" I choke to remain with my mom and texted him that I need a divorce . "
In a recent Reddit post shared tor/AITAH(am I the *sshole here), site useru/Charming_Passage3440explained that she’d been married to her husband for two years.
“He has a habit of sitting in the car for 5-10 minutes before entering the house,“she explained. “I don’t know why he does it, but he talked about a past traumatic experience he had when he came home and caught his ex cheating on him.”
While the original poster (OP) understands different people have different hangups,she saysthat if she’s being honest, the habit makes her “uneasy” and has caused a lot of fights between them. For instance, sometimes he stays seated in his car when dinner’s ready, or when the couple have guests over.
On top of that, OP was worried her husband might one day face a situation where he had to act quickly, but would simply sit in his car instead. “And it happened last week,“she said. “My eight-year-old son tripped and fell from the stairs and broke his ankle. He was in so much pain and I called my husband to take him to the hospital.”
And whileshe saysher husband “rushed out of work,” he took his time arriving to the scene. “I called and called and then I was stunned when I looked out the window and I saw him sitting outside the house in his car.”
“I asked why he didn’t come into the house immediately to help and he said he would after two more minutes,“she added. “I was so mad and hurt but… he insisted he wouldn’t feel ‘comfortable’ coming in until the 10 minutes were up. He told me to get my son ready to take him to the hospital, but I started screaming at him nonstop telling him this was a family emergency,” she continued.
She says she regrets shouting at him but admits part of the reason she was so stressed was because a situation like that was “always stuck in the back of mind.“She added, “I ended up taking my son by myself when my neighbour intervened and offered to take us. We went to the hospital and later my husband came and tried to talk to me but I refused.”
“I then went to stay with my mom and texted him that I wanted a divorce,“she shared.“He tried to…. justify what he’s done [by] saying he could not help it and that he was nervous and wanted to help my son but felt stuck. I refused to reply to his messages and days later his family harrassed me saying I was making my husband’s trauma more severe and that I disrespected his boundaries by pushing him off his limits.”
She adds she feels “lost and unable to think because of the whole ordeal.” While her family is on her side, “My husband is still trying to basically talk me out of divorce saying I’m making a huge deal out of it. I feel like I no longer have trust in him especially when it comes to serious stuff like how cold he acted in a family emergency.“She addedthat her son is not her husband’s biological son.
Others say that while a mental health issue may be at play, it’s not OP’s fault for being hurt by the actions. “Since this is causing problems in his marriage, he needs to address it ASAP and his family needs to support his recovery from this compulsion. I don’t blame OP one bit,“u/Inevitable-Divide933commented.
“If he can’t get past his trauma to help a child who broke his ankle he needs therapy. It’s already caused ‘many fights,’ so if he refuses therapy do what you gotta do. NTA [not the *sshole],“u/Test-Subject-593shared.
But some were a little more upset with the husband.u/wtw4, for instance, said “I mean, he could have just called and said, ‘I’m outside.’ I have no idea if OP could lift the child, but it doesn’t seem like he actually had to go inside, making his ritual kind of pointless.”
And yet another Redditor,u/GreenCoatsAreCool, opined, “If it was a huge emergency, why did you call your husband to drop work and come home? How do you get around if you’re at home with no car? If it’s an emergency, don’t wait for him — call an ambulance or someone else. Your husband should have responded faster, but you are putting a lot of the responsibility of this situation on him and truly character-assassinating him. Your response seems to come from somewhere else, because you seem to have thought about this situation numerous times. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy and you and your husband should have talked about his trauma more in depth. I find it odd that you immediately jump to divorce as well.”
Shout out tor/AITAHandu/Charming_Passage3440for having this discussion.
mention : entry have been edited for length and/or clarity .
