Shelley and Harry married when they were 22, and everything was "pretty good." They had a baby, lucrative careers and a nice social life. Then they had another baby and things began to change.

"Harry became more demanding," Shelley says. "He said I should always put him first, his family second and the children third or fourth. When he decided to go back to college, he said I should emotionally support him by literally sitting there, watching him study. If I chose to watch television, he would go on a screaming rant. If he said the sky was green and my father said the sky was blue and I agreed with my father, he would go into a horrible rage."

Harry's rages became physical. "Once he was mad at me and punched me in the arm so hard I couldn't move it. If he was doing something stupid — like playing a stupid submarine computer game at 3 a.m. in our bedroom with the sound way up — and I asked him not to do it, he would get really close to my face and say, 'Don't tell me what to do.'"

When he found out about a letter Shelley had written to an old boyfriend ("I got carried away"), he threw her against the wall and threw a stapler at her.

"It missed my head and put a huge hole in the wall."

He would hit their daughters with a belt.

"He never spent any time with them, and when he did, he would scream at them. They were just babies."

Harry wasn't any more in control at work than at home. "He was always quitting, getting fired or laid off due to his insubordination," she says. "He would have a fight with one of his many bosses and then say he was going to 'show him' by quitting! He would be out of work for months. I never had the courage to say, 'You need to stay where you are and not quit your job.' He went from making $75,000 a year to minimum wage as a janitor in our church."

Once, Harry was fired because of sexual harassment. A co-worker accused him of stopping by her desk and massaging her neck and back. He wouldn't stop when she told him to. He would talk to her about his sex life, and he gave her an X-rated video saying it would spice up her marriage. None of this, he told Shelley, equaled sexual harassment.

Eventually, Shelley and Harry lost their home in a foreclosure and had to file for bankruptcy.

During all this time, Shelley says she never confided in anyone: "I thought it was me who was messing up in the marriage. He would tell me I was a worthless person, a terrible mother and a horrible wife, and I believed him. I honestly thought that there was something very wrong with me. I was under constant stress, always walking on eggshells around him, making sure that I wasn't screwing things up."

Next, Shelley finally gets the courage to leave ...

What was the straw that broke the camel's back in your relationship? Send your tale, along with your questions, problems and rants to cheryllavinrapp@gmail.com. And check out my e-books, "Dear Cheryl: Advice from Tales from the Front" and "I'll Call You. Not."

Photo credit: at Pixabay