I Realized I Wanted a Divorce While Having Sex With My Husband

This was my moment of clarity. I needed to leave my marriage.

I realized I no longer wanted to be married to my husband while having sex with him.

He was on top of me and his body just felt so heavy. For years, I’d shouldered his weight. Now I was literally being crushed by it.

With each thrust, he seemed to push me deeper into the mattress. As it was, our bed had a permanent indentation in the middle of it, thanks to him.

Those days, my husband spent almost every waking hour on our bed. He was unemployed. He got up around noon, took an hour-long shower, then climbed right back in between the sheets.

He spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading about conspiracy theories from the vantage point of our conjugal mattress. After we lost everything in the 2008 financial crisis, he also lost his mind.

Our house foreclosed and we moved into a rental. Soon after, my husband began discussing 9/11 “truth.”

He swallowed the red pill and became convinced that chemtrails existed and that every school massacre was a hoax.

Still, nothing could prepare me for the shock he’d given me earlier in the day when he unloaded his newest revelation while I was washing the dishes. His dishes.

He’d come to find me while I was scrubbing his plates to announce that covert sectors of the U.S. government secretly kidnapped people each year, killing them and sticking them into huge vats where their blood was drained to feed aliens who lived in underground tunnels in New Mexico without the public’s knowledge.

I lost control. “I’m divorcing you!” I shouted.

Was I serious? We were broke. He’d bankrupted me. I couldn’t even get an apartment on my own without someone else co-signing my lease.

My mother was dead. My relationship with my father was strained. I had no one to help me. How would I survive?

Part of me even still loved him. Despite how angry I was, I still wanted our marriage to work.

We had two children together. How would I support them if I left my husband?

Part of me even still loved him. Despite how angry I was, I still wanted our marriage to work.

I remembered the good times. When my mother got sick, my husband was there for me. He comforted me when she died.

When our financial situation was better, we traveled the world together. When we were home, we discussed politics. At least we used to.

Back before he went crazy, my husband always had something interesting to tell me.

Now he drove me nuts with this conspiracy rambling.

It wasn’t that the sex itself was so awful. It was that we had so many problems, I couldn’t feel close to him.

Because I couldn’t feel intimate with my husband, I couldn’t enjoy the sex. It felt like he was one of the aliens on top of me. I no longer recognized him.

And to think I was the one who had tempted him into bed! I’d invited him to have sex because I hoped it would heal us.

Sex was only making things worse.

With each thrust, I felt myself being pushed deeper into the mattress, a shallow grave. Each pivoting of my husband’s pelvis displaced more figurative soil. He was burying me alive.

I felt the sheets against my naked skin folding around me, shroud-like. The sheets were one-thousand thread count when we first bought them, Egyptian cotton. The sheets had been luxurious new, purchased when we had money.

Now they were threadbare after being washed so many times. Sleeping on the sheets all these years, fucking on them, my husband laying on them for entire days, refusing to look for work, obsessing over one insane idea after another — the sheets had deteriorated just like our marriage.

It occurred to me that my husband wasn’t just fucking me— he was fucking me over. He had been fucking me over for years.

He was the reason I couldn’t leave. He was dragging the kids and me down with him.

People in unhappy marriages often have a moment of clarity when they realize their marriage is officially over.

I had to divorce him, but the idea terrified me.

I turned my head to the side, catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror affixed to the inner door of an armoire that lay permanently on the carpeting of our bedroom.

The armoire door had been unhinged during our move to this rental. My husband said he’d re-assemble it. He never had.

The broken armoire door was a reminder of everything that was broken in our lives. As I stared at my reflection, studying how my belly splayed out at my sides, the extra skin jiggling with the motion of the sex, the realization hit me hard and fast — as hard and fast as my husband’s thrusts.

I’d reached middle-age and would grow old with this man if I didn’t do something.

I would die with him if I didn’t make a move.

Yes, I knew I’d be lucky if I got anything in child support. I knew that most likely I’d end up a single welfare mom. I knew it would be challenging to figure out how to get an apartment on my own with my bad credit. I knew I’d encounter difficult times ahead if I divorced him.

But I also knew I couldn’t stay in this situation. Even still, it took me another year and a half until I finally worked up the courage to move out.

Still, I’ll always remember that night as the moment I realized I wanted to divorce my husband.

People in unhappy marriages often have a moment of clarity when they realize their marriage is officially over.

This was mine.