I got married in 2000, when I was 38. My husband's three years younger than I am and has been married twice before, but this is my first marriage.
Unfortunately, my husband has no sense of financial self-preservation, which led him to max out a credit card last year. He never showed me the bill, just had his dad refinance it, and now I have to give my father-in-law a check for $130 every month to make minimum payments (!) on the card.
Then he bought a used van for his 22-year old son without talking to me about it (because he knew I would object because of our high debt load). The boy was supposed to give us a check every month to make the payments on the vehicle. Unfortunately, he skipped town and stuck us with the van and the payments. Husband decided he didn't like the van and traded it in to buy a new Kia, weighing us down with a $22,000 car loan. He subsequently had an accident with the car (property damage only), that's how I found out that he put a $1,000 deductible on the insurance to save five or six bucks in premiums each month. Needless to say, the car hasn't been fixed yet because we don't have $1,000.
I guess I should have threatened consequences after the credit card issue, but I didn't think he would do something like that again. I mean, how can a man of 42 be so stupid? His favorite saying is, "Oh, it's just money". But then again, he keeps telling me that an asteroid is going to hit earth sometime in 2030, so I guess that explains why he doesn't hesitate to draw on his profit sharing or 401k when we need money really bad.
I feel so trapped. It seems like every time things look up financially, something happens that drags us back down (like having to replace the roof twice after hurricanes) or he does something stupid, such as buying his son a van. I feel I have no choice but to make all those payments because the bank account is in both our names. And what can I do after he's done made all the decisions anyway? The car dealer is not going to undo the deal because my husband failed to get my approval, even though it's my money he's throwing away.
This and other things have made me lose all respect for my husband. We haven't slept in the same bed or had sex in over two years.
Most of the time I'm holding up okay. I mean, he's not a bad person. He works very hard; he doesn't drink or take drugs; as far as I know, he's not cheating (although at this point I wouldn't mind if he did because then I'd have a good enough reason to end this marriage). But we don't have anything in common. There is nothing to talk about except, "How was your day?" And both our days are always the same. We go to work, come home, get on the computer, and go to bed.
I don't know what to do. I promised in a church before God that I would stay with him through good and bad, and things don't seem bad enough to justify divorce. I've never seriously considered counselling because I don't have money for a therapist, but also because that would mean I have to tell him how I feel about him and our marriage, and I don't know how to do that without breaking up with him.
Right now, all I want is a way out of this mess without feeling like I'm a horrible person who is going to burn in hell because I want a man in my life, not an overgrown teenager.
