Me 30F and husband 33M have been together for 12 years now. Have 4 kids, the youngest are 19m and 4m old. Having 2 babies back to back has put a lot of stress on our relationship. I always thought we were happy up until we had our 3rd baby.
A little background into our relationship. Met in high school, he was my first and was a popular football player and older so I always felt he was, for lack of a better word, “cooler” than me in a way. We broke up and came back together after high school. He had just finished a relationship with a girl that he was “in love” with and I think he felt being with me was comforting. I’m really a loyal person and reliable. We got pregnant and got married as soon as we found out we were pregnant.
He has always wanted me to change, be more fit, lose weight, be closer to God, be more confident in bed. I had always just said he just wants me to be a better person, growth is good. He’s definitely manipulative and is constantly putting me down, calling me “big mama” and now my oldest son also calls me that. He is also 290lbs for reference, so it’s not like he’s fit. When I was pregnant for this last time he has told me I’m fat, 220lbs, that he’s no longer attracted to me and that my vagina feels loose, all when I was 8/9 months pregnant. So we made a plan for me to lose weight so that we could have attraction again, and the time limit he set was 1 year and if I didn’t lose the weight he joked that he would get a free pass cause he “has needs”. So we’re 4m into that and yesterday I had felt something was off, when things I thought, had been getting better between us, since I have lost almost 50 lbs.i asked him what’s wrong and he says that he has never been in love with me and wants to be in love and eventually wants to separate. This is WILD to me, he says he knows he’s in the wrong and that there’s nothing wrong with me, he knows he’s been manipulative and controlling and I will always be his best friend and the mother of his children and he wants to still provide for me and the kids. And that maybe I should start going on dates so that I can find love too.. that I don’t know what real love feels like between 2 people who are madly in love with each other, and he does, and he wants that for me. he says I have stolkhome syndrome and that he can’t understand why I would love him since he’s always been mentally abusive to me.
I feel crazy, there has been good times, i know I’ve been in love with him, although I don’t feel in love right now, I’m exhausted, I have 2 babies, I don’t sleep, I’m a stay at home homeschooling mom with no income, we didn’t want our kids to go to school so we’ve set up our life so that I could stay home with them. What the hell am I supposed to do, I haven’t had a job in 8 years much less any experience that could land me a job that can pay for living and day care for 3 kids, my oldest being the only one school age.
He says he’s attracted to me now that I’ve lost weight, that our sex life has gotten better. He says he’s willing to work on it, since that’s what I want. But that since he was never in love it seems impossible that anything would change. How would he just magically become in love with me, has it ever happened before?
He has said multiple times that having all these kids he was just “giving me what I wanted” since I’ve always wanted a big family. He’s a good dad, and loves the kids.
I am so broken, I am now 30 years old, have 4 kids, have stretch marks, have horrible self esteem because of how I’ve been treated, how the hell am I supposed to find some unicorn man that will accept all this baggage, he was supposed to love me after having all these babies has wrecked my body, I did it for him, for us. I always thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.
Should I be trying to save our marriage? This is so scary. My kids have never seen this much sadness in me and I’m scared of what this will do to them, my parents got divorced when I was 20 and I was devastated. My life is in shambles, I never thought this is how it would go. If you made it this far, thanks, and sorry for the grammar errors, it’s 1am and I’m up with the baby.
I want to call my mom and sob to her but I can’t, I feel so alone.