Am I [27M] in a Toxic Relationship with my Wife [25F]?
I have been with my now Wife for 7 years, married for 1. We met back in college and started dating pretty soon after. We moved in to an apartment and were there for a little over 2 years before we finally got married and bought a house.
While we lived together before marriage I had started playing video games with a group of friends one night a week for about 2-3 hours after work. My wife and I would eat dinner and then I would go to my office and play. During this time she would go play games with her friends in her office and it was just a normal little occurrence. She would also play with her friends at other times though, including weekends where she would occasionally be up extremely late. I mean from 6pm to 4 am with minor breaks. Where I am just sort of left to wait until she says I can go to bed on my own time which is normally like 1-2 am.
She would get annoyed when I talked about how our games went and talking about things that happened. However, after we were married and in our house, she started getting upset in subtle ways the nights that I would be playing. She would make comments about how she didn't like them, silently sulking when it was time for me to go up, etc.
It came to a head few days before our game night where she said her friends were starting to play a game and she wanted me to join her group and play. I was down, it was something we could play together and hang out. However she said that they would be playing at the same time my group met. So I said "ok, are you able to move your time around?" and she said no it was that time and day. So I said "I will ask my group if we can shift our time around".
She looks at me and goes, "No, you can't do both."
So I ask her why and she says she doesn't like them, even though she has never met them or talked to them. She said that I was spending too much time with them and that it was taking away from time with her. We spend all other moments together except work. I have never gone out to hang out with any one ever while we have been together.
She said that having two game groups would be too much time taken but I countered saying it would be the same amount of time since we would be playing one of those blocks together but she refused. She then said that she had wanted me to invite her to the games and want to play with her. I said that I feel like I should be able to have friends outside of her to hang out with sometimes.
This upset her and she claimed I did not love her anymore because she was not enough and I was choosing them over her. I refuted that saying we both should be able to play with our own friends and play together. She said "but you were fine with it when we started dating" well that was then and I want to have other people to talk to and hang out outside of just each other. Which then circled back to me not loving her and choosing others over her again. At one point in this discussion I flat out said this feels manipulative to basically give me an ultimatum between her and my friends. She just agreed saying "yes it is" and I said again that is manipulative and she went " You knew what I was like before you married me. If you aren't happy you can leave."
At this point she broke down sobbing on the bedroom floor and I just kind of stood there till I came over to her and just sat and hugged her saying I loved her and it became about stopping her from crying.
My group ended up falling apart due to other issues. However I was not invited to play games with her friends.
This happened back in April of this year so I hadn't talked to anyone else since then. I played games with my wife and occasionally she would go play with her friends. She would still play late with her friends either once every week or every other week on weekends.
One night when she decided to play for another late night where she took her dinner up to her office with her to go hang out with her friends I decided to play a game and looked at some random groups to join to have someone to talk to. When she came out of her office and heard me talking she came in and said "What are you doing" and I explain i was talking to some people on discord and the look she gave me of *how dare I* glare and she sort of scoffed and closed the door to my office while saying "you can head to bed whenever"
Following that when I got off later she started interrogating me about them. "What is their name, What do they do for a living?, Will he play *game that we play together*?, I think people who use their name in their username are stupid" and I mentioned a bit of what he told me on some of his job roll and she sort of scoffed and said "it sounds like a role player, how cringe"
She basically also has started sort of questioning me when I play online. I have to play with myself shown online or else she starts questioning why I am marked offline. Meanwhile she is marked offline for the past year. At one point I had marked myself offline and then we played a game together and she got upset about it and said later she thought I was cheating on her.
We also had a disagreement about how to do a random task outside and neither of us had done it before but she asserted her way was right even when our results looked the same. So I called her out that she had never done it either so how can she claim hers is automatically better when they look the same. So got upset and stormed off only to come back and say "So are we going to the store or can you unlock the door?" because we had planned on going to grab some stuff to do some yardwork.
And I kind of was just tired of it so I went and unlocked the door and we went inside. So I am just thinking I need to go just relax and calm down so I started heading upstairs and she says "Ok , go hide up in your office." so I turned to her and go "Maybe ill just go somewhere else then?"
"Sure, you do that if you want to stay married"
So I just kind of sit on the stairs take a breath and engage her after a few minutes asking about some other stuff and then finally offer for us to run to the store to grab stuff then we could go to another store she wanted to go look at.
She also got upset at one point that I sent my brother my address to confirm for him since he had to use it for some security paperwork for their job. I hadn't mentioned it because it was such a minor thing but when I was mentioning a message from him about his work and she had made a comment "you dont talk to your brother much, whens the last time you talked to him?" and I went through my messages and I was like oh the last time was when i sent the address.
"Why didnt you tell me that?"
"It was like two messages to confirm it"
"Ok but you couldve told me she sent that, I dont know why you decided to hide it"
" I didnt? I just didnt seem that important"
"Fine, still seems like something you couldve told me"
These are just a couple things that have happened since we married. I am trying to start keeping track of things because it does not feel like this is normal but sometimes I also wonder if I am just expecting the wrong thing out of our relationship? It feels like when I have a disagreement on something with how she criticizes things about me like hanging with friends for a few hours, but then she spends an entire night hanging with hers. But if I push back on it then its a question of my love for her and my commitment.
My memory can be sometimes iffy on stuff like these because I normally just forget out the details of our disagreements because they dont seem to matter until they get brought up again later where I just take her word for it on what happened because as she says " she never forgets". So now I have started keeping a journal of things to try and help me review things and behaviors and see if I am doing something wrong or whatnot.
Posted Nov 1, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC