It would be impossible to give an extensive account of how we got here in our marriage, but, I am going to try to recap things, mostly because, I am hoping to find someone with a similar life experience, who won't just lecture me about being codependent, but perhaps who is themselves too, and can empathize rather than sympathize.
I guess I'll start with me: I guess I have the diagnosis of "co-dependent" but, it's not just some disorder for me, it's...my identity. I guess my husband would quickly add that "gaming" and "ADHD" are his identity, but I feel this is different. When I was young, I always just wanted one best friend, to spend all my time with. Most of my best friends left because they felt suffocated, even from a young age. I was an immigrant in a new country, and, my parents may have some narcessitic/personality disorders, perhaps from the trauma they endured as first generation immigrants. I am not sure how all that contributed, but at some point all of my desires centralized upon starting my own nuclear family, that I wanted to make as perfect as possible, and having a spouse to whom to dedicate my whole life to. I am Christian and, my hope had been to have a spouse who was basically, in my eyes, one step down from God. I wanted my whole world and life to be about them, and to have the wonderful family that I felt I never had, and to serve them and please them and just, have the "fairy tale" life of sorts. I didn't need a ready made man, or anything, I just wanted someone for whom I would also be everything, someone to make the total focus of my life efforts, and, eventually, our children.
My first two serious relationships ended badly. One was long distance, with an athiest. I didn't really factor in Christianity as much as I should have, my greatest regret. I will not go into the full extent of that relationship, but, it ended with a disclosure over Christmas that he was having an affair with a girl he met at the gym, prettier than me. This was a devastating blow for me as I had hoped to have an ideal marriage, and I chose to lose my virginity to him, hoping that would cement our future marriage. It was a mess, and I was largely responsible because I had started falling in love with another boy who actually was spending time with me, and who seemed also serious about marriage, and who found my first boyfriend abusive. With this second one I had a purely intellectual/spiritual relationship, but he also was not Christian, and, despite talking with me extensively about how much marriage meant to him, how seriously he would take his vows if married, how much he longed for a family - just the sort of things any woman wants to hear - it turned out his jokes about being a compulsive liar may have been true, and that one left me as well. I believe he may have turned out later to be gay, or, in any case, he is still otherwise unmarried.
Despite the fact that I did very well in high school, graduating at the top of my class, college was not going very well for me, perhaps due to these relationships and emotional instability. I was at a top 10 school, but, I could not compete in the biomedical curriculum there, which was 2nd in the nation. Despite my test scores, I simply could not keep up, especially without emotional support. I struggled with my weight and appearance, and, I always felt worthless compared to others. My parents wanted to pull their financing, and I did not want to return home to their commentaries on me - calling me a "broken horse" that they could no longer bet on and other things of this nature. I only had a 2.6 GPA at the time, which was unemployable. I wanted to escape my parents, and, it was at this time I met my husband.
He was a very poor boy from the surrounding community, whom I met online ignominously on HotorNot, a place I went because I was immature and emotionally insecure. I was not in love with him, but, he seemed to care for me deeply, in a way that I had not previously experienced. Unlike my previous boyfriends, he was not ambitious, put together, and he was extremely poor - making 8.50 an hour. He had dropped out of his local community college, and had no future prospects. His car was an Aspire - and we joked that "it aspires to be a real car". I was not actually physically attracted to him either, but, I saw that for whatever reason, he cared for me. I felt safe with him, and, there were things that surprised me - things I'd never seen the intelligent and accomplished men do. For example, we were at Walmart, and, out of respect for the employee, he took a shirt and hanger I was trying on, and when finished with it, walked all the way across the store to put it back where it came from, because he was that respectful. He did not want to sleep with me or do any sort of crass behavior, because he found it disrespectful to women. When we attended a party once, he acted extremely uncomfortable and asked me what we were doing there. He never once looked at another woman, the party, the surroundings, the high and prestigous life, and, though he had none of the other attributes that I would have normally looked for in a man - I was attracted to his moral purity, and the thought that he would be dedicated to me no matter what. He said he wanted to become the man of my dreams, and that he would work towards this end. And he lost his job for being late taking me to class. He let me eat the last burrito out of his fridge, in an apartment that had next to nothing but that burrito, not even a full bed. And I felt for once that, I came in first in someone's life.
I wasn't the best girlfriend, and I was unfaithful when we were intially apart (I went back to a local university by my parents). I don't know why I did this, I perhaps thought he could never become stable enough to be a husband. I wanted to look up to my husband, not tutor him in math. And I was afraid he would never make the 60,000 required for starting a stable family. But also, I wasn't very mature either. I did things in that initial time period I am not proud of. But eventually, I settled in my mind that I did want to marry him, and, that I was going to help him improve. We worked together for about 5-7 years, my trying to help him through school. He left everything to be with me, moved across the country, and even tolerated my parents and their abuse, while we tried to get him in and through engineering school. He had a poor education, and we were starting from fractions. Thankfully, math is one of the gifts God gave me, and I was able to use the gifts God gave me to help him get through college.
I thought for a long time my husband was unintelligent. I thought this because he was easily distracted, and had great difficulty with school work and routines. I know now this is a symptom of ADHD. The first time I realized he was not actually unintelligent is when he took a course he was interested in - digital logic - and got the top score in the class effortlessly. I was blown away, excited, but also sort of angry. If he were not unintelligent, then, why did he need to be babysat for his homework, have everything structured for him, need help staying on task and focused - things you would expect from a person with subpar intelligence. Anyway, I was just thankful also it was one less course we needed to worry about getting him to pass.
At the community college before this point, we had a defining incident in our relationship that was to summarize it for our then friends, and that I guess they never forgot. I was trying to help him achieve the minimum GPA necessary for engineering school, and he needed to get a C at least in Physics. He was on the borderline, and I had written an extra credit battery paper for him, and I just needed him to study for the final test, so that he would get enough of a score to get the C, without which he couldn't enter college and our dreams of financial stability would be crushed. He went to the student atrium, and in between my own classes I went to check up on him, and I found him there not studying, but playing Magic the Gathering with some unacademically serious students there, his "friends". The only thing holding them together was this Magic the Gathering. He also had told me earlier how he planned on using the work computers where we begged to get him an internship to print off some cards, or something to that effect. I do not have a good control of my temper, and I felt this was a betrayal of trust, my time and efforts, and everything we were working for, so I took his laptop, walked off with it, and threw it over a bridge. I think the entire campus may remember him screaming "nooooo!" and rushing down to the river below desperate to retrieve it. He later found me in my art class that I was taking and exhibited an angry reaction there that led to the campus police being called. I tried to explain to my teacher that he had "illicit material" on there, not realizing she would assume this was something much worse than it was. I meant illict for our relationship agreement. The police combed the lake and brought up the laptop, and then scanned it with a harddrive recovery, which was very embarassing because we had photos on there together (of me mostly). Was not a great experience, but the police chief took his side lecturing him that "you know, you can still get out of this relationship now, it's not too late buddy." Even then, everyone thought I was controlling, and took his perspective on me.
I wanted him to achieve his potential, and for me, I was not aiming extremely high I felt. I wanted him simply to get a 3.0 in engineering, and be a regular person with a regular job. So we could have a married life with children, the sort of holy grail of existence for me.
My husband said he was attracted my ambition and drive, and, I thought this was a good basis at the time for marriage: I have no beauty to offer, and it was nice to be valued for something. Incredibly, God gave him the ability to graduate, and to cover all his deficits. He was even selected for a prestigous NASA internship (not that I am a fan of that organization) - and got 2nd place at our senior design competition - even with a partner who left him with all the work for a male modeling competition, and another one who could barely string a few words together because of an even more severe case of ADHD. My husband does have some very attractive attiributes in that he is incredibly patient, and was kind, and he didn't really complain about having the entire project dumped on his head, and I think this was obvious to everyone, so incredibly he came in 2nd place.
When he graduated, I could scarcely believe it. My best friend at the time would sometimes encourage me when we were struggling what we had overcome, and sometimes he would say "you took this man from nothing, and you made that man!" But actually, it was God using my skills and gifts to help effect his purposes for him, I just, foolishly, probably took the credit.
I was under a lot of stress from our going through engineering school, and I still have PTSD from it. I also managed to graduate magna cum laude, and perhaps if I had been more focused, I could have actually made it to medical school, which was my desire because, I thought healing professions were very admirable at the time, and who doesn't want to be a healer?
But I wanted to have children even more. Like everything else, I initiated the marriage, and, my husband responded.
This started the most idyllic 7 years of my life. My husband must have still been in "hyper focus" mode on me - compared to now where he says he "knows everything about me" and I am no longer interesting. We would have dinner every night, that I would make, go on long walks, and take care of our dogs. We both got hired by a good company, and were DINKS. We managed to pay off our debt quickly.
After I had my first child, our son, I feel like my life peeked. My husband allowed me to stay home in our small apartment with our son, and, whatever feelings I had for my husband, the love I felt for my son was 10, maybe 100 fold. My husband jokes that I am "one man tent" and only one person can go in at a time - but, one man or not, I completely fell in love with my son. I was determined to raise him to be the fullness of a leader and the man I had wanted to marry - a man who was both full of character and Christian decency like his father - but who also would have the benefits of a highly involved education, full parental attention, and the best of everything I could give. I still feel that this was my highest identity - finally able to shine through - "mother". Even my first fiance who left me had said of me "you have the highest maternal drive of anyone I know."
I didn't mind at all doing the things that the women in the engineering field around me would have found domestic and demeaning, and, I was so happy serving my family, and, it was intensely rewarding. Our son was, without my being aware of it, extremely advanced, and we could do learning all day, and go and spend every waking moment together. I treasured him and loved to watch every single milestone. And I felt, I truly felt, like a good Mom. Whatever horrible things had happened in my life before, it was over and my life was peaking and I knew it, even in a two bedroom apartment with little hope for a house.
Unfortunately, my husband was unable to keep his job steadily. He was unable, I guess, to do work as he found it - but had to "innovate", sometimes missing deadlines. He would shake things up wanting to do things in a better, more efficient way, failing to realize how this would impact his work relations. The company had a downturn, and it had an unprecendented layoff of 30% of its engineers, even people with 30 years. Suddenly, we were being let go. Miraculously it seemed, my husband got a job at a different employer - a healthcare one - his "dream" job, but in a terrible place - SC.
That was the beginning of the end.
I do not remember him, at the start of our relationship, gaming the way he does now. He used to read comics and things like this, but he got rid of all of that when he fell in love with me. When he would read books, we would read together. Sometimes, he would read to me, while I would drink my tea. Even his reading time was "our time".
When we moved to SC, everything began to change. Maybe it was from the overwork his employer was putting on him, but he began more heavily using his cellphone. He started playing this game called Hearthstone, and at first I didn't notice it very much. This is because I had 3 children, and they always required my attention. I was so in love with them, that for the most part I didn't notice the gradual decline in our relationship.
He didn't want to do the manual testing assigned to him and managed to get his boss angry enough with a missed deadline to fire him over Christmas. Fire, not lay off. His manager did not care at all for his innovations and improved testing. We had 6 months where he fell into unemployment insurance and we lived on SNAP. It was, I think, in these 6 months that he started heavily gaming.
And the vilest games. They were full of violence, sorcery, grotesque themes - spiritually offensive games.
I guess maybe that's when I really started to take notice, because I was trying to pursue my faith more. I pursued in all the wrong ways - and I wound up trying a psychedellic to understand why a loving God would allow suffering in the world. I have always been highly affected by the suffering of people around me, and historically. I failed to put my trust in His Word, and instead did a legal psychedellic there - Salvia, a mint plant. I shouldn't have done it because I have underlying anxiety, and my husband said I had post partum depression. After I did this thing, I had a bad trip, and, then, perhaps what happened is I spiraled into psychosis because I felt entities were talking to me malevolently, for quite some time.
My husband was sort of supportive of me during this time, and sort of not. He didn't divorce me, which I appreciated, but, he just escaped himself into video games more. It was only after this incident that I was able to see his video games as vile, because of the content, especially as I was struggling to try to walk a clean spiritual path. It was then that I really looked at the content of the Magic the Gathering cards he had stored in our house - and I saw that they featured actual demon imagery on them. I could not tolerate having them in my house, nor could I sell them, and I felt that they were an abomination, and I threw them out.
My husband is usually a loving person, but, when he found they were gone he seemed angry enough to hit me, and I remember running out of the house while he paced angrily in the driveway. I had never seen him be so angry at me in my life, and maybe that was the start of his love being replaced with resentment of me.
At the time he was gaming around the clock, into the middle of the night. I had some sympathy for it because he was unemployed and dealing with a lot. Through the prayers of the church, my husband finally got rehired in the Midwest, where we longed to be, in an innovative engineering position, a dream job of sorts.
But the gaming and cellphone usage never went away. He manages, thank God, not to do it so much at night, which is good, because I am afraid he will lose his job if he does, but, every free moment he does this. Today was his birthday and outside of two scheduled activities I had for the children - he spent the entire day on a first person shooter game.
He doesn't actually talk with me anymore, he says he "can only handle people in small doses" - and, we haven't been intimate for a year. Even when we were intimate, it seemed to lack all spiritual intimacy. A further schism in our relationship is he doesn't want to talk about the Bible, and he is "tired of hearing about that 2,000 year old book."
He is so addicted to the sorcery game on his cell phone he sits with it in the bathroom, and one of my children summarized it as "Daddy goes to the bathroom for an hour, you go for half an hour because you are pregnant, and I go in 5 seconds!"
I am pregnant with our 4th child. I am probably due in a few days now, and I have felt terribly unhappy, increasingly, over the last 7 years.
Most of it centers around him trying to spread his addiction to our children. I understand for quite some time, he has not been interested in our marriage marriage. I am boring, I am not exciting, he needs "constant stimulation" and mental excitement, I am not an engineer anymore, I have quotidian conversation, and, I have no love of endless diversion - I am not "fun" - etc. etc. He "knows everything there is to know about you" and just needs me to be in the room, or whatever, like a lamp. Nothing I could ever say could compete with a demonic sorcery game, and, I am not worthy of time and attention. I am nagging, and complainy, and not an appreciative wife, etc. etc. And maybe this is true, maybe I am unpleasant, I do have a lot of failings.
So it is not that I am complaining because our marriage isn't strong and full of love. This is a loss, but, I could probably bear this alone.
It is really the effect on the children.
I am trying to homeschool them to preserve them from all the defiling incidents that happened to me. I want them to experience the best of what life has to offer spiritually, the purest things. I want to safeguard them from the evils of the world, teach them discipline, and raise them up godly. Even though I am broken now, and as you can see I suffer from insomnia, and, I guess, a severe form of depression called derealization. I know I am still me somewhere on the inside, even if the strength of the person who helped get my husband through school is gone.
But as I am trying to help our children, two of whom for certain have ADHD, even as I am sort of disabled right now from the damage of the depression/anxiety and anhedonia that happened after the Salvia usage, I feel my husband is undermining all my efforts.
One of the worst ways he undermines me is by offering the children screen time based rewards - the phone, or computer games - which are addicting them, sucking out all their capacity to enjoy other things - and reducing their own lives to the next "game time". Worse, they are sometimes or often watching HIM play spiritually defiling games like first person shooters, which I cannot imagine any real Christian playing. At one point he was playing a game called Don't Starve, before I put down my foot and "got angry" about it (my children think I am just this angry joy-killer, perhaps because my husband has referred to me in front of them as a "joy-killer"). In this game people were dismembered and you had to move around or you would starve. Grotesque things like this. There was no "check" in his mind on himself or what he was showing the children.
Recently, our youngest two children said their vision was getting blurry, forcing me into a situation where I feel I have to forcibly stop them from participating in the gaming, to save their vision. This makes them side with their father even more, and collectively view me as an angry, unpleasant Mom. I cannot explain to them consequences. I cannot help them see that I am trying to protect them. Their Dad is more fun loving and easy going, and they idolize him. Which would normally be an OK and desirable thing, but here, perverted.
He often forgets to do basic things, like mow the lawn, or basic house maintenance, and he always says I just have to bring it to his attention, he'll do it. Eventually, he does, but only if I "nag". Everything is an interruption and imposition on nearly uninterrupted game time. He does go to work, which is a huge thing to his credit, but one day he was working from home and I found he had the games on "for during down time". I never know when the next job loss is coming, God forbid.
After my miscarriage last year, he barely looked up from his phone to acknoweldge it, sort of heartlessly saying (without any empathy or real emotion) that we can just try again. This after my bleeding out probably 20 toiletfulls of blood at 3 months. I know it wasn't his fault, and I know his logic is correct, but, there is a deadness in feeling in him.
He boasts that he is an "efficiency addict". I try to explain to him how maybe this technology that he loves is actually driving some people to joblessness, but, he seems to worship this technology.
I struggle to understand how the man I met, who, grew up in a poor Applachian town, the son of a very believing woman, surrounded by a family of mostly believers, none of whom used to love to technology all that much, came to have this as his central definition. And with this, an insane desire to explain to me how stupid I am for believing in Creationism, and just all these petty actions against me. He knows I don't believe in evolution, and am skeptical about dinosaurs, and so, he goes out of his way to throw out the Creation book I got for the children, and then takes as many photos of dinosaurs as possible. He fills the lego room which he will not allow me to clean with dinosaurs, in an almost fanatic way - just, I guess, to rebel against me. So instead of wonderful, thought provoking toys, our children are playing with grotesque monsterous looking like things, with bloody mouths and hands. He also chooses lego people who are almost as grotesque as the figures in his video games - although, thankfully, not as disgustingly clad sometimes.
Then, instead of reading anything together as we used to, he calls all my spiritual books boring, and downloads pages upon pages of filth - something like DragonGirl or some weird, usually violent, SCI-FI escapism, but without any of the beauty of true sci fi - just...drivel. Then he puts these books on the Kindle, where my eldest son may run across them.
In the absence of these books, my children are interested in their Christian readers. When he went on vacation, and the screen was off, they naturally reverted to taking an interest in their Christian readers.
I realized we reached a new low because he spent more time talking with me on the phone during that trip, than probably ever, and things almost felt normal. Without the constant arguing over the games, our home was more peaceful.
I understand I am not a perfect person, and that I can improve as a wife, and that I HAVE been angry and nagging. I get so defensive when I see him putting our children on these entertainments. I feel I am struggling against him in parenting continually.
I am approaching this last labor of our last child and, our relationship has robbed me of much of the happiness of it. I struggle with intensely depressive thoughts, and I often wonder if, in the painful labor, God is going to take me home.
This also fills me with fear for our children. Part of me hopes my parents could take over at that point, but, they have wanted me to divorce my husband for a while. But, they are not Christians, and even if they stepped in to help, they struggle with narcesstic behavior, and, I don't think they would REALLY love the children. I fear that their influence on them would not be a godly one. And I have no one else besides my parents, no friends, or anything.
I had a lot of fallings out with the church. I felt that they were overspending and underconcerned with the fate of the poor, or animals, and, I wound up isolated in my criticisms from them. Everyone finds me to be a critical person, and maybe that is what I have become.
Even if it were biblically allowed, there seems to be no hope of divorce and remarriage here. The entire purpose would be to help the children, and, they love their father so much, I don't think it would help them. The thing I want is a changed father. I have prayed for this before. I have prayed and even fasted.
I often feel abandoned by God by His lack of response on this issue. I prayed and fasted once for 10 days and my husband lost interest for about 90 days. But like a dog to its vomit he always goes back. There have been other people who have prayed for us too, and sometimes his gaming improves, but never permanently.
I do not understand and cannot relate with the advice to "just take care of you" and things like this. This is diametrically opposed not only to my personality, but all my spiritual beliefs. When I am "just taking care of me" I don't feel good, actualized, happy, or anything. When I feel like I am shining is when I take care of others. This is the core of my identity. I guess in psychology it's called the Wendy syndrome or something.
My deepest regret is being so much in a depressive gutter that I can't seem to effectively be the person I once was, when it matters most, for the children. It is like my husband has sucked up all my resources, and life has given its hardest blows so early, there is very little of me left. It's like that one song "my soul is so afraid to realize, how very little there is left of me inside" (from Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails).
But while someone might think of this in terms of "how very little there is left of my personal identity" I rather feel it is "how very little there is left of my ability to handle stress, react, and be fully there for people in a servant like fashion." Simply, I broke along the way.
Maybe it is my relationship with my husband that seems to also characterize my feelings towards God at this point. I am so lonely and defeated, I cannot relate anymore to what used to be my favorite lyrics in this song: "I got my head but my head is unraveling, can't keep control, can't keep track of where it's traveling, I got my heart but my heart is no good, and you're the only one that's understood; you make me hard, when I'm all soft inside, I see the Truth when I'm all stupid eyed, your arrow goes straight through my heart, without you everything just falls apart."
I look around at all the other Christians and how blessed their life seems to be, and I remain here alone struggling with depersonalization, depression, guilt, no self worth, not a friend in sight because who wants to befriend such a down in the gutter person - and, my one person who I had tried to devote my life to finds me an annoyance at best, and I have 3-4 children now, all of whom are depending upon me to give them every opportunity, while half crippled - and, I feel abandoned by God. I don't feel that "personal relationship". I read these books, and everything about Him but, in my own life, it seems there is a certain impotancy in prayer. I often wonder if this life is His revenge on me.
And sometimes this leads to an ideation of what the afterlife might be. I am torn by these feelings of guilt of, wanting to escape this situation somehow, and, feeling like I would be failing the children if I did. I think about how God talks about Paradise, and how it could come in a minute, possibly.
And then I wonder what that would be. I read in the Bible there's no marriage in heaven, and, I guess everyone can sneer at me as codependent, but, what kind of heaven would that be, without a marriage? Not a destroyed one such as I have, but the ideal one - where the woman is completely into her husband, serves and respects him - and the husband is a complete protector of his wife, completely vested and interested in her, and the children - where there is spiritual unity, and love, and passion, and all the good things. I guess I would take Paradise in any definition, but I am sadly deflated reading about a heaven without marriage, even as my own marriage is - well, you see how it is.
When confronted my husband reminds me to be appreciative that he is not in the bars, an adulterer, or mindlessly watching sports games. He has very many valid points that often leave me wondering if I am just truly a "joy killer" who "wants every single minute of my time" and who "shares none of my interests" and if I am trying to reject "who he is" instead of just this gaming plague ontop of who he is.
He lost his mother at a young age, and, perhaps this is part of the escapism from that. I just don't understand if he wanted to be so alone in the games, why he married at all? Of course he WAS different then, even though he claims he was not. He proudly tells me that he "hyperfocused" on me then, but now there is no need to. No need to focus on me at all.
I am left feeling selfish for even wanting basic together time. Basic together time sometimes becomes him telling me about all the technological things he read online, robots, or toy guns - things like this. Not things of real spiritual substence. He also gives toy guns to the children, which I hate. He keeps giving them behind my back, and hiding them. He also shows them the depraved comics behind my back.
My greatest desire here is to react as a Christian wife should, but, I don't know how anymore. I guess that would be praying and fasting. I have fantasies of fasting until I get a response from God. But I have children, and if past experience is any indicator, I might well be dead if I tried that approach.
I have difficulty praying recently. I feel that God has it in for me, or hates me. I understand there is a devil, but, I look back on my life at the long string of abuse I have been through, and, I feel like...can God possibly love me and have allowed all this to happen? Was I truly responsible for all these failed relationships? Is it all the just recompense of sin in my life?
With the depression and derealization, it is harder to do what I want to do most: be an effective supporter of others.
I struggle to just clean the house and after the pets, and get food on the table. And also do the homeschooling and children's activities. On a good day I am able to do these things, by the grace of God.
Increasingly, I am going into my own escapisms, to the detriment of the children.
I feel like I wouldn't if I had a spiritual partner. There seems to be no ethical way to obtain one. If there is a man similarly struggling, it would be immoral for me to "bond" with him over our mutual trauma. If there is another woman who is similarly struggling, what could she say but "kuddos" or "me too".
And then all the paid psychologists in the world - at their whopping 155 an hour - are they going to help me if God is not?
So I'm just continuing in this life but I always question whether God separated me into hell in a fit of anger against my unbelief. I keep wondering what this life MEANS.
Because of the depresonalization, I cannot take joy in seeing sunsets, or nature. Everything seems skewed as though I am in a HD video game. It's hard to live like this. I could probably do it with a lot of emotional support. But there's little of this too.
My children told me I was beautiful, even though I am 40 lbs overweight now because of the pregnancy. I hope maybe I can become so objectively good, that, even if my husband acts dishonorably, I can take some joy in somehow being the best wife ever.
But this is hard to do with the constant arguments. I can't just give them up because otherwise he would burn the children's eyes out with the screen time.
Stuck, so stuck.
I have a lot of respect for the men who make the sacrifice of being there for their wives by trying to overcome their addictions, and call them for what they are. Haven't gotten to this step with my husband. With my luck he will divorce me for a younger woman. He has already said that if I die, he is going to marry a gamer girl.
What else is there to say?
Alice
Welcome to the forums Alice. Thanks for sharing your story.
You can find the advice for spouses here: http://www.olganon.org/forum/i-need-help-spousessignificant-others/first-aid-kit-spouses-and-significant-others-video-game
Excessive gaming changes personaility. It explains why your husband acts the way he does, in contrast to the man you knew.
Around self care; its the priciple of fix your own oxygen mask before you can help other people with theirs that they tell you just before you take a flight on a plane. You are not really helping anyone until you take care of your essential needs first. If you treat yourself with respect you will be modelling that to your kids to treat themselves also with respect.
I would encourage you to get more support for you; do you have a local church you attend? have a look at the getting support for you thread in the spouses first aid kit thread, see about going to 12 step meetings. You can do them online now.
I hear your pain and the difficult position you are in, between a husband who no longer seems to care about matters that are important to you, and your religion.
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