I lost respect for my husband before I ever married him.....but I didn't realize that was what the problem was with the marriage from the beginning until I finally left after 33 years.

For me, if I don't respect someone, I can't love then in the way you need to love a husband. I can love someone as a person, but with lack of respect that he was truly as intelligent as he was bragging about being) came lack of trust (that he could take care of me or a family in the way a husband needs to care for their family), & there was just no way I could love him with all these negative feelings I had toward him. Wow do I wish I had understood this at the time I tole my mother that I didn't want to go through with the wedding. But she insisted that he was young & that he would "grow up & become responsible" with time.

So I ended up getting married anyway. My lack of trust that already existed made me question everything that he thought or wanted to do because then that we were married it didn't just effect him & I was entitled to protect myself from his stupidity. That was turned into his feeling that I was controlling....yes, I am going to control my life when I don't trust the other person to take care of me or do the right thing.......so it was an understandable feeling. The problem is that with the years, it only snowballed. Everytime I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, whatever he did ended up harming us rather than helping. On top of that, I realized that things that he heard, he really didn't understand but would claim to understand & act on that lack of understanding or I would end up acting on it & being completely wrong & end up damaging things financially on top of any relationships that we had none of. He had no intention of changing......I don't think he was capable of changing as that was just the way his mind worked & we were incompatible from the beginning. My mistake of not acting on my gut feeling but being convinced that I was wrong & that it couldn't possibly be as bad as I thought. I would make totally wrong assumptions & act accordingly based on what I was told unless I constantly double checked everything I was told.

Yes, I could have accepted living like that & just known that was the way I had to deal with him......but after so many years, my patience & ability to cope had overflowed & all I could do was overreact to everything & anything that came out of him. I realized that it was impossible for him to ever act in a way that I could trust what he said........which continued to only reinforce the fact that I couldn't respect him as a husband.......with those feelings there was no way I could even stand to be around him let alone love him as a husband.....when I couldn't stand him & didn't want to be anywhere around him.

I had given him chance after chance when I would confront him about the things that he did......but he would not only continue to do those things but continue to do others things that were even worse until I was finally able to leave (it felt like a huge escape after all those years).

It wasn't until after I left that I was able to understand these things because they were so burried under the anger & rage of my reacting to him.....by that time, there was no recovery of any sort & I had no desire to ever go back & never will even though we will never get divorced because of financial issues. The contact I continue to have with him only reinforces the fact that what he was, is & always will be who he is because he has no desire to make any changes or fix any of the problems. I have a hard time not getting suckered into believing the things he says.....things that either he doesn't listen to what people are telling him or he is incapable of understanding what he is told......whether it's his adult ADD that he was just Dx'ed with a few years ago, whether it's a malfunction in his brain, or whether he is just too lazy to listen or care about what he hears.....it doesn't matter because it ends up effecting me if I listen & then try to base any hopes on what he says. I just couldn't possibly live around that 24 hours a day.

Look at how deep seated are the things that you find you can't trust.......lack of respect goes hand in hand with lack of trust.......& I can't possibly believe that anyone can love someone in an intimate way when they can't feel close to them in any other way......but those are my feelings & probably not those of many others.

I have never been happier in my life than I am not that I am completely alone without the stress of wondering if what I am being told is a lie & whether or not I can trust what I am being told. Unfortunately, I have run into many people who have worked on my farm who are as bad if not worse than my husband & I have tried to trust.......but the more I am burned by the people around me in these issues, the more I am learning not to trust anyone or believe anything that anyone tells me.......as my feelings only end up being reinforced by the reality of the situations, it isn't my imagination that there are many people out there that aren't to be trusted, or respected to the point of letting them anywhere close to being a part of my life (or doing work for me).

One has to take the situation day by day & see if there are changes & see what is happening. Once you mistrust someone, it's almost impossible to regain complete trust, but I would imagine if you could really see a change & know the change, it would be a lot easier to rebuild the respect & the trust.

Sorry for the long reply....just seems to hard to put these things into a few words...lol.