A marriage should be built on mutual understanding, appreciation, and love for one another. However, there are cases where one of the partners acts as though they don’t care enough for that union to last. This can easily lead to constant fights and even separation.
A woman took to MamaMia to share how her marriage of five years came to an end after she accidentally read one of her husband’s texts to his friends in which he referred to her with a nickname that “felt like she’d been slapped in the face.”
At the time, their son was 2 years old, and her husband was out most of the time without ever telling her who he was seeing or where he was going simply because he believed “he didn’t have to.”
She tried hard to justify his decisions because he was the breadwinner for the family and she was happy to give him downtime, asking money from her parents to support his business.
Her husband was like that since the beginning, and although she believed things would change after their son was born, that wasn’t the case.
“He continued his long Friday lunches, that always turned into Friday night drinks, because they were networking opportunities. He had always played Thursday night sport – he didn’t ever even miss one week,” she wrote in her letter to the outlet.
Moreover, he wasn’t willing to say if he had any intention of getting involved in her and her son’s life.
One Friday morning, the woman’s husband was in the shower and his phone ‘kept pinging’ so she decided to check it in case it was urgent.
What she stumbled upon was a text message to his friends that read, “Don’t think I can make it tonight. SWMBO will say no.”
She was confused as she had no idea what that meant, although she was certain it alluded to her.
When she asked her husband about it, he answered in the most casual manner. “It means ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed,” he said.
The woman felt awful. She felt like he treated her as his mother while he was the teenager who tried to sneak out of the house in order to have fun with his friends.
“After five years of marriage, this is what I’d become to him. The only thing I ever asked of him – some accountability regarding his whereabouts, was apparently too demanding. And he’d spoken about me like that to his friends,” she wrote.
Feeling “mortified” by the nickname he gave her, and realizing that no one in the chat questioned the abbreviation—implying he’d used it before—the woman knew there was “no coming back from that.” This union didn’t feel like a marriage nor what a family should look like.
“I was never, ever, going to kiss, let alone sleep with, a man who called me that after 10 years together – even after becoming the mother of his son,” she wrote, adding that she knew at that point that both her and her son deserved better than that. Not being valued where she was supposed to be loved wasn’t the life she ever imagined so she made the decision to take her baby and leave her husband.
Her story gathered plenty of attention and people’s opinions regarding her decision were divided.