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[quote=Anonymous]OP, I was married to this guy. It started when we moved here. He got a thinktank job that he was very excited about, and he spent the first 6 months networking like crazy. What he always told me was that it would slow down once he got acclimated, but it never did. There were almost always after work events, to the extent that our only friends in this area were people he knew from work. He traveled constantly for work - conferences and meetings in various places that were mostly things he wanted to do rather than things that were necessary for him to do for work. He was out of town at a conference on our first wedding anniversary. He was out of town at a conference on my birthday for 2 years in a row. When I complained about that, he suggested that I come with him, but a) I had my own job (though not as interesting or impressive as his) and b) it's boring to just go to someone else's conference and it wasn't like we were spending any quality time together anyway. He paid for those things out of pocket when they were not covered, so we had to budget for his extracurricular travel and he had to have nice suits because he'd get called to the Hill for various stuff. The result of that was that I was under constant financial scrutiny for things like going out to lunch or buying a $30 pair of shoes, but it was perfectly okay for him to drop $1000 on work clothes every few months. He was the one who wanted to have children - lots of children, in fact. He saw himself as a very involved father because he took 2 months of paternity leave with our daughter. However, he was never the one to cover a sick day with her, never was the one to take her to a doctor's appointment, never went to any of the events at her daycare. Sending her to daycare itself was a huge bone of contention between us because my admin salary essentially all went to childcare and when I suggested that if he wanted to have multiple kids, it might make sense for me to stay home with them since daycare is very expensive, he accused me of trying to "get out of contributing to this family" and said that it would be grounds for divorce if I pushed it further.

That was when our daughter was about 7 months old. After her first birthday, he started pushing me to try for a second, and I went along with it because I didn't know what else to do. I had several miscarriages, which he not-subtly blamed me for a couple of times in the middle of an argument. After my 3rd miscarrage, I told him that I was not interested in trying anymore "for a while" and he got really upset, accused me of a bait-and-switch about kids. That was pretty much the beginning of the end.

I started going to therapy ostensibly to figure out how I could save/improve our marriage. Every suggestion from my counselor was met with a reason that he couldn't do that and that I should do it instead. As time went on, I realized that he and I were on really different pages about what it meant to be a family and a married couple. We separated when DD was 2.5.[/quote]

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