“It was such a wild change that I felt like a whole different person had replaced the man I thought I married.”

I’m an award-winning writer and editor living in New York City, where I currently work at BuzzFeed as the Senior Lifestyle Editor.

Warning: The story below discusses suicide. 

"It only got worse. When they arrived in Indonesia, his family started asking for money, and her husband said her money was now his and wrote a check for half of her savings. He wouldn't let her eat more than a few bites of food before insulting her, and the rest of the time, he pretended like she didn't exist. She said that as soon as she got home, she immediately filed for divorce and had to move because the guy kept coming to her apartment and cursing at her through the door. It was such a horrible experience, she swore off dating for 10 years until she met my grandfather at 32, and he treated her like a princess. They were married for 45 years before he passed away."

"I do not know this person personally, but I heard of a similar situation happening to a friend of a friend. 

It started with small but persistent asks from her in-laws, delivered to her via her new husband, which she fulfilled reluctantly, as it got in the way of her full-time job. Then the asks kept getting bigger and more elaborate. She would be insulted by him when she refused, and he would call her not family-minded and selfish.

She turned up to deep-clean her in-laws' bathroom, after being voluntold and intimidated by her husband, and absolutely covered that bathroom in honey. Just doused it. And then would not stop claiming this was the best way to clean a bathroom, and they just needed to let it sit, to really get everything glossy and shiny.

It became a giant fight where the husband said she embarrassed him on purpose, the in-laws were disgusted by her incompetence, and she just kept yelling that this is how you clean bathrooms and how come they didn't know that.

The marriage did not last, but they also didn't ask anything else of her."

"I tried to get him integrated into volunteer groups or different veteran groups, but he wasn't interested. His existence became sleeping in and then gaming for the day. He started down the right-wing pipeline, which was opposite of what he was politically when we met. He would say I wasn't putting any effort in and should get up early before work to make him breakfast or things like that. I would try to jump through all these hoops to make him happy, thinking he just needed to adjust to being out of the military. I ended up feeling more like his mom than his partner, and it decimated my libido. 

He became progressively angrier and more demanding. He would flip out on me for the smallest of things and follow me around the house screaming for hours on end until he would get some sort of reaction out of me. It was a terrible existence. We eventually ended things, but watching someone I loved so dearly and had all of these fun memories with turn into someone I couldn't even recognize left me pretty traumatized, and I've only recently been able to speak about it. I struggled for a long time to accept that I'll never know if it was PTSD, the medications he was on, struggling with life after the military, or him becoming radicalized that changed him so much."

"He drained her entire savings account buying dirt bikes and a camping trailer. Then he moved his 15-year-old daughter into the house without discussing it with SIL. He rehomed the cat that her father had given to her daughter as a gift. He claimed he got a janitorial job at a 24-hour gym, but was just drinking in the parking lot all night. 

The final straw was when he got a cash advance on her credit card and used it to make a down payment on a brand-new truck. They had been best friends for three decades. It’s not like he was some guy she found in a bar. She thought she knew everything about this guy. I’ve never in my life seen a bait and switch like that."

"He is a selfish partner and terrible parent, and I hate that I had a kid with a man-child that my daughter now has to see as the cautionary tale instead of the blueprint for a future partner. But, he somehow managed to cheat on me (also my fault because I wasn't into his non-showered, unromantic advances) and blame me for all of the problems in our marriage. 

Now that we are getting a divorce, I realize that my libido is just fine. I learned a very important lesson: Never have children with a man who demands pie for dessert without actually buying any ingredients or preheating the oven. This is not about pie, lol 

I'm with someone new now, and my daughter notices the subtle differences: like my new partner helping out in the kitchen without being asked, and both of us working together as a team in parenting. She is only 6."

"Yup, it's a difficult lesson to learn, but I'd never enter a relationship again when I supply all the gas and my partner only drains my tank. A partnership should be a two-way street (figuratively speaking)."

"You need to get the divorce. And you need a will, power of attorney, etc., if you don’t already have it. As your spouse, he gets to make decisions on your behalf if you can’t, inheritance, etc."

"What frustrates me is that she continuously spends above her means by financing purchases and buying random junk. She continuously leases cars even though she barely drives anywhere. I'm at my wits' end. I've expressed my feelings to my spouse, but it doesn't seem to matter as I'm seen as the problem. I've lost my privacy, my personal space, and just consistently miserable seeing her in my home. I've been complicating filing for divorce, but my child is the only thing holding me back."

"He went from sweet, kind, romantic, and understanding to controlling, harsh, and demeaning. He went from acting like he thought I was wonderful to acting like I was intolerable. He had zero respect for me. He treated me like I was stupid. He got angry when my opinion did not match his. He got angry when I was ill or pregnant and not able to function fully. He got angry that I was sad about his anger. 

When we moved to my country, we lived in poverty because he wanted to send huge amounts of money home to his family and refused to do what was necessary to transfer his license to my country. He would take important things from where I put them and hide them, then lead me to believe I had been irresponsible and lost them. Later, I would find these things in strange places that I would never have put them, and would just assume that I was indeed irresponsible and disorganized. 

Years into our marriage, he admitted it, and those incidents started to make sense. He was impossible to please. No matter what I did or said, it was wrong, even if I repeated verbatim something he'd previously said or did exactly what he told me he wanted me to do. There was a certain look he gave me often. Like I'd murdered his mother. I can't describe it any other way. It was that hateful. There was worse. And he became emotionally cruel to the kids as well. I knew fairly early that the marriage would be a struggle, but still. Each new incident was something I never imagined he would do."

The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.