43M Can’t Shake 36F Words

In the last three months, I (43M)have lost around 20 lbs through food tracking, daily runs, and an added assist from peptides. My wife (36F) has made snarky comments the whole time about how I’m being unhealthy, how I’m becoming frail, that I’m going to get scurvy, and that I look weak. For context, I’ve dropped from 210 to 190…not a huge transformation. I’ve never considered myself overweight, I just decided to dial in everything because of an overseas trip we have this summer.

Well lately our marriage has come under stress with her starting a new job. She absolutely does not have to work because of my income, but she says she just needs to have something outside of the house. I genuinely don’t care and can somewhat understand, so I try to be supportive. However, most days she comes home and complains about working and to add to it, she’s so exhausted she’s asleep before dinner. Leaving me to do most of the activities with the kids. Her argument is that she does the morning routine (which is at most 2 hours of running around), so the least I can do is take care of the evenings. Mind you, with my commute, I’m not home for 12 hours of the day.

A few nights ago I decided to say something. It immediately became this big thing about how I want her to stay locked in the house and I’m controlling. Things got heated and in the middle of it I brought up how I’m tired of her making comments about my appearance. She responds by doubling down, accusing me of looking sick, weak, and malnourished. (For context, I track 2500 calories a day). In anger, I respond by calling her a fat b**. She’s not at all in the slightest. And just like that, the flood gates opened up. She proceeded to go on about how I’m not attractive, me going to the gym and losing weight won’t do anything for my appearance, how my d*** is too small, and a few other things just trying to point out my looks. I tried going to sleep but she then ripped my CPAP off my face and threw the entire unit to the floor. In that moment she realized she went too far and left the room to sleep on the couch.

I wake up the next morning, she’s emptied the joint account and claims she needs it to find a lawyer. We exchange a few words while I’m at work, but I’m really not interested in a conversation and I was genuinely busy. In my commute and moments of silence, her words are playing in repeat in my mind. I come home, she acts as though nothing is wrong and wants to know if I’m still mad. We shared a few words about the night before, but the whole time all I can think about is how I don’t want to talk to her.

A few days have passed now, and she is walking around like nothing happened. She’s still talking about work, although her tune has changed and now she loves it. She’s still exhausted and I’m back to hanging out with the kids solo. She has asked that I stop taking peptides and is staying firm on her opinion that I look “gauntly”. Part of me has lost the drive to stay on a strict diet, but I’m trying to remember that I do feel better when I eat healthy.

I’m at a point now where I have no desire to speak to her about anything. The money was moved back over, but I had to push the issue. We have four kids together so I’m trying to think about what’s best for the kids. The easy answer would probably be divorce and I know our kids witnessing this type of relationship isn’t healthy either.

Not to go too deep into my childhood, but I was bullied a lot about my appearance. I haven’t had a ton of issues with confidence as an adult, but my appearance has come up a few times in moments of rejection in my bachelor years and once when I heard a former gf’s friend say something along the lines of “not sure why you think he’s attractive”.

Reading this over…I’m fully aware this is toxic. I guess I just needed to vent. But how do I move on with a SO who can do quickly make those kind of verbal attacks and then go back to normal so quickly? She even said the next day “I was pretty quick with that wasn’t I?” My response was “yeah, it was just waiting to come out”. To that I got no response.