”…would’ve been great to have this conversation before getting married. Ultimately she wanted to do whatever she wanted, like she just turned 21.

I knew it was over when I came home (we agreed I’d leave for a few days while she “thought” about things), all of our family photos were down. It was like she had to get any of our photos out, off wall, etc. That was the first sign to me that this isn’t going to be fixed. This was before I found out about the infidelity.

In short, I always did a really good job of managing her moods...until we had kids. At that point no matter what I did or how much I contributed to the household, caring for the children, handling the bills, etc. I was failing at preventing her catastrophic thinking i.e. our 3 month old son is depressed, he's going to get lead contamination, nobody can feed him but me/why am I (her) always the one that has to feed him?! 

She overslept, stated up til 4, didnt pay the two bills she was responsible for, would scream at the top of her lungs and accused me of yelling so loudly I was going to wake the kids up when I was barely speaking above a whisper.  

BPD runs in her family but after a decade together I thought it skipped her. Now I know it just looked a little different at first. .

We decided we didn’t want kids.

One of us changed our mind.

The other didn’t.

Currently going through the divorce process now. She was cheating again... (broke up 3 years ago because of it. We got back together, had another kid, got married last year, going through the same stuff again.. Ooops. Lesson learned)

I moved out almost 3 weeks ago. She has a new boyfriend already. Already bringing our two kids around him, sleeping over at his half-a-house with them, staying at hotels overnight with them. Its wild wild stuff...

I still really dont have a reason for why shes acting this way. Shes treating me like im gone when i genuinely didnt do anything to deserve this.

Not divorced but my parents are. My dad was a serial cheater and my mom got tired of it. I think after the time she caught him on the couch with a woman while she (my mom) was at home asleep. He asked her if she would file the divorce under “irreconcilable difference” instead of adultery, and she was nice so she agreed.

There are myriad reasons to get divorced, but I think the most common one is resentment.

As soon as you start resenting your partner, the slide to divorce has begun.

My wife is my best friend and we never trash talk each other to friends or coworkers.

But it took me several failed relationships to get here.

We had a rule that if one of us was away overnight, the other had to be home before midnight for our teenage kids. I was away, he came home before midnight, and then left again about an hour later. I realized I couldn't trust him on anything after that, but wish I had left way, way before that. Nearly 18 years of marriage.

Ex-wife has traits of Borderline and Narcissistic personality disorders. Massive problems with our now adult children to this day. She says she hit a midlife crisis and picked crazy fights and would go 3 days without talking.

When we got quiet. We stopped fighting. Things were so quiet it actually seemed peaceful - we just didn’t care to fight anymore.

My husband was a true narcissist
I was struggling physically and mentally due to his grueling work schedule… I was the primary care giver of 3 children and had minimal effort at home… all this took a huge toll on my health
Weird symptoms, heart issues and he never believed me….
My gut told me to get out of this marriage or I’d be gone….

A month after our separation I found out I had metastatic cancer
And I had at least a 10 yr delay in diagnosis which now makes my prognosis much more complicated
I truly feel the stress of my marriage contributed to my cancer diagnosis.

Ex-wife is a medical professional, but she is also bipolar. She said she could handle it without medication. But that meant I was the punching bag for everything including minor inconveniences. I dealt with it for years and years, always walking on eggshells. Always trying to judge her mood above my own thoughts, wants, or needs. Once our youngest turned 18, I stopped caring as much. I just let her have her episodes and went on about my day. This pissed her off even more. She is also a narcissist (by my diagnosis). Always wanting to control everything. So I got sick and tried of her constantly needing attention but also constantly treating me like dirt. So I started cheating. Turns out there are people that will listen to you. She knew something was up when I just didn’t bother trying to feed her constant bs and found out I was cheating. So I decided to let that be what ended us. But she didn’t want it to be over cause she was losing control of me. And I didn’t care anymore.

Both entered the marriage not wanting kids. I changed along the way and wanted the option of a child. Many many other issues in the marriage but that was the big issue in the end for me.

I currently have have my 15 month old daughter sleeping beside me holding my arm and an amazing girlfriend who can always make me smile.