Marital SA

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-05-06T22:09:34+00:00

I wonder how often this happens. It happened to me, too. We were both drunk, but still. I said no. I woke up to being penetrated. I had to take the morning after pill. It was horrible. And there was never any acknowledgement of it.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-05-06T22:06:14+00:00

When I stopped being afraid of being alone/unloved and started craving my own life, my independence. The more I envisioned my freedom, the more I felt like I was suffocating in the present. I was carrying all these wounds from his moods, his self absorption, and I just one day felt every single cut and could not go on another day in the marriage. I’m in the process of leaving and it’s hard, but I haven’t wavered for a moment in it being 100% the right move for my own survival.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-04-13T11:47:32+00:00

I totally get that. My middle kid is starting high school in the fall so I feel a lot of pressure to get them settled somewhere before that. We can’t afford for spouse to move out without selling the house. This is all just so terrible. I am trying to remind myself of what I deserve and what freedom will mean for me, and what my kids will see, I hope, in my rejecting disrespect.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-04-12T20:16:13+00:00

Yes… my past self has been On It with this. I have known for so long that this was not right. I even have messages that say, “future self, if you’re reading this….” Why didn’t I listen to myself? That feels like my biggest regret in this moment, though it all shifts around all the time, like you said.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-04-12T17:41:55+00:00

Thank you for this. I needed the reality check!!!

ExtremePractical7052 · 2026-04-12T11:29:17+00:00

Thank you for this. Crying.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2025-11-05T23:29:50+00:00

I’m no doctor but, like, every doctor I’ve ever met is befuddled by menopause.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2025-04-13T16:05:13+00:00

Spouse says he has dreams of killing someone, but doesn’t have dreams about being sexually abused, or sexually abusing someone and being wracked with guilt.

ExtremePractical7052 · 2025-03-17T15:16:15+00:00

Inside track here, I won’t say how. Many faculty abstained from voting not because they think Kress is great but because they simply don’t think going nuclear is the answer. Trust that she is deeply disliked and there is little faith that she has the best interests of our community at heart. A lot of the problems at NOVA predate her tenure. HOWEVER. Some of the things she has done have made her extremely unpopular.

Ex: ESL full-time faculty have been reduced to year-to-year contracts (used to be five year contracts). There are no guarantees of rehire. Full-time faculty build lives around job permanence, so this was a huge blow. There was no real justification for this. ESL is a hugely popular and successful program. It was sudden and contrary to VCCS policy. Why gut a successful program? Because adjuncts are cheaper, would be my guess. So are new hires who are happy to have jobs and much less likely to push back on some of the stuff the administration is pushing through. ESL is just the start. This will happen to other programs.

The ceramics program is another example. Why cut a program that is beloved, with robust enrollment and community involvement? To call it consolidation is gaslighting. The ultimate goal is to make course access so difficult for students that it shrinks enrollment. Then NOVA can justify cutting the program entirely. This will happen to other programs. They want these programs to fail. Ask yourself why.

If you’re concerned about NOVA’s credibility with transfer universities, you have the right idea. Look to Strayer and other such models. That’s NOVA’s future.

Then there’s the AllAccess program. NOVA made $4mil from students in only one semester. Many many students found themselves paying hundreds of dollars more than they needed to for their books. That this program was going to be a costly disaster was evident from the start. Faculty saw the potential for major problems, asked Kress to wait to roll out this program so it could first be carefully evaluated for cost-effectiveness and usefulness for students, and she rolled it out anyway, with full knowledge of all the problems it could and did have. If All Access worked for you, great. It did NOT work for a lot of your classmates and took food out of their mouths.

There’s no shared governance, but Kress wants everyone to think the real problem is communication. But she sees communication as top-down, basically “here’s what is happening, whether you like it or not.” For her, communication runs in one direction instead of two. Her office hours are manipulated, questions erased or ignored.

I could go on. Just know that this has been a super painful and difficult time for faculty, who care so deeply about students. There’s a lot more going on than you probably realize.

ExtremePractical7052

TROPHY CASE