My wife’s reckless spending is ruining our sex life

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My wife's reckless spending is ruining our sex life


When I married my wife 20 years ago she was completely unmaterialistic, prudent with money and was always saving for the future. We were able to buy a nice house for our two boys and enjoy one nice family holiday each year.

But over the past few years, the woman I married has transformed into someone else entirely.

A year ago, she persuaded me to move to a much bigger house on an interest-only mortgage – something she said would work out in time because we would inherit from our parents one day and pay it off. In reality, our parents are both fit as fiddles and this debt has me lying in bed awake every night worrying about repayment.

Recently she went out to buy a brand new car on hire purchase at a ridiculous interest rate after years of being perfectly content with used vehicles.

After years of wanting to “age naturally” my wife has now started getting regular Botox injections. When we meet friends for dinner, she jokingly talks about her car, the new house and her aesthetic injections as “her midlife crisis”. She laughs it off, but inwardly I am despairing. My own spending has not increased at all. She is becoming more and more reckless with money, becoming even more of a big spender each month. I truly worry how long we’ll survive if she goes on this way.

I’m in a management role at work – middle management, to be honest – and my wife is a partner in a solicitor’s firm so we both earn well enough, but I’ve always budgeted for our lives as they were, when we had fewer outgoings. Now each month I find myself wondering if we will have enough left over for the food shopping.

We used to have a loving marriage and regular sex but even that has dwindled because I simply cannot think of anything except our outgoings and the ridiculous “never never” mortgage we now owe. My wife often instigates intimacy but I am so resentful of her selfish and unfair spending that I find it impossible to reciprocate. I just roll over and pretend to go to sleep until she leaves me alone.

The stress is making me feel unwell. I have constant headaches from the anxiety about money and find myself furious with her for not caring about our future financial security.

One friend of mine suggested it could be the menopause – but my wife hasn’t mentioned anything of the sort, and other women of a similar age who are friends of ours not acting in the same way, so I am not sure if that’s correct.

She’s started mocking me for my prudence and recently joked in front of friends that I was “tight”, complete with an eye roll and sigh. I didn’t say anything at the time but spent the night seething. It’s like she just doesn’t care about our future together at all.

I have a modest pension plan – something that would have easily seen me through retirement if we’d carried on at our prudent financial pace. But now with a huge mortgage to pay off and my wife’s constant spending all of that has been thrown into doubt.

I miss the unmaterialistic woman who used to laugh at people getting into silly amounts of debt and who wanted to age gracefully. She has changed beyond belief, I almost feel as though I married one woman and ended up with another. Frankly, after all this I’m not sure whether I can bring myself to stay with her.




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