@Susulaila: Welcome to Psych Central! Glad to have you aboard! Great to see you jumping right in with a thread of your own!

I certainly have had experience with this issue. Episodes i am not proud of. I left my husband after we'd been together four years and he was running us into the poor-house. He was spending all his money and all my money on himself. He had an expensive lifestyle. Mine was a lot more reasonable but i still didn't have any money to spend on the few small-ticket items i wanted. His were all big-ticket items.

I had trusted him to budget for us because i had faith in him to take care of us but it turned out he couldn't budget his way out of a paper bag. He "forgot" $600 worth of monthly bills when he conned me into buying this expensive house. He sneered at me when i protested a few months into living in the house when it became clear we could not afford it unless i gave up everything *i* wanted. He sneered, "You signed the mortgage papers!"

Yes, i did that but based on his assurance that he had done a "budget" and was "sure we could afford it." I was making almost exactly as much money as he was, $40K in 1995, which was excellent money for a woman, just average for a man. He was taking a ride on me.

So i left him and went to a women's shelter. There was the appearance that he was hitting me and i'm ashamed to say i did nothing to correct the impression. I didn't ever SAY he was hitting me and the staff at the shelter and i just termed it "financial abuse." I hired a lawyer and started divorce proceedings. I rented a super-cute rent-controlled bachelor apartment in the heart of downtown and i was thrilled with my new home . . .

For a few weeks. Then i had an acute anxiety reaction and became convinced i couldn't sleep without him. I didn't feel safe in the apartment even tho it was an excellent and lovely place. I so wished i could have hung on there! That i would have hung in and stuck to my guns and divorced that sucker and wiped him off my boots like the dung he was!

Instead, i got all fearful and crippled with anxiety and couldn't function and went back to him but just for the purposes of survival. I think he knew i was only going back into the marriage out of medical necessity and my true feelings for him had been exposed, all my avalanche of resentment and rage at him being such a mediocre provider and such a con artist and incompetent at budgeting and taking financial advantage of a woman earning a salary way above average and he didn't respect me for going back to him.

His love for me gradually died and also he revealed four years later that he wanted kids, had always wanted kids, had married me expecting me to change my mind on kids when i had said repeatedly while we were dating, living together and engaged that i did NOT want kids.

So he asked for a divorce and there was a heck of a lot of other drama which i won't go into and as much as i disliked him i was still devastated that he was not going to stand by me and adjust our lifestyle to fit our budget, downsize into a condo. I guess he wanted the big house to fill with kids. Wha?

What a loser! So we divorced and i immediately lost my looks at the devastatingly young age of 29 years and couldn't attract a suitable man and have been alone ever since. I'm so f_ck!ng angry with him for wasting my best years, years when i was pretty and thin and sexy and able to work hard and play hard and could have found a suitable man! Now i'm fat and pot-bellied and look pregnant at 53 and grey haired (tho i dyed it purple today!) and no man will look at me. I'm considering that i might be bi and maybe should look for a woman partner.

I've been so hurt by the few men who i've seen since my divorce, brief relationships which quickly failed when the guy would say, "You gotta lose weight!" "You look like a pregnant lady!" Or mostly men just won't look at me at all, except as a fun person to chat with or a good Scrabble opponent. I'm so angry with men! Furious!

And yet i still want sex. It's beyond all reason. I don't like casual sex and i don't want to get to know any man well enough to be intimate with him and there's no one applying and men don't like women who take the initiative so i'm sure stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fifty-something women can't get laid, Leslie Jones on "Saturday Night Live" did a fun rant about this. She can't get laid either. It's not just me.

Anyways, for the young ladies out there, kick up your heels and enjoy your sex-life because it doesn't last forever!

Be well my friend!