Are You in an Emotionally Toxic Relationship? (Test)

My story with my husband is 22 years long. We tend to ask each other how did we make it this long?!!! When we first got together my first husband had announced he wanted to break up. And my husband now father had just recently died. We both were hurting very much. I was just wanting to meet him as a friend because I knew his dad. His family and my family knew each other for many years before. Everyone knew him except me. I wasn’t looking for a relationship so soon. But for him I was it! I just wasn’t ready, but when he announced he loved me I thought, ” oh no. What am I going to do with that?” Well I didn’t really do anything with it. To say it simple. I felt stuck. Yet I wanted to stay. I moved in with him right away because I couldn’t handle being home emotionally. I was looking for a break from all of that and he offered me to get away at his house. I was in a place in life I was just ready to give up. I kept telling myself this must be what I deserve. So I went for a ride down a road that I never would have if I stayed with my first husband. I guess that’s when I really played the victim roll. As good of a person he really is. He figured out how to bring out the fight in me. Which in it’s own way was a good thing. We spent the first 17 years continueously sitting on the edge of our seat if we were going to stay together or not. He turned out to be one of those people who really tweaked my nerves enough that I would try to tell him about it. I don’t really feel like he listens to me in a way that we can actually talk. Yet he has always done a good job at doing the right thing at the right time for me to stay. Yet I didn’t really have any where else to go. I actually really loved him a lot so I kept trying everything I could to try to work it out every time I felt like I needed to go. Well I did many times. More so in the way of taking a time out. We married in 2002. In 2016 everything went really bad. We always yelled at each other before that but this year we couldn’t even talk without yelling. For me it’s always been the emotional stuff. Well then he met up with a “friend” he knew from his life before me. At a funeral and they started talking. I ended up “revisiting” my past and ended up in a situation that I really try to avoid and ended up cheating. There was that part of me that just said f… it. It’s not really the way I am nor do I like to be that way. But sometimes I get left alone with the wrong kind of person that makes me feel like I did when I was a kid. Victim all over again. …. Well that year we spent six months separated. It was another one of those hardest times in my life and I chose to endure it. First because I was still waiting for him to give me a chance to talk to him. I kept falling for the “I’ll wait for you to be ready.” Towards the end of the six months, I reached a point I was ready to accept it the way it was. He told me he was moving on and I should do the same. Then him and his friend started to not get along. It wasn’t long and he come in the door and gave me a kiss and said, “I want to be your husband and I want you to be my wife and I want you in my life again!” Three weekends in a row I waited for him to come spend the time with me. But each time he went to her house instead. When he did it the third time I got that heart sunk in my stomach feeling back. I told myself I wasn’t going through that again and without saying a word to anyone and not really thinking about it I decided to seriously attempt to overdose. That’s how I found out you can’t overdose on psych meds. It’s not even so much that I wanted to hurt myself. I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. I wanted to go home to heaven. Instead of going to sleep I stayed awake… After that it was a little bit of a slow process but we eventually moved back in together. We definitely don’t do things the same way we did before that. Most of the time we bicker between each other. People around us laugh at the humor side of all of this. But every once in a while it goes to the extreme which is not funny at all. I don’t know how to put into words what upsets me so bad about how he gets. I can’t try to talk to him without expecting a argument with him. I tend to feel like we can’t have a relationship that we can actually sit and talk in a normal way. I usually wait until we can talk and still go through debating on if I should leave. But not the same as before. Yet at the same time I am still stuck if I actually did decide to leave. Recently some thoughts have been brought to my attention that makes me think maybe I am mistaken about staying. He doesn’t seem to get what I’m trying to say. Now I feel sad every once in awhile because I can’t help but feel like I’m making a mistake staying because the things that are upsetting to me the most don’t get better.
I didn’t really mean to spend so much time on telling this much of our story and I still haven’t told all. But I hope that it helps give you an idea. I can’t really consider him abusive. But then maybe he is more than I think. I don’t tend to take him on picnics either. But what bothers me lately is that I don’t feel connected to him. Like spiritually. I don’t feel calmness with him. I find myself staying a distance from him. And I am starting to feel it’s like a calm before the next storm. And my feeling of incecure is starting to come back.
I honestly don’t know what to think about it right now. But I am wondering how I should decide. Not that I’m asking you to give me a answer. But I feel like I’m not understanding something about what I should be thinking about. I keep riding out the waves. But it’s not helping anything get better.

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