Another marriage narrative:
"I’m living this reality right now as well. Ten years of marriage, 15 together in total and I’ve finally woken up to these red pill truths thanks to sites like this. We met when we were 18 and she convinced me that our love was this perfect romantic love without conditions. I responded like most men, especially those who are still really kids, and bought into her vision of us being soul-mates hook line and sinker. I ignored the times over the years when I had stumbled and her unconditional love suddenly became very conditional.
Two years ago I lost my job and suddenly I was as disposable as a used kleenex to her. Contemptuous talk about me, disrespect and other men coming out of the woodwork. She had the audacity to tell me she was finally going to live the life of freedom I’d denied her by insisting on a relationship so young, a total rewrite of the truth. It’s not as if I had been 18 and dying to get married and the fact that I held out against marrying her until I was in my 20s did nothing but piss her off.
A young guy who came by one day to fix our fridge was an object of absolute lust for her and she made it clear how useless I was in comparison to him. He was one of several she told me I couldn’t measure up to, guys who lived how they wanted, worked out and socialized all day when not on shift and drank and slept around at night (so basically everything I the perfect beta husband had given up on in order to be with her years ago).
I recovered financially last year and she never cheated physically (carefully verified), but now I’m awake to reality. She is loyal to me only as long as I fulfill all her fantasies, whatever they are in a given moment, and pay all her bills no matter how wasteful some of her expenditures are (at one point when I was jobless we had $100 in the bank to last two weeks and she went out and spent $80 of it on a scarf). This wasn’t a temporary thing, but a pattern I’d ignored throughout our marriage. Even when I was at my lowest, unemployed and living on savings, she was laughing at me and telling me my whole reason for existing was to pay her bills, true for any real man she said. She even convinced me to finally convert to her religion and promptly fell into a flirtation with the minister advising us, my lowest point.
She’s well past her prime now at the age of 34 and I’m only beginning to come into my own, which is why I assume she never left or slept around. I’m now getting fit, making great money and can more than live without her (always could but now I know it). She said we might be over before long if my attitude doesn’t change and I just laughed and said so what? That shocked her and she was the one jumping through my hoops for a while there. But I can tell she’s biding her time and she fully expects me to fall back under her whole Disney princess spell and go back to working my butt off for her and loving her no matter what, but I’ve seen the truth now. You can’t unring a bell and she can’t unsay the venomous things she said to me when she thought I was useless, flirting with men in front of me while I blamed myself for not having work. I’ll do what’s good for me now and she’s welcome to come along for the ride, but on my terms. If not, she can take a walk. I regret marrying and if it doesn’t last I won’t marry again, but I’m just fine with that."