Source: Reddit
My husband and I have been married for 12 years and he runs an alcohol treatment center that is heavily religious in nature. His father was a pastor and when he was in school he studied first to also be a pastor and then pivoted towards a master’s degree in pastoral counseling with a focus on substance abuse treatment after he was denied a position at a church he really wanted.
One thing leads to another and in our heavily Southern Baptist area he ends up founding an organization and treatment center that incorporates our faith into sobriety. It has become a mainstay for a lot of local people and people see it as a family. My husband is a great speaker so he draws a lot of interest and can easily get people to work for him for free even though he makes a significant amount every time somebody signs up for a program. In fact, if he spent even 10 percent of his profit on payroll, these people would be making miles above the national average for their job.
I often feel astonished that people aren’t resentful that their contributions aren’t being compensated for every fraction of what it is worth. But for years I never really questioned my husband or what he did for work because I thought he was doing good and everybody at the church we go to where he speaks regularly also admires him.
However, in recent years, because our sons are now turning 10 and 8 , I have been going to community college for paralegal studies and was able to be mentored by friends in the legal profession. I had put off college for so many years because of my relationship and because my husband said I didn’t have to worry and that I could stay home and focus on the kids. I found an intellectual curiosity that I never knew I had, and definitely want to pursue a career in law.
This didn’t go over well with my husband and I started to see how dismissive he was of most of my thoughts. I also found out he was lying pretty compulsively to people regarding his childhood and other credentials. A lot of which was to either elicit sympathy or make himself seem more brave or prodigal. For example, he said that his late mom was a habitual cocaine user throughout her life who beat him, an account that everybody in his family says is not true and he also admitted was not true but that he couldn’t think of a good way to spin why he really went into the substance abuse field.
He also constantly mocks every person he’s around for work and basically says they will never amount to anything and that they are idiots for either working for free or paying through their nose to get sober.
When I married him, I married him thinking he was a great guy and that I would stick by him for life but I find every day more unbearable. At home, he is a totally different person than in public. We had hired a cleaning company and a friend of mine knew the owner. The owner said that he could have made a lot of money off saying that my husband was a client of his but that he decided it wasn’t worth it because of how my husband treated the cleaners who came over to our house. While requests by us have been met with schedule conflicts we have obviously been banned and I know that it’s because of my husband’s dismissive, irate nature.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was me going to the doctor’s with symptoms and finding out that I had a bacterial STD after missing periods and having a mysterious mild fever. But I knew that I wasn’t the one sleeping around so when I told my husband about the diagnosis he freaked out and admitted to an affair. I was heartbroken but told him he needed to tell her and her sexual partners about this and that’s when it came out that he was having numerous affairs and he didn’t want to tell anyone about it. He got tested and it turns out he was asymptomatic. I found out one of them was a long term thing but others were midnight bar flings across the country or escorts. He claimed that his life was stressful and it was just an outlet.
He agreed to wear a condom until I could trust him again and said he wanted to work this out. And that we had to or it would be public shame for both of us. For a couple days after this he was very apologetic, buying me gifts and surprising me with a planned trip to Paris. However, when he said that I should trust his expertise and refused to see an independent therapist even though there are so many virtual options that would have gotten us a reputable therapist on the other side of the country he reverted back to being dismissive and ambushed me with an impromptu sit down about our marriage where he began painting infidelity recovery in a way that it was still only on his terms.
I had had enough and we ended up sleeping in different bedrooms. He responded to this by making the concession that I can have the passcode to his phone now and that he won’t ever get mad if I ask him to verify where he is going but he also wants things to go back to normal and for me to act like this never happened.
He said we’d be ruined if we divorce and tried to bribe me by saying that I could get a job at his organization to further the career he was fighting me on. But when I still didn’t just put a smile on my face and say all is forgiven he would say that I would have a hard life if I divorced him and that my career would be unrewarding and take me nowhere.
What should I do? Our boys feel the tension but both are overawed by their father. I cannot imagine starting over and I feel like he would be very resentful of any divorce. But the duplicity of his and by extension our life is giving me whiplash.
