I’m miserable in my marriage and want to leave, but my husband needs a hip replacement. Would It be awful to leave him now?

I'm not sure if my prior post was uploaded.

Your bigger problem apart from the surgeries is the business valuation upon divorce. My girlfriend also had a business she had started. She was the face of the business. Her husband did the books part time. Upon divorce she had to make giant payments to buy him out of the business.

I'd consult a divorce attorney and find out how your business would be valued in a divorce situation.

Given the business situation I'd stay through both surgeries to build good will.

I suspect since your husband is not morbidly obese, is fairly fit, and eats a healthy diet he will bounce back quickly from both surgeries.

Mom was in her 70's but fairly fit when she had the spinal stenosis surgery.
It was done as out patient. They wanted her to use the walker the first couple of days. She did but she really did not need it. By day 4 she was walking without the walker. By day 7 she was doing well, cooking meals and walking her dog outside.

Hire CNA's for the first several days after each surgery to give yourself a break.

My late husband also had spinal stenosis along many other things and it can lead to a loss of mobility. The surgery for spinal stenosis can be fairly intense and can take about six months or more depending on the severity. A lot of people will want to judge you if you leave, please do not listen to them. If the marriage has been unhappy to the point you are depressed and isolated then I would say to get out can be a wise choice. Divorce is not an unforgivable sin, only rejecting Jesus is. Is this the beginning of a myriad of health issues? What if he became bedridden?

I think maybe you should Google spinal stenosis. Seems without surgery it will worsen over time. He could end up in a wheelchair and be incontinent. It would be very hard caring for someone like this.

Can you go out with your own friends and maybe go on vacations with them? If so would that make life happier at home?

It's not a minor procedure, but spinal stenosis can often be corrected by surgery. Physical therapy can also be helpful and is frequently the initial treatment of choice. Planned hip replacement in a person of your husband's age may have a very rapid recovery.

I am single with no children, and I had a knee replacement in my 60s. I was able to take care of myself after surgery with only a small amount of outside assistance to do laundry and grocery shopping, as I recall--this was before the era of online grocery shopping! The stenosis surgery demanded much more aftercare, and I did have 24-hour care at afterwards for aa few weeks, which I was able to afford

I've been in a business partnership with my husband for 40+ years (and still am) - a c corp. My son went into an LLC business partnership with his best friend. Breaking up a marriage is one thing. Breaking up a business relationship is another and can be equally messy.

I'm not going to say either way to leave him or not, as we are anonymous strangers with no accountability to you and are only getting your side of the story. That being said, if you do leave, know that there is never a "perfect" time to do it, the timing is only about preparedness. You need to get as much as possible in place before he knows what you intend to do.

Depending upon what type of business you have together (c corp, LLC, etc). you need to take the contract/paperwork to a business attorney to talk you through how to extricate yourself. I don't recommend using an attorney that you are both currently using as this will create a quandry for that lawyer. This will also cost money. I would start with figuring out the business piece first, then move on to consult with a divorce attorney.

I have been thinking about how your H has ruined his body with a very long-term ‘diet and workout body-builder schedule’, basically chosen for vanity. This is unusual for a man. Men’s bodies are even now ruined because of repeated work stress (eg many miners), or sport (Australian Rules Football is notorious for multiple concussions and the long term results). Historically it’s women whose bodies have been ruined for vanity, from footbinding to corrosive white face powder. H has the health result of his own quite unnecessary choices. He is doomed to live with it, but there is no reason why you should be doomed as well. Don’t feel guilty if you leave.

My late husband had a hip replacement. It can take up to six months to a year for total healing. Most people begin to get back on their feet about three months in. My advice is this, start making a plan for other ways to have your husband cared for. Do not stay in a miserable marriage because being a full-time caregiver will only make things worse.

Hip replacement can signal a downward spiral of health problems at times. Your spouse might be more mobility limited from now on. Can you handle the physical side of this? Your spouse will need physical therapy. As for the daughter, she needs to realize she cannot depend on you for her entire life. Perhaps his daughter wants to help care for him so she and her children have a place to stay?

The waitlists for hip replacement are often months long. And if he went to the gym to lift, he is likely not a high priority on this list.

So, it really comes down to being ok with the financial loss you will have to take by liquidating the house and the business, unless one party buys the other out.

My MIL was Catholic and raised her children Catholic. FIL was not. He manipulated her through her religion. When he died I hoped for her a few years of freedom from his heavy thumb. She died a month and a day later. Time is always shorter than we realize.

You were coerced into a Thanksgiving at your SD’s home that you didn’t want and it is a few days after. There is that.

I would separate the stenosis from the hip surgery. You learned of it a month ago, when was he diagnosed? This is wrong on so many levels if he has known and felt it was none of your concern.

I wonder if he is too OCD to be leaving his financial future in your hands knowing you aren’t happy?
Especially as he basically keeps the books and plans your lives while you work??
I would use the time he is in the hospital and the rehab checking things out on the financial front. Do you go over the taxes before signing? Do you look at the bank statements? Does he have a safety deposit box you never see the contents of? How are the bank accounts set up? Is the daughter a beneficiary?

Work with professionals so that you aren’t manipulated by him in the areas you are unsure of. Stop taking his word at face value for anything. If you don’t have access to your financial records/accounts, why not? Just how bad is this?

When was the last time you saw your parents?

Why not plan your own day this coming Saturday? Skip breakfast and get out a bucket list and see what you would be sorry you missed in Ca if you left next week. Would you dare to do that? Just how strong is his control?

Would you miss the step grands? Are they taught to respect and love you? Do they see your husband while you are working?
Would you want this step daughter to be your caregiver?

Could you imagine making her your POA? Is she her dad’s POA?

What would you miss about your Ca life? Sometimes going home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

At the very least I would insist on getting the daughter on her own. She has an Inheritance and you have what? The looming prospect to be someone’s drudge who is not going to give you a minutes peace if you don’t do everything the way he wants it to be done?

You can’t afford her. Hire someone to do the little she does if it would put you under water to do w/o her meager contribution. Pay a salary and taxes and who ever you pay is responsible for their own rent. You may be looking at caregivers for him soon if you are going to be the provider.

Insist on couples therapy. Use the fact that you just learned of this diagnosis to increase the need for a clear understanding of his future and the fact that he was keeping it from you. That the daughter needs to go, etc.

These are tough issues but they will never get easier and lots of red flags for them to get worse.
Your husband sounds condescending to me but you have to want to be in control of your own life and that can be scary if you have grown accustomed to someone else calling the shots. He doesn’t sound lazy like the daughter but he will most likely be very threatened by any independence you show. It may be too difficult to change your own actions with him looming large. You may need a separation. To “take some time apart” as you work through these life altering decisions.

Let us know how it goes. Holidays are hard. A lot of issues surface that we let slide other times of the year. Maybe that’s a benefit of holidays to force us to acknowledge what’s not working so well with the people we spend our lives with.

If you were miserable with him for most of your marriage, you should have walked away a long time ago.

Do the right thing and see him through his surgery. If you stuck around for 22 years, you can stick around for a few more months. Use his recovery time wisely make plans to go.

“I feel like the devil considering leaving him now” – when has this NOT felt like the devil? This time is no worse than any time for ‘walking out on him’.

My suggestion would be to use this time to plan and prepare. Coming to this site is part of ‘plan’. I’d separate this into three parts:
1) Plan for your own life if you decide to separate. Will you go back east? Will your telephone friends really be there to start your new social life? Where would you live? What appropriate jobs seem to be on offer? Don’t just get on a plane and arrive with no plans! Start researching now.
2) How will you deal with the business and the partnership? Get some business/legal advice (NOT just from your relationship counselor) about the options. Think it through, and do any prepatory work that is needed. That could include making separate copies of accounts, recording how much work the daughter actually does, whether the business is saleable and how would proceeds need to be split. Make sure that you have copies of all tax records.
3) Find out the options for separation. It may be that your church disapproves of remarriage but not of divorce itself, or of legal separation. Since Pope John Paul 1, the Catholic Church has had quite a few of its ‘rules’ and ‘practices’ under review (from opposing contraception to retaining pedophile priests), and many parishioners and priests have felt able to review old ‘rules’ themselves. For example, in the old days even cremation rather than burial was viewed as contrary to Bible ‘rising from the dead’ teachings, but that too has changed.

Move forward to the practicalities of separating, while you give yourself time to think about whether to go ahead with it! Best wishes, Margaret

This might sound cold but every relationship is a transaction. What are the two parties asking each other to do? did they consent to it? Or did anyone railroad the other into something? Last statistics show the majority of Americans over the age of 55 are single. This is concerning in eldercare as we will have so many people age alone, and in nursing, men do not age as well compared to women, and single men by the far have the worst declines.

It sounds like the beginning of eldercare for your spouse. It also sounds like the relations might have been off balance in that perhaps someone did not do enough to improve the life of the marriage during the good times, and now during the bad times that has come to light.

Love, caring, grief, commitment are unpaid hard work. Some of us don't commit choose to be alone because it did not feel justified to commit to something that took and took.

I am not here to judge or tell someone how to feel or what to do, all I know is if an emotion like love, caring, grief no longer feels justified or caring or the situation has become detrimental, then someone needs to decide what to do. That puts one in control of our emotions versus the other way around.

I work in eldercare hospice and my experience in this world of capitalism we call the United States, no one wants to do the hard, costly, unpaid work of commitment, love, caregiving or grieving, instead they make excuses and blame or argue about money or resources or play games or use people for things and think they won. If I went out on a date with someone that asked me on to take care of their hip surgery and chronic pain from body building I would not care if they looked like THE ROCK, I would run, as that is just to intense of a demand from someone I just met. If it were my spouse of several decades that had put in the hard work of love, commitment, caregiving, grieving, sacrifice, dedication that goes into a marriage or family or commitment or business or farm, etc. then I might consider putting in that hard work for them in their time of hip replacement, need and pain from bodybuilding and perhaps they were smoking hot like THE ROCK. But if I have not seen enough efforts put in to the hard work of improving the commitment enough to justify the marriage or becoming someone's enslaved caregiver because they wanted to be like THE ROCK but weren't, then I don't know what I would do.

I hope you find peace with this, but just know that none of us immune from grief or loss, we will all have losses at some point, it just becomes a question of how and when and why. If you want to grieve now and quickly then get out. If you want to grieve very slowly and painfully then stay.

I’d stick around while he recovers but I would also be getting my ducks in a row to leave. Do all the prep work now. Figure out what you can do with the business and find yourself a new place to live. Remove yourself from all joint credit cards and move half the funds out of joint accts. Meet with a lawyer before anything.

I had a total hip replacement on Oct 22. For the first couple weeks, I needed help doing everything but getting to the toilet. For times that wasn’t fully successful, I wore an incontinence pad. My dh took two weeks after the operation on Fmla time.

This is a lot to do even if you love the person, which it doesn’t sound like you do.

Being he's a kind person with a good heart, and that you know he'd help you thru any medical issues you had, I'd stay to help DH thru his hip replacement surgery and then move on with your life. After 22 years of marriage, another month is no big deal.

"Narcissist" is the buzz word of the 21st century, imo, and used to describe anyone who displays any level of selfish behavior. My step daughters DH is a real narcissist who threw her out on the street at midnight after an argument he couldn't win. Penniless (narcs don't allow joint accounts), no clothing, no car, just the clothes on her back, and forced her to seek shelter with friends for MONTHS while he hid her daughter 100 miles away. That's narc behavior. She had to beg for money from her siblings just to survive. They got divorced and then she remarried him. Pure insanity runs thru both of their veins.

Best of luck.

Please separate your dh's hip op from your feelings about your marriage. They are two discrete things although the one has brought up the other.

As has been mentioned, recovery from a hip op is often quick and easy especially for a relatively young individual. It is not a reason for you to stay in an unhealthy marriage.

I see from reading below you are working hard to "keep us afloat" My goodness. He has it made! Partnerships can be dissolved. Put your energies onto building a business/job for yourself. This situation is never going to get better. it will get worse. If your beliefs stop you from getting a divorce, get a legal separation and get on with your life where and how you want it to be. He will not be a good caregiver for you if you need care.

Decide what you want for your future. This op does not tie you down to your husband. See a lawyer and find out what your financial situation will be. Talk with your therapist and decide how you want to proceed.

You mention "I know him to be a kind person with a good heart." I have difficulty with that considering the rest of your post. You are in no way responsible for his daughter's rent. You should be building up resources for your old age. Please work these things through with your therapist.

I see you are feeling insecure considering your parent's age and other factors. You are young enough to rebuild, I met someone when I was 72 and divorced and have built a good life with him. I'm 87 now. It's never too late. Good luck.

I’d leave. His lazy daughter can help him after surgery or he can go to inpatient rehab. He 100% would never burden himself with any imaginary recovery you would have— you said it multiple times in your post that you are down the list in his priorities.

That is just you trying to talk yourself into staying with a theoretical situation that hasn’t happened.

A difficult situation for sure. I would start with taking out the "we" in terms of supporting the daughter. Can you manage to attempt to separate your finances?

You can't change a Narcissist because they don't think its them thats the problem.

Do you have family or friends on the East Coast? Maybe go for a visit and don't come back. Do you have the ability to support yourself? DH should recover from the hip surgery well. They have people up and going not long after surgery.

Do you want to be his caregiver for the rest of his life or yours? I had a friend who left her husband afterbover 20 yrsvof marriage. My SIL left mu brother after 20 yrs, Me, better to be alone than be unhappy in a marriage.

62. Younger than my daughter. And with the best, most free years of your life ahead, those years when your children are raised and you can see the world and are strong enough to do it. These were the years that my partner and I built a small home in the country and watched the foxes cavort in the meadow and hedgerows. Weedwhipped, went out to eat, traveled at will.
'
You have time to make a life and you should.
I would pull hubby aside now and say you are leaving, after clearing such a move with your family, and go back home after my divorce. I would get a legal separation of finances right away. I would leave him to the medical system which will support him and his daughter's help and care, or any he hires in. Recovery from hip almost always goes quickly and well. And if it DOESN'T the last thing you need is saddled with it.

You have known you want to leave a long time, I suspect. I am curious what excuses you made to yourself prior to this? And why you are choosing to leave now with a surgery on the menu, but I will tell you one thing--if you are finally ready to make a happy life for yourself, NOTHING would stop me, a total hip surgery the least of all.

Don't be so sure that if you had medical issues he would help you through them. You mention that he hasn't satisfied your needs throughout the marriage, so why would it be different if you were sick? FYI, he doesn't seem kind or good-hearted! Kind people don't abuse their wives. Narcissists pretend to be kind so they can get away with more abuse or get what they want or to manipulate others. They're good at it.

The hip replacement - that's one thing. But the spinal stenosis is another. Lots of pain can become lots more pain all his life. I've known people who had it. When they started taking heavy drugs for the pain, ummmm......things took a bad turn in their marriages.

His daughter will be an ongoing problem in your marriage. As husband's health deteriorates, you'll probably be dealing with daughter and kids more than you do now.

Verbal abuse is never okay. It will chip away at your self-esteem. And how can you continue to run a business with him if he's abusive? And the daughter is always there?

You could try couples therapy, if you think it's worth it. I think I'd be wary of a therapist who directs you toward understanding that you can't change them, you can only change you. Why change YOU when you appear to be the normal one in this mess?

You have a lot to think about.

I'm surprised that your therapist didn't mention detaching yourself emotionally and using the gray rock method against your husband's verbal abuse and tantrums as a means of control.

What is keeping you from enjoying your life on a daily basis? You can join clubs, hobbies work, and other activities outside of your marriage. You start by weening yourself from his control by taking back your control of your life. Now is the time to start. Taking a trip back home occasionally so you can visit with friends and family and regroup.

JetBlue has excellent prices Back to the east Coast .

Thinking about this and what your therapist said to you. When I came on this forum, in March of this year. Many told me my mom is a narssasist. I was honestly annoyed and a bit angry about it. " How dare they" , well guess what after much education thinking and therapy and all that. I have no doubt my mom's a narssasist and they were right.

My husband had hip surgery at age 68. Her was walking around on the same day and was back to normal at a month. He needed no extra care by me, except to be his chauffer on the day of surgery. Concentrate on your plans with your marriage and stop worrying about his health.

Have you ever tried couples therapy with him in the past? Before you give up on 22 invested years, have you suggested couples therapy with him as a last resort and as a condition of you staying. Only if he works on the marriage and makes it a priority. If he says no to therapy, then I would move out for a trial separation. If that doesn't move the needle, then you have a more clear picture about your marriage.

FYI a hip replacement at his age and being in good health otherwise is not that big a deal. His ne're-do-well daughter can help him.

Hi Eliza, this is more of a relationship issue, we are people supporting each other though caregiving so this is not really a caregiver question.

Also this is a question only you can really answer for yourself. As far as leaving someone that needs a hip replacement, that's really nothing to feel guilty over if your wondering about that. Hip replacement are not fun but there not life threatening and honestly much easier than they use to be. So if you want to leave take that out of the equation.

I think you have to sit down with yourself and way the pros and cons. Will leaving make your life better? Maybe explore the narssasisim better, learn much more about it. There is a cute couple on Instagram that deals with this in a cute way. They take senrios and act out how a narcissist behaves compared to a healthy person. Sometimes we don't see the traits until we remove are selves more on an emotional level, and sometimes therapist are wrong.

As far as the OCD , for me I've learned that I don't mix well with them, for a long period of time. That's just me.

As far as the daughter, that just plan sucks, and your husband is hurting her by not making her learn to stand on her own to feet.

You sound very unhappy, so my thinking is , will your life be better if you leave? Do you have plans financially? Will you be happier alone?

All things for you to think about.

Best of luck