Need some marital advice

Posted: Oct 28, 2014

This is probably going to be long, so sorry in advance. I've been married for 18 years and was with him for 6 years prior to that. I was a teenager when we got together. I have been very unhappy in this marriage for many years now. My husband and I fight a lot. He pretty much blames everything that goes wrong on me. He also expects me to do pretty much everything, cook, clean, etc. He was in an accident a few months after we married and has pretty much not worked since then. He has been trying to get disability for the past few years, but it has been denied as he has been unable to prove his problem stem from the car accident and he has not worked anywhere to earn disability credit since then. I have the only income. At one point, I was working two full-time jobs, one in an office and one at home transcribing, and he still expected me to do all the cooking and cleaning. I am down to only the at-home job now. He is often not very nice. He calls me names and puts me down and says I would never make it without him. I have lost several friends because they can't stand to be around him. My best friend has begged me for years to leave him because he is abusive. It is not so much physical, although he did try to strangle me a couple times a few years ago. I know I have a bad temper and get cranky and moody at times, but pretty much everybody I know says that the problem is him. I am not in love with him. I feel sick every time he tries to touch me. He has very poor hygiene and only bathes about once a month. He has horrible body odor and horrible breath. Whenever I have tried to mention these things, he has said that I am turning on him. At the moment, we are staying with friends, so there is no formal rental or mortgage. We don't even have a car, so there's not really anything tying us together. We are helping the friends with their bills as they are both out on disability and not really making it. There are no kids. We do have two cats. I have tried to tell him I want a divorce, and he has pretty much told me to just walk out with what I have on my back and start my new life and when I have done that, he has just followed me, so if I'm leaving, I am going to have to try to sneak away. Since we don't have anything at this moment, it seems like a good time to try to get away. He wants to look into buying an RV this weekend, so once that happens, I will be stuck again. All of our savings is in a bank account in his name only. I have $2000 that he doesn't know about and that's it. I feel bad about abandoning my family as he calls it every time I try to leave. I will be heartbroken to leave my cats behind and would really like to try to at least take the younger one. The older one is 10 and my husband refused to have him fixed when we found him, so he does spray occasionally. He is also hard to travel with as we were just traveling to get here and he peed in his travel bag twice along the way. He is becoming more and more unmanageable, but I do love him dearly. The other cat was fixed when he got him, so other than normal cat stuff like jumping on tables and clawing at stuff, he is pretty good. When we were traveling, he managed to wait until a litterbox was set up for him every time even though my husband made the stops way too far apart. I also feel bad about moving out on our friends when they are in need of help, although my husband would still have the money in his savings which is about $12,000, but once that ran out, he has no income. My plan would be to rent a car to get to a different state which I have priced at about $150 for two days. I might have to have it longer though unless I can find an apartment before I get there. I would have to try to sneak out while everyone is sleeping and get a cab to the airport to rent the car. I don't know what to do about the cats, leave them, try to take one, try to take both. He's really attached to the older one. The younger cat doesn't seem to like him much at all. I think he would be much angrier if I took the older one. He's going to be angry anyway it goes, but he definitely would freak out if I took the older one. I would send him money to take care of the older cat, but I am going to be heartbroken and the cat is going to be devastated as well as I'm the one who takes care of him. I just don't know what to do. Maybe he's right and I can't make it on my own. I feel like I have just ruined my life and I'm going to be stuck with a man I can't stand to be around for the rest of my life. I've been sick for two days trying to figure out what to do because I'm going to have to act fast if I'm going to do this. If you've made it through all of this, thanks for listening.;