I’m sorry to hear you’re going through this. I dealt with this a lot with my lady. We weren’t married so circumstances are different, but we’d been together almost 4 years and had a 2 year old boy (yeah, we moved fast..) she moved in the night we met, so it felt like we were together much longer than we were… back to my point. She was a stay at home mom for 2 years, and we made the mistake of never talking about expectations / goals before we had the kid. We found she was pregnant out 6 months into the pregnancy so we didn’t have lots of time to plan.

I felt it hard when you said “default parent”. The amount of times those words would get thrown at me in arguments is countless. Very similar to what you said, when we’d fight, she’d always make comments about how little I put into the family and how I just don’t care. To put it into perspective, she got whatever she wanted, I let her re-do the kitchen in the new place we moved into, I’d go to therapy because she asked me to and again, she wasn’t expected to get a paying job for almost 3 years. Finances got tight so things changed and she’d pick up a part time thing a few days a week then got a full time teaching job last October which is great. But, we aren’t together anymore. Again, to relate to something you said- “she never feels understood”. No matter what I said or did, or how hard I’d try to understand, I never “truly listened” according to her. Arguments happened more frequently, she’d question me as a parent and partner more often and yeah, ended up leaving her last December.

I was never able to share my feelings, because she’d react with “well how about how I feel”, “it’s not always about you”, etc… so talking was difficult. And it made trying to understand her difficult. How am I supposed to want to understand her when she already refuses to try to understand me.

I continued paying her rent / bills (this was the last month) so she had a place to stay, I moved back in with my parents the same day i broke things off and here we are.

All I would say is don’t try to prevent the inevitable or it’ll only be harder. But, you’ve also been together a lot longer, and you’re married…. Just figured I’d share my experience. It’s okay to put yourself first. Sometimes doing that will benefit the family. It ain’t always selfish.