Red flags were personality issues. He worked for a bank while getting his degree & expected them to GIVE him a job in the programming department because of that...but they had no interest in him because of his GPA.....he kept saying that GPA doesn't show how intelligent or how good you will be on the job.....but I pointed out to him that it wasn't intelligence they thought it pointed to but rather attitude. He had told me that he got a bad GPA in classes he thought he was smarter than the professor in or classes he didn't like & I pointed out that no one wants to hire someone who won't do the job because they think they are smarter than the manager or goes off & does whatever they think should be done because they don't think management knows what they are talking about & that was exactly what he did with his education & in his case, low GPA was an indication of an attitude problem, not a problem with intelligence.

I was ready to bail after that & after seeing him with a few of his friends....but my mother said....oh, he'll grow up & become responsible when he has to. I thought education would make sure that no one was like my dad because I wanted to make sure I didn't marry anyone like him......so I got talked into going ahead with the marriage....not trusting my own gut feelings because I wasn't sure enough of myself.

Then I got married & the first thing he started doing was using sarcasm to put me down....I don't think he was doing it before the wedding....I just remember it happening after & it started to get to me so I started throwing it right back at him. Went on for over 6 months & I had ENOUGH....so I told him to either STOP or he could GET OUT. It took him over a year of constant reminding him for him to mostly stop......Respect NEVER GREW because there was NO seed for it to grow from.

Then he really blew it when I got pregnant. I had made it known before we got married that NOTHING was getting in my way of my degree & having a career (which was why I didn't want to have kids)....the first option out of his mouth was for me to just take 5 years off of getting my degree & go back later.....that was WAR!!!! & honestly it never stopped being war.

My good times were when we went to Italy with his job our 2nd year of marriage. We were supposed to be gone only a few weeks so I thought I would just take a couple weeks off school & catch up when I got back but we ended up being there 5 weeks.....my good times were when I was wandering around the town ALONE. Our winter skiing vacations were great because we met a older ski instructor in Jackson Hole & he taught western swing so I got to dance because H would never dance (2 left feet). My good times were because I was doing what I liked to do & H would just tag along.

Getting lost in my career for 15 years, I was able to work when H was home & be home when H was working most of the time. I worked 60-80 hour weeks to avoid being around him. I would go to our daughter's activities & sometimes he would go also...my engineering career hours were very flexible as long as I got my job done I could make my own hours.

After career ended, that was when I felt totally trapped. House was upside down so there was no way to get any money out of the marriage in a divorce & he started getting us into bad debt because with the major depression & anxiety I ended up in, I wasn't able to be in charge of the finances any longer....so he destroyed us.....there were no assets to divide only debt.......so there was no where to go & no direction to turn until my mother died. There were times when I left. Lived for a few months at the ranch where my horse was. Stayed at my mother's for awhile especially when my pdoc wouldn't let me go home after hospital stays (usually from suicide attempts).

It's important not to allow yourself to ever get to that kind of place. I should have gotten the divorce while I had my career. Hind sight is always 20/20. There were times during that time also that I was really sick from medication reactions & migraines that wouldn't stop (I still am dealing with that) so I wasn't even sure if I could physically take care of myself. H would make food at times or I would do a frozen meal.....It's a hell of a way to live (if that's what it was called)

The problem also was that anger grew & grew until at the end I was seeing red every time I had to interface. When things are bad, unless the other side is willing (or capable) to change, things ONLY get worse.

It wasn't until last year (after leaving him 7 years prior) I started reading on Asperger's & come to figure, that was what I had been dealing with all those years. It started making sense out of all the behaviors...would never go back to living with that, but at least it's helping with my anger level. It was the anger that grew during that time of just living in the same house on top of all those other years of fighting.

Tolerating it while I could get out financially created being trapped when I financially wasn't able to......just be mindful of what's going on in your marriage...looking back I see my situation more clearly...in ways that I couldn't when I was in the middle of it.