Nine days ago, I made a post about how my unemployed wife had spent $1,176 on delivery apps in just a month. This is egregiously outside of what we can afford to spend on takeout, and since she didn’t seem willing to stop, I canceled our credit card and moved the money from our joint account into my own.
For the following few days, my wife kept talking about how I was financially abusing her. She threw several tantrums despite apparently being severely malnourished, threatened divorce, threw a bunch of the food we had in the fridge away to try and strongarm me into letting her get takeout, and even tried to guess my bank account password a bunch of times (sorry my password isn’t TacoBell123). That last one was how I learned if you try to guess someone’s bank account password enough times, the bank will send them an automated email.
But last Friday, the complaints and threats stopped. She seemed mostly back to normal. I figured she had given up.
That was until today, which was garbage day. When I took the last bag out before taking the bin down to the curb, I discovered half a dozen fast food bags and other takeout containers in it.
My wife wasn’t supposed to have access to money. I had no idea how she was affording the food. I confronted her about it, and first she denied everything. I had to bring all of her fast food garbage in to get her to fess up: she had taken out a loan. Now, I thought that she had borrowed money from a friend or family member. But she had taken out one of those predatory payday loans.
Before you ask, no, I have NO IDEA how she was approved.
Within the next hour, I froze my credit. I then drove her to the payday loan place, where I paid the loan off in cash. I will now have to dip further into my savings to pay the rent.
I suppose in a certain way, cutting her off was successful. She didn’t order takeout anymore. She just drove to the restaurants to pick up her food, for the low low price of $20 for every $100 she borrowed, or $60 in fees in total.
In addition, I told her that we would be getting divorced. So yeah. My marriage is over. I don’t even know what alimony laws in my state are like, but I assume she’ll happily live in a cardboard box under a bridge if Uber Eats will bring her food there.
It’s only now, looking back at the chaos, the tantrums, the desperate measures, that I’m starting to piece together the notes I saw about her doctor’s visits before she lost her job, or remembering her talking about [mention a symptom related to a condition like severe depression, ADHD executive dysfunction, or similar]. Maybe her inability to manage cooking, her lack of energy, her impulse control problems weren’t just laziness or entitlement. Maybe they were signs of [mention the potential condition, e.g., severe depression, executive dysfunction] that got worse after she lost the structure of work, and the takeout was her desperate, poorly chosen way of coping because she genuinely struggled with basic tasks.
I still stand by my decision based on her financial irresponsibility and behavior. But the realization of a potential underlying health issue driving all this makes the ending far more tragic.
So, AITA for cutting off my wife financially, leading to all this drama and ultimately divorce, when her behavior (excessive spending, taking out a predatory loan) might have stemmed from a serious, unaddressed health or psychological issue?