Marriage is driving me crazy.

Marriage is driving me crazy. How does anyone survive it? Here is a list of all the times my wife drove me to almost have a complete nervous breakdown. First she insisted on getting married immediately. It was on a Friday and she wanted to go to the courthouse on Monday. We left our jobs during our lunchbreaks. I was in a state of panic but she refused to reconsider. Then in late January she insisted on a huge wedding reception on Valentine’s day that cost about $10,0000. The stress of organizing and paying for this wedding in a few weeks almost gave me a heart attack. Shortly thereafter she bought two dogs. I of course had to walk them everyday and clean up their dog shit. These dogs did not get along and when I walked them they constantly pulled me in opposite directions. Taking care of them was a nightmare. Thank God, my wife agreed to give them away before our son was born.
Then she decided to buy a new, more expensive house and rent our townhouse even though we didn’t have any money for a downpayment and really were having trouble financially in our current house. She agreed to rent our townhouse while I was in class. Then she got into a dispute with the builder of our new house and cancelled the contract. So we had tenants preparing to move into our townhouse and we had no new house to move into. We scrambled to find another house which we did but the move itself was horrible. There was a gap of a several days in which we had to stay in a hotel. We put all of our stuff in five different storage units. While we were preparing to move, she bought a lot more crap at yard sales making the move even more difficult.
After living there for three years she then insisted on buying an even bigger and more expensive house. She agreed to buy the new house without consulting me at all. She dragged me to the sales office and nagged me into signing the contract. I didn’t think we would qualify but these days mortgage companies approve anyone so the house got built, and we ended up buying it. Realizing we absolutely could not afford it, we put it on the market immediately after buying it. My wife became panicked and so depressed that she could hardly leave the house. She wanted to back out of the contract and lose the $100,000 down payment. I at least wanted to try to get some of it back. It took six months to sell the property for the same price we bought it. With the closing costs, the mortgage payments, and the upkeep of the house, we lost a fortune.
While we were trying to sell it, her mother kept pressuring me to move into the new house and sell our existing one. I knew we absolutely could not afford the new one and the equity on the existing one was almost used up so the proceeds from the sale would not make that big of a difference. The stress was so great that I ended up spending several days in a mental hospital. When we finally sold it, I felt relief but my wife cried at the settlement.
Even after that disaster, she keep trying to buy things we couldn’t afford. The following year she insisted on her mother buying a house at a development for retired people. She wrote a check from our joint account for $5,000 as the earnest deposit. There was no way her mother could afford the payments on the house and we certainly did not have $5,000 in our account. The check bounced but she keep writing new ones. She ended up bouncing two or three checks. We’re lucky that her mother was not sued by the real estate company.
Then in the space of a month, she bought two cars. Here we were trying to recover from a financial catastrophe and she buys two cars with combined payments of over $900 a month. Already we were going into deeper debt every month and she adds this burden. At the time she did not even have a job. How she qualified for those car loans, I will never know.
During most of our marriage she did not work. She insisted on finishing her college degrees. After about five years she qualified for an associates degree at our community college. For several classes she insisted I write the papers which I did. Then she transferred to George Mason University. She should have finished in two years but it has dragged for four years and she is still not finished. She insists I write her papers even though it’s a Spanish literature class and I don’t know even Spanish to write college papers. She says to write them in English and she’ll translate them. Here we are going deeper into debt, headed for bankruptcy and foreclosure and she wants me to concentrate on her classes. She finally got a job as a secretary at the church but continually threatens to quit so she can concentrate on her stupid degree. What her degree in Spanish is going to do for her I don’t know. I really doubt she will ever become a teacher as she once planned. Trying to read sixteenth century Spanish literature and writing a paper on it while worrying about the huge debts that are piling up is driving me crazy.