My first marriage.

I realized it had to end after I had failed to complete suicide, and was in mandatory intensive outpatient therapy. I was listening to everyone in group therapy talking about how awful their relationships were, and how miserable their partners made them, and the really, really obvious answer was, well, just fuckin’ leave.

And it hit me that this was true for me also.

My spouse had been resisting going to marriage counseling for over a decade, controlled all the finances even though I made most of the money, had largely cut me off from the few friends that I had, was verbally, emotionally, and sometimes physically abusive, had been rejecting any attempts at intimacy for over a year (to ‘punish’ me, I guess?), and then blamed me for all the problems. I’d started spiraling when they threatened to leave me, had a couple really bad days at work, and then gotten fired for my “bad attitude”. And from there, I got forced to a hospital.

The divorce was… Unpleasant. They lied to all of our friends about what was going on, and I ended up losing all of the friends I had remaining. The only positive was that I got the house and car.