My husband (33) has been sober for 14 years and we have been married for almost four but I am divorcing him because he has put recovery (not HIS recovery), but recovery and his image within the recovery community before our marriage.
Two months before we got married I found out he had been cheating on me with a woman from his recovery community but we chose to work through it and honestly at first I thought we had. At that time he was more than willing to take accountability for his actions and together we decided what changes needed to be made to rebuild trust. I had an incredibly hard pregnancy and three weeks before I delivered our daughter we found out I had cancer and would be doing a year's worth of chemo after. The first two years of our marriage were HARD but we did it together. As a team. Back then I felt like it actually brought us closer and was an 'opportunity' for us (me) to lean into one another and support each other. He took the brunt of parenting our newborn as I was often sick from treatment.
Fast forward to four years later and I am leaving him. It is almost hard to describe but slowly over the past 18 months he has become more and more distant. He attends AT LEAST three (usually four) meetings a week and has kept me separate from this group that he is completely enmeshed in. I had told him many times how lonely and isolating it felt and he said he would organize a dinner for his sponsor, his sponsor's wife and I several times but that never happened. He seemed more than happy to keep his recovery life and his family life separate.
During that time I found out he was hanging out with a woman he had met in recovery (different woman from the first) behind my back. I had previously told him how uncomfortable she made me and that I had seen texts between them that — while not overtly sexual or inappropriate — were definitely flirtatious. He's my husband. I know how he flirts — especially via text.
Recently I found out he gambled almost $5k (I found that out 3 months ago and he still hasn't told me how much he actually gambled). I was so desperate to understand how to support him and/or what to do at this point because our marriage was in ruins. I had been thinking about leaving for a few months at this point. It wasn't the gambling itself that pushed me to the decision of divorce – it was how he reacted after. First he tried to gaslight me into believing I was being a bad/unsupportive partner when I got upset about the gambling. I spoke with his sponsor the next day to get advice on what to do. His sponsor said I needed to protect myself/my well-being not only for me, but for our daughter. He also said he recognized my husband has been manipulating him as well because "ever story I heard, he was the victim." I had previously found Reddit posts my husband had put up about me that conveniently left out pertinent information and made me look down right cruel.
When my husband found out I talked with his sponsor he completely shifted to this dark, angry version of himself I had never seen. A week later he went back to hanging out with the woman I had told him made me uncomfortable (I found this out via our 3 year old daughter …) and when I tried to talk to him about it he LITERALLY laughed in my face. Fast forward a few months and I've moved out. We have filed the initial papers for divorce and our daughter is doing amazingly well with the changes – I am so grateful as she is my #1 priority.
All to say – has anyone else experienced this with a partner who is in recovery? It's like he transferred his addiction TO recovery. It became all consuming and left no room for our marriage and honestly sometimes I worry about my daughter, too. We switch off weekends and often he'll get a babysitter on his weekend or he'll give her melatonin at 6:30pm because he 'just wants her to sleep' … her bedtime is normally 8:30.
I don't know this person anymore and I am confident in my decision to leave but it has been a total mindfuck to say the least. How do you not wonder if anything was true? I can only imagine how much I DON'T know …