Do I Stay Out of Guilt, or Finally Save Myself?

I need advice because I feel like I am breaking apart. Right now in 2025 I’ve just found out again that my husband has been talking to someone on Ashley Madison. He only told me because the person or someone connected to her threatened to expose him unless he paid them money. He started the conversation by saying, “you know how we never have sex and you ignore me.”

The reality is that he has been unemployed since January of last year. I am the sole breadwinner, working full time, and I’m also in school full time. I am TIRED. Sex is not the most important thing on my plate right now. The last time we were intimate was maybe three or four weeks ago, not months, not years, but he still jokes constantly about how he “never gets any.” He has never once come to me to have an honest conversation about how he feels unloved or unwanted. Instead, he hides it, then goes online and seeks attention from strangers.

When I confront him, it’s always excuses. He says he “needs attention.” He blames mental illness and says “it runs in his family.” He says I’m “difficult to talk to” and that he doesn’t know how I’ll react, so instead of trying, he looks elsewhere. It always circles back to me somehow being the problem, while I’m the one holding everything together.

And this isn’t new. It’s the same cycle, every few years. In 2018 I found out he was talking to at least three women. He admitted to meeting one of them twice and went “riding around” with her and her aunt. Then he mailed her kid a video game “out of the goodness of his heart.” He only told me because the aunt threatened to out him to me unless he gave her money. Around that same time I saw him answering Craigslist ads, telling women he wanted “friends with benefits, maybe more,” and he had Kik and Tinder on his phone.

In 2014 it was a girl on My Free Cams from Knoxville. In 2011 it was dating profiles looking for “friends with benefits” while married to me. Every three to four years, like clockwork, the itch comes back, he gives in, and I’m left shattered.

Last time he promised we’d go to counseling, and we never did. Each time he gives me just enough information to get me off his back and then expects me to move on, but I don’t move on. I can’t. His betrayal sits inside me every day, eating at me.

Now I feel trapped. I don’t even know how to move on from this or how to walk away. And I feel guilty because he doesn’t work, and part of me feels like if I leave, I’m abandoning someone who depends on me. But if I stay, I’m abandoning myself.

That’s the war inside me right now. Do I stay out of guilt and responsibility, or do I finally choose myself and walk away?

Has anyone else lived this kind of cycle? How did you know when it was truly time to go? Is there even a way back from repeated betrayal, or am I clinging to something that has already burned to the ground?