Skyblossom

Whatever you do don’t have a baby. Babies add stress to your life and he has already proven he can’t handle the current level of stress. If he can’t handle the current level at work he is not going to be able to handle a greater level of stress at home. The stress a baby adds to your life goes on for years and that’s with the average, healthy baby. How would he handle a special needs child? I had to spend part of my first pregnancy on total bed rest. Could he handle that? If anything happened to you and your husband was left on his own to raise a baby/child could he do that? If not you have no business having a child with him.

I don’t see this marriage going long term. He already can’t handle a regular, normal level of stress or he is saying he can’t. How will he handle the inevitable things that happen. How would he handle you having cancer or you losing a job? He can’t deal with basic life and life happens. Sooner or later you will get fed up at the grown man who can’t deal with life. Can you carry it all? Can it be all you all of the time?

I also wonder what changed at work so that he suddenly couldn’t handle the stress level. Either their was a massive change at work or he was able to deal with work and is using it as an excuse or he was smoking and lying even before you were married.

The thing about a dealbreaker is that it exists for a reason. You can try to ignore it but it will still be there. How much of your time that you spend with your husband is positive compared to the amount of time you spend with him that is negative because you are annoyed/disgusted/concerned/worried about his smoking. Research shows you need at least five times more good times than negative times for a marriage to succeed long term. Do you have that? If not you will reach a point where you are just angry or hurt or disgusted or whatever it is you feel about him when he is smoking. That will be the sum of your life with him day in and day out and at some point those feelings will finish off the marriage. It isn’t that we hope you get divorced. It is the only way that we can see for you to have long term happiness. Things like this spiral downward until you reach your breaking point. At that point you will wish you had left a lot sooner.

We all have our dealbreakers. Pot is one of those for me as is smoking cigarettes and routinely getting drunk. I have no use for any of those things and don’t want to be around them even if they are legal. I also have no tolerance for someone who spends beyond their income or who spends within the income money that was set aside for other things.

I’d have to really think about other things because although they might not be a dealbreaker they might be. If my husband traveled for work most of the week most weeks and I was left to take care of everything at home all of the time I think I would get tired of that. If my husband had a job that required him to move every two years to three years I don’t think I could do that.

When you find yourself sneaking and lying you know you are messing up and if you are doing it in a dating relationship you should break up. If you flat out lie to trick someone into marrying you then you shouldn’t be too surprised when they are angry that you tricked them into thinking you were someone other than your true self. Most of us can’t respect someone who pretends to be something other than their true self. That is a bait and switch situation and people hate it. Most people are also hugely disappointed to find out that the person who tricked them was capable of being so deceptive. Then they have to wonder what else do they lie about.

Say I was dating a guy whose favorite thing to do was to go fishing and camping. He would make sure he spent at least one weekend a month fishing and camping and that’s what he did for all of his vacation time. If I disliked fishing and camping but pretended to like them and went on all of his fishing and camping trips until we were married and then I quit going he would feel betrayed. He thought he had a partner who was a perfect match only to find out that he had a partner who was no match at all.

That’s what happened with the original poster. She thought she had a great match only to find they didn’t match at all and the only reason she didn’t know that before the marriage when it would have been much easier to move on was because he lied and misrepresented himself. He was the one who didn’t respect marriage. He didn’t respect it enough to go into it honestly. He didn’t respect it enough to let a dealbreaker be a dealbreaker. He didn’t respect it enough to let her have a choice in what she would experience in her own home after getting married. Marriage requires several essential foundations and one of those is trust and another is respect. He didn’t value marriage highly enough to go into marriage as a trustworthy, respectable partner because he misrepresented who he was.

The best part of your marriage is already over. It will be all downhill from now. He was hiding what he was doing because he knew it was a dealbreaker. Knowing that it was a dealbreaker he did it anyway. He has made his decision. He wants to have both you and the weed but when it comes down to having to choose one or the other he has already chosen the weed. You are already second in his life and you will never be first. If you have children with this man they will always come second to weed. When push comes to shove you are more expendable than the weed. It’s a dealbreaker so it is time to break the deal. Breaking up will be painful, none of us doubt that. Compare the pain and sadness of a breakup to the pain and sadness of spending twenty or thirty years living as you are now. Can you take twenty or thirty years of your current life? Can you see adding children to the situation and spending the next twenty years raising the children by yourself because his primary focus and need will be the weed? If you have children and then breakup you can assume you would be required to send your children to spend weekends with their drug addicted father and his probably drug addicted girlfriend. Think very long and hard to avoid getting yourself into that situation. You have the freedom to breakup now without huge consequences. Of course it will hurt but not nearly as much as sending your kids off to spend the weekend every other weekend with an addict.

Boys have more trouble with assault because people think it can’t happen to them and that they aren’t manly enough if it did happen to them.

I think most of us have a good idea of whether a person likes what we are doing. We can tell if they seem interested or not. We can tell by their body language whether they are leaning into it or not. If their body language is ambiguous then we should pull back. It isn’t that difficult.

No one is saying she should press assault charges.

@Wendy If your daughter comes home crying because some guy was grabbing her and kissing her when she didn’t want it you’ll be fine with it then because she has a brother and you wouldn’t want her brother to get into trouble for grabbing and kissing girls when they didn’t want it.

I think a big part of the problem here is that her parents have raised her to let them make all of her decisions for her. Then she ends up in this situation and her parents aren’t there to tell her what to do or how to handle it. Her parents have raised her to not question and to not have an opinion of her own. They raised her to passively go along with whatever they decided and so she passively went along with what both her friends and the guy decided. She hasn’t had experience with making her own decisions. She doesn’t know how to say no. She doesn’t know how to set boundaries. She doesn’t know how to form her own opinion and then use that to make her own choice.