Kerplunk - It's Over!! by A.W., H.R. and Our Girlfriends (i can read with my eyes shut txt) 📖

cause is your husband and marriage –otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book.
____ Set your intention to explore the good, the bad and the ugly from this day forward.
___ Check this box to signify that you are ready to stand up and speak up for yourself!

CHAPTER 2
The Beginning of the End – It’s all down and uphill from here, Sweetie!
What happened? You found your Prince Charming, right? This was the guy you wanted to wake up with every morning for the rest of your life; to have kids with and build a future together. Now all you feel is sad and miserable. Is it you? Is it him? Maybe this is just the way marriages evolve once the honeymoon is over. But you still feel awful. Your insides rumble with uneasiness and the sour taste in your mouth never subsides. Maybe you were married too young – right out of college – and you have grown apart. They say that men marry the woman that they fall in love with and they want her to stay just the same forever. Inversely women marry the man they can see him becoming. They marry his potential. So from the beginning, men and women are growing in opposite directions. He: hoping she will stay exactly as she is, and she: wishing he would develop to the full potential she desires for him. Kinda yucky, huh?
Maybe you were blinded by love and leaped into matrimony way too quickly. Once the excitement of the big white dress and the tropical honeymoon wore off, you came to your senses and "Whoa!" what do you do now? Maybe your beliefs changed. Maybe you didn't have so much in common after all. Maybe those factors added up to arguing, infidelity, insulating the marriage with children (only adding fuel to the fire), or loss of any interest in giving a crap.
Girls, we know you make excuses for your man. “He’s been traveling a lot.” “He can’t help it; he is just like his father.” "His own parents were hard on him" "He had it hard growing up." "His manager is making his life stressful." "He is ...fill in the blank." “We went to therapy a few times but it just made him so uncomfortable to try to express his feelings to a stranger." So you, playing the good wife role, just keep on keeping on. You give it one more try “for the family, for the kids, because it’s almost Christmas.” Eventually you will just get too tired to put forth any effort to solving your marital problems. You will withdraw. You will stop expressing your needs. He doesn’t really care anyway, right? You will throw up your hands and convince yourself that this is just the way marriage is. You’ll think, “The fire goes out after so long anyway, right? We get older and set in our ways and simply cohabitate. Everyone is like this, right?” Wife-Swap, a popular reality TV show, now shows that the average American marriage is just a bit crazy, right? They stick together. You should too. Are you looking forward to a long life of wedded bliss with Mr. Fun? Hmm? We know how you feel. You are at the point where you can give in and just stay the path or you can wake up and see that your marriage is headed for separation or divorce.
For whatever reason you find that you still feel awful. You’re married. You made this choice so you think that you aren’t supposed to feel gross unhappiness, jealousy, loneliness, abuse, neglect, controlled and completely exhausted. But yet you do and you are searching for a way to rectify the marriage or maybe it’s too late to save the harvest and it’s time for you to just to get out.
How are you supposed to know when enough is enough? How are you supposed to be able to decide if there is enough love and respect left to keep your union together? Most of our girlfriends went through a lot before they drew “The Final Straw,” which we will uncover in the next chapter. In some cases "the beginning of the end" built up for years and in other instances, they knew they had made a mistake just a few days after the wedding. So we've broken it down into three groups:
1) Girlfriends who realized a day or two after the wedding that it wouldn't work,
2) Girlfriends who realized the marriage was defunct after a few months,
3) And girlfriends who stuck it out for years, sometimes decades, before concluding their marriage was a failure.
Our girlfriends shared some pretty incredible stories with us. Truth really is stranger than fiction. We can't make this stuff up!
Amazing as it sounds, some of our girlfriends knew a day or two after their wedding that the marriage would not last. Here are their words:
"A couple of days after we were married, I found him sex-ting to an old “friend.” Well, she wasn’t an old friend. She was more of a side dish, a playmate. He kept her and a few other girls a secret for months. I was devastated." – Emily, 23
"The police officer said, “Yeah, we’ve seen this before. Guys like your husband drop their guard after they get married and think that they can get away with just about anything once they get you ringed on your left hand. Nope, this is nothing new. You wouldn’t have found out before. Some guys are just too good at being who they want you to see." This girlfriend dated him for 4 years before they were married and he hid a secret life the whole time (fraud, theft, embezzlement and mucho infidelity). – Lauren, 41
"I think I knew even before I got married that it wouldn’t work. I got married as a last ditch attempt to save the relationship I had put so many years into it. Not a great reason, of course. I know that now, but at the time it seemed to make sense. Honestly I wasn’t finished trying – it took being married for a few years to know that I’d tried everything to make it work with him. In the end I was the only one bending, changing, and trying to save a relationship that simply wouldn't work." – Claire, 50
"Looking back, I always worried that it was not going to work out. So from day 1, I suppose that I knew it. I always had a feeling he was cheating and it turned out he was." – Lilly, 36

"I caught him lying and cheating one week after our wedding–sex-ting
another woman! Who the hell did he think he was?! Tiger Woods?
Jesse James? My fairytale love suddenly turned into a Hollywood horror!"
– Allison, 28

"Now I wonder if others could see the mistake I was about to make by marrying him and I was so into the pomp and circumstance of the nuptials that I couldn't see it. My father, my maid-of-honor and my sister all offered me an out, without judgment on my wedding day. I should have listened." – Kara, 42

And on a positive note…
“I knew I had made a mistake just a few days after my wedding. I got caught up in the romance and foolishly married too young and too quickly. I did genuinely like my husband. He was not a bad guy, but he was not my soul mate. We held it together for 27 years. Once I had gotten all 4 kids off to college, I went back to college and found a job and life for myself outside the house. By that time, my husband and I were roommates, nothing more. I chose to get a divorce when I was 46 years old. It was the best, most liberating choice I have ever made. My kids understood. My husband agreed. We all have enjoyed a great relationship for the last 30 years and I don’t regret one minute of my life and the choices I have made.” – Isabella, 76

Some of our girlfriends knew after one to several months that the marriage would not survive. Here is what they shared:
"After a short time he revealed his other side – the side that was narcissistic, egotistical and didn’t play well with others where his career was concerned. We moved three times in 6 years and my husband wanted me to move again before I filed for divorce. Our oldest son went to 3 high schools due to our many moves. It got to the point where I couldn’t even stand to be around him anymore. He didn’t see it as a marriage or any form of partnership. He just gave my son and I orders that we were expected to follow.” – Molly, 61
"Several months after the wedding, I was painting a room in our house when I just sat on the floor and thought, “What have I done?” I knew I’d made a mistake but pushed the feeling down and determined to try to make the marriage work. I completely ignored all feelings of hopelessness. I lost respect for him and therefore trashed any physical attraction I had towards him. I liked him less and less as I got to know him better from living with him. I felt he was not ready for marriage, and I learned that he had significant family issues that hindered his ability to be in a healthy relationship." – Megan, 35

"As the months went by, he became increasingly secretive. I could not tell what was going on and each time I would ask he became angrier. I didn't know what to do and was afraid to confide in friends. It was a new marriage and I was supposed to be blissfully happy! I noticed he was spending way too much time on the computer. When I questioned this he just said he was playing around. My gut said otherwise. So I spent a $100 and bought computer-monitoring software. It monitored his keystrokes and grabbed every single screen shot. I got his accounts, emails and passwords. I felt like I was betraying him by spying on him, but the information I found opened my eyes to the fact that I was married to a complete stranger. He committed such horrific acts. Multiple counts of infidelity, Internet dating with profiles each with different zip codes, meeting women in other towns, sending other women, gifts, porn, lying, Internet fraud...the list goes on. He is in jail now." – Zoe, 38

The rest of our girlfriends knew their marriages would not work after one or more years.
"After 4 years, I had no idea who this man was. Who did I marry? His behavior was so foreign to me – turned out he and his co-workers would do drugs at the office. His co-worker got arrested and put in jail (turned out he