I'm now 45 and he is 50, and I feel so devastated about this. We have been having severe issues in our marriage, mostly around his drinking and pot smoking, for the last decade. The drinking/smoking, which I cant do (alcohol triggers flares of ulcerative colitis for me and pot smoking gives me panic attacks) has been extremely problematic because it is a barrier to connection. So I've been begging him to get help for depression/anxiety and stop self medicating, meanwhile his personality has been increasingly worse while he is drunk, ie, more yelling and stuff, and he has denied over and over again that the drinking is the problem and shifted the blame to me.
We've been back and forth for the last decade near constantly about his drinking and drug use, with him telling me im exaggerating and imagining things and its not that bad and the real problem is me, theres something wrong with me, I dont give enough affection, I dont love him enough, I have weird hangups over alcohol, etc (I dont). So I've been seeing therapists on and off, both of whom assured me after long periods that the drinking really does sound problematic and that I don't seem to have any unusual hangups around affection and that I seem normal aside from PTSD from the abuse I got as a kid. I've been asking for couples counseling repeatedly for years. He finally agreed to couples counseling in April or May and we started seeing someone. But. things haven't been getting better, they've been getting worse and we've been getting further and further apart, and even with the therapist he insists that his drinking is not problematic and that I am exaggerating.
So for the last few sessions we've been struggling with the question of whether we should even be together because I have specific goals in life and after 15 years of me trying to make his goal of being a touring musician happen while he drank his life away, I wanted us to finally buy a house, which has been my lifelong dream. And he stated that he was never interested in traditional marriage stuff like sharing goals and planning a future, and that he wanted to make sure that he wasnt taking on my goals as his own because he didnt want to share my goals, which was really painful to hear.
Then during our session on Tuesday, he said some more things that made me realize that our relationship was not going to work. And at that point I decided we should separate, but it was the end of our session and I wanted to process for a while before saying it anyway.
Thursday night he got drunk again and he crossed several lines. I decided I am done with trying to make the relationship work but since he started the fight while I was laying in bed I got him to leave me alone.
Friday night he sat me down and apologized and owned up to the drinking being a problem and admitted that he knows he has been self medicating for a long time and that he has gender dysphoria. He said he has known since childhood but his mom beat him and shamed him and his dad also shamed him. And when he was honest with past girlfriends they left him or made him feel ashamed, so he never told me. And that he succesfully pushed it down for the first 10 years of our marriage but for the last 10 years he has been struggling with it.
And honestly Im so devastated. Mainly because he has been lying to me about who he is for 20 years but especially for the blame shifting and lack of accountability for the last 10 years. I feel like it is massively unfair that he a) lied about who he is b) made me think i was crazy and that I was the problem, not his drinking and the affect that all of those things have had on our relationship. and c) he didnt give me the chance to have emotional intimacy and see what our relationship could have been, and he was never honest with me about who he is and what he wanted out of life, was never honest about not sharing my dreams for the future, didnt give me the choice of either staying with him or moving on, because he knew I might possibly leave and he was afraid of that.
And he knows that I'm an open-minded person, like we live in a blue state (though he is from a red state his parents migrated to in their 20's when there was a lot of violence in NYC), his nephew is trans and I literally do not care and we have discussed these topics at length so he knows that my general outlook is "live and let live, if it hurts no one there is no reason to not let people be themselves and trans folks hurt no one by being themselves."
And now I basically feel like my entire 20 year long marriage was based on lies and I really can't be there for him while he figures out who he is and what he wants in life because he has lied to me for so long and specifically spent the last 10 years full well knowing he was lying to me but hiding it and turning it all around on me and making ME feel crazy for feeling like something was off, and driving us apart with the alcohol. And I basically can't stop crying now.