My wife and I have a baby and a toddler who take an absurd amount of energy every day, my wife and my family can’t stand each other, so I effectively don’t have an immediate family, but the catch is my wife is not a nice person.
So I’ve given up my family for a person who is rude, demanding, impatient, doesn’t show empathy, and is extremely controlling, but shows a nice face to everyone else.
The thought of divorce makes me sick to my stomach because of how difficult of a process it is, trying to explain all the changes to my toddler, how much harder solo parenting is, and being in a marriage and a home had a ton of financial and practical benefits, but I’m just so tired and lonely and sad.
I’m in therapy and we’re in couples therapy, but she started pulling away the first time the therapist challenged her so I don’t have any hope for genuine change.
It’s just a Groundhog day of exhaustion, loneliness, and misery, and the only person left in my life i could lean on is at the core of the problems. I’m not going to kill myself, but things are so dark right now.
I started writing and recounting events or conversations that had stuck with me, kind of like a historical record “she said __, I said __”, etc.
I also had cut off much of my family and don’t really have friends, so I took segments of my writing and showed them to chatgpt, trying to be careful not to bias it since LLMs are prone to sycophancy. My reasoning was that they’re good at pattern recognition; I wanted to see if one could be found based on my recollection of events. After a few weeks of exploring my memories/feelings and new ruptures/arguments/comments as the occurred, it told me that it sounds like I was being subjected to emotional abuse, disclaimed that it couldn’t actually make that call and suggested I find a therapist.
Fortunately for me, I have one colleague who’s known me for a decade, before marriage, the house and kids. I went to lunch with them and kind of laid out what had been going on and where I was at. My performance had slipped at work and it was noticed. When I told them that I was considering divorce, they didn’t recoil or second-guess and it was enough of a sign for me to start my own personal therapy.