Husband suddenly not interested in being a parent or spouse

[Anonymous]

It may simply be depression/ burned out. Work sucks and is stressful and a grind. Home life with three kids is just hard labor. Everything just sucks and the guy is like:

“what the hell did I do to myself by getting so locked into the rat race, so completely fried by this life? What a disaster. I’m just scrapping to get though each miserable day and everything sucks with no respite.”

At least that’s how I feel. I’m not cheating. I would like to live in a tiny house and not work and just calm down without kids around me. I have kids and a spouse. It is a grind. I’m counting the days until I can retire and kids are grown.

It could be this.

[Anonymous]

No one suggested begging, persuading, or convincing.
But it’s certainly worth OP taking stock of how she has valued or possibly de-valued her husband. Married men who are happy in their relationships rarely cheat. Men who are feeling isolated, ignored, and disconnected from their spouses are much more likely to shut down opportunities to stray.
OP can deny and ignore that or acknowledge it and take inventory.

The bolded is categorically false, and you repeatedly post it. Maybe find a little evidence to back up this ridiculous claim before you post it as fact? Studies that find the majority of men who cheat ALSO claim to be happy in their marriage have been cited many times in this forum. More often than not, men especially cheat because they want to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, I am really sorry. This would be very confusing and distressing for anyone. And I feel for your kids.

My thoughts are the following:

stop the therapy. See your own therapist if you dont have one.

see a divorce lawyer or two. THis is looming so best to start getting prepared.

how do you think the new job is going? Possible he is having a rough time/going to get fired?

In terms of brain tumor: here I would reach out to any friends he has or mutual friends or family, just investigate to see if they've had any issues. If he's only being hostile to you, then my sense is affair. If others have experienced hostility or strange and uncharacteristic behavior, then insist on going to the doctor.

as for his rejection of the kids: here's my thought based on my own experience.

my dad was a very involved dad (in fact my mom was basically absent/emotionally crippled my whole childhood so my dad was my primary parent). But when he started having an affair he pulled way back/became a jerk. Essentially it was because he was feeling guilty and then angry at feeling guilty and we (my mother and us kids) were the "reason" he felt guilty/angry. I also think he was realizing how inconvenient it was to be a father/husband, how much he ached for freedom and started to rewrite his history about how much of his own life he had sacrificed for his family, so having an affair was also an "out" for him. He essentially disappeared for like a year, once the affair was outed, and never re-engaged as a parent/

This. I’d reach out to your circle. Have a friend’s husband invite him over for a guys night. Get their take.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone managed to find a position of power in a situation like this without divorcing? I don’t mean repair the relationship, but just taking power through some way other than initiating separation.

Read about chummy lady 180

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really rather him just leave me.

He probably is having an affair despite denying it. I just don’t get it.

He can go and be happy with wherever. I’ll be fine.

But he cannot do this to our kids. This is the man who would turn down buddy trips to take his kids camping.

Who is this man?

I told my ex that he could leave and I meant it. And I didn’t say it in a shrill historical tone. I sat him down, and I said sometimes feelings in relationships change. You may decide you want another choice in your life, but I also need to understand the situation so I can make my own choices. I think you are seeing someone else and it is not fair to make me live this way. I will be fine and we can separate. But I need to understand what’s happening here.

He lied through his teeth until I found the text messages.

I don’t know OP. Why do they do this? It’s one thing to have the affair, it’s another to deny someone else choices in life while they explore whatever fantasy is happening. It was a level of selfishness that made me understand that no matter what happened, he’d leave if things got too tough (me getting sick later in life for example). I could have recovered from the affair. The willingness to keep me in a painful place while he continued the affair was as another story. I left, and to this day he asks me to come back. Some people truly cannot comprehend that some mistakes can’t be undone.

Oh my god. Almost the exact same situation happened to me, down to the dialog. Crazy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It may simply be depression/ burned out. Work sucks and is stressful and a grind. Home life with three kids is just hard labor. Everything just sucks and the guy is like:

“what the hell did I do to myself by getting so locked into the rat race, so completely fried by this life? What a disaster. I’m just scrapping to get though each miserable day and everything sucks with no respite.”

At least that’s how I feel. I’m not cheating. I would like to live in a tiny house and not work and just calm down without kids around me. I have kids and a spouse. It is a grind. I’m counting the days until I can retire and kids are grown.

It could be this.

But do you work out every morning like OP's husband?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:BTDT, OP. We were married 15 years with two kids. He had a massive midlife crisis. He didn’t have an affair but did a lot of other cliche things. He went from being dutiful and on all the time to not giving a crap and talking about his new needs. He was extremely angry and hostile. Basically, under stress his childhood trauma and other issues came out, and he cracked.

I agree that you need to mentally prepare for divorce. Get a lawyer and a therapist. He is no longer your partner. We wasted time with several couples therapists and though I wouldn’t have done it differently (had to feel I tried everything) it was pointless.

My theory is that he was always pretty self centered and for a short time identified his “self” with having a family/ being a husband, but when he realized it really involved un-selfing and being there for others he couldn’t hold it together.

We had other issues, too. He had been in therapy for years with anxiety/OCD/ attachment issues. Big jealousy about my career and friends. I think he never grew up.

Nothing your said here is about "we" at all but it is all about your evaluation of his character and core personhood. You think he is an awful creation of human being but you demand him to "love me I need it!". Those of us on your husband's end of this know what this is like, someone telling you that you are crap and in the same breath telling you that you don't love them enough.

PP here. You’re projecting. The anger and hostility, along with the midlife crisis, was escalating for several years. He blamed me for everything he was unhappy for in his life. It culminated in a major mental health break. He accused me of trying to persecute him, kill him, control him, had hallucinations of me chasing him when I wasn’t. There was no “we” by the end. It was all eclipsed by the symptoms of whatever trauma and issues he had, and this is why several of the therapists we saw just told me to get out of the relationship.

What’s funny is he would say things like you’re saying. It was part of the symptoms consistent with a personality disorder. I never said anything about needing him to love me. That’s all your stuff, you need to work on it instead of dumping it on strangers.

My point to OP was just that sometimes people do radically change or reveal things inside that they no longer have the capacity to hide under stress. Her DH’s issue doesn’t sound as severe as my XH’s but there is almost certainly a mix of mental health/ childhood and relational trauma/ midlife crisis going on when relationships start to break in this fashion. It’s good to be realistic about where it might be headed and the fact that you cannot control what meaning someone else wants to make of their life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It may simply be depression/ burned out. Work sucks and is stressful and a grind. Home life with three kids is just hard labor. Everything just sucks and the guy is like:

“what the hell did I do to myself by getting so locked into the rat race, so completely fried by this life? What a disaster. I’m just scrapping to get though each miserable day and everything sucks with no respite.”

At least that’s how I feel. I’m not cheating. I would like to live in a tiny house and not work and just calm down without kids around me. I have kids and a spouse. It is a grind. I’m counting the days until I can retire and kids are grown.

It could be this.

But do you work out every morning like OP's husband?

Good point. No. I have not read all 9 pages. I am definitely genuinely depressed. So don’t do that. Also, sleeping in basement is total BS if you are just burned out. I’m burned out and the choice is either suck it up and eat with life, or divorce for real. Basement/neithe is not acceptable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really rather him just leave me.

He probably is having an affair despite denying it. I just don’t get it.

He can go and be happy with wherever. I’ll be fine.

But he cannot do this to our kids. This is the man who would turn down buddy trips to take his kids camping.

Who is this man?

And what is your excuse? Why are you waiting for him to make the decision? Your shock can only last so long- it sounds like it's been a month now. What exactly is going on down in the basement? Others have suggested checking out his phone/laptop/you could install a nanny cam in the basement etc etc. You have literally done nothing. Please make a plan. Make sure you collect evidence or protect yourself financially.

At your next therapy appt, state the obvious- that you are worried something organic/physical is going on and you want to rule that out before giving up. But if he isn't going to follow up and rule out issues/he doesn't care, then the next topic is the children- why he doesn't even care that he doesn't care about the kids any longer. What have his responses been with the therapist on that topic? Honestly this would take up all my time in therapy in this case- discussing the impact on the kids of suddenly being ignored and disengaged. If he stays silent and your therapist continues to state the obvious- then you have to make the choice as the only engaged member of the relationship-Then you leave.

Liberate yourself. Stop waiting for liberation.

X1000
Do something!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I am really sorry. This would be very confusing and distressing for anyone. And I feel for your kids.

My thoughts are the following:

stop the therapy. See your own therapist if you dont have one.

see a divorce lawyer or two. THis is looming so best to start getting prepared.

how do you think the new job is going? Possible he is having a rough time/going to get fired?

In terms of brain tumor: here I would reach out to any friends he has or mutual friends or family, just investigate to see if they've had any issues. If he's only being hostile to you, then my sense is affair. If others have experienced hostility or strange and uncharacteristic behavior, then insist on going to the doctor.

as for his rejection of the kids: here's my thought based on my own experience.

my dad was a very involved dad (in fact my mom was basically absent/emotionally crippled my whole childhood so my dad was my primary parent). But when he started having an affair he pulled way back/became a jerk. Essentially it was because he was feeling guilty and then angry at feeling guilty and we (my mother and us kids) were the "reason" he felt guilty/angry. I also think he was realizing how inconvenient it was to be a father/husband, how much he ached for freedom and started to rewrite his history about how much of his own life he had sacrificed for his family, so having an affair was also an "out" for him. He essentially disappeared for like a year, once the affair was outed, and never re-engaged as a parent/

This. I’d reach out to your circle. Have a friend’s husband invite him over for a guys night. Get their take.

+1 my dad had a benign pituitary tumor and his behavior (anger mostly) was evident in all areas of his life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know how often you've used this forum in the past, OP, but be aware that comments here will always skew VERY heavily in favor of "He's cheating." And people will assert with 100 percent certainty that they know your DH is cheating when they cannot know that. I am not saying he's not cheating. I'm saying that not every problem like you describe is automatically rooted in cheating. This site pushes a narrative that it's always, always cheating. Just know that, and consider other causes,once you rule cheating out.

This directly contradicts what the person who posted about her husband's phone being paused in odd places said. She came back recently to say that her husband was cheating and too many DCUMers tried to come up with innocent or non-cheating explanations.

That person you're citing is not OP. I am addressing OP. The intense insistence on DCUM that what OP describes simply must must must be cheating, and can only be cheating, could cause her to dismiss other possibilities. I was clear: Yes this could be cheating. But a behavioral change as sudden as she describes can have a lot of other potential causes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:BTDT, OP. We were married 15 years with two kids. He had a massive midlife crisis. He didn’t have an affair but did a lot of other cliche things. He went from being dutiful and on all the time to not giving a crap and talking about his new needs. He was extremely angry and hostile. Basically, under stress his childhood trauma and other issues came out, and he cracked.

I agree that you need to mentally prepare for divorce. Get a lawyer and a therapist. He is no longer your partner. We wasted time with several couples therapists and though I wouldn’t have done it differently (had to feel I tried everything) it was pointless.

My theory is that he was always pretty self centered and for a short time identified his “self” with having a family/ being a husband, but when he realized it really involved un-selfing and being there for others he couldn’t hold it together.

Wait, no affair, addiction, or abuse, but a mid-life crisis with roots in childhood trauma, and you bailed?

[Anonymous]

Brain tumor?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:BTDT, OP. We were married 15 years with two kids. He had a massive midlife crisis. He didn’t have an affair but did a lot of other cliche things. He went from being dutiful and on all the time to not giving a crap and talking about his new needs. He was extremely angry and hostile. Basically, under stress his childhood trauma and other issues came out, and he cracked.

I agree that you need to mentally prepare for divorce. Get a lawyer and a therapist. He is no longer your partner. We wasted time with several couples therapists and though I wouldn’t have done it differently (had to feel I tried everything) it was pointless.

My theory is that he was always pretty self centered and for a short time identified his “self” with having a family/ being a husband, but when he realized it really involved un-selfing and being there for others he couldn’t hold it together.

Wait, no affair, addiction, or abuse, but a mid-life crisis with roots in childhood trauma, and you bailed?

The root cause ultimately doesn’t matter. If he wasn’t willing to commit to improving as a partner and father, she did the right thing.

[Anonymous]

I’ve been there OP. As others have said, look into his phone, credit card(s), track his location. Do you know his phone passcode? You need to determine if there is an affair or addiction before confronting him. In the meantime, take care of yourself. Plan things for just you and the kids. Go out with girlfriends. Pick up a new hobby.
Hugs