My husband ran over SIX of my new roses. He dragged them down the street!!! Boy was I MAD!! I wasn't too friendly about it! He made it up to me by taking me to Home Depot to buy 6 expensive pots AND a water fountain. About 3 of my roses ended up dead - the other 3 are very small and mostly growing roots! Grrrr. I'm especially disappointed over April in Paris - I was really excited about seeing the blooms! So, I know how you feel! Get him to buy you something! LOL Carol

sounds like you're in the middle of a poison pit. Alcoholism & depression are connected, & the ways that people deal with it (guilt, denial, suppressing anger & using sabotage instead) spread into other areas of their lives & become the way they deal with everything. Even if your hubs is a "dry alcoholic", he isn't "over it". He's not functioning like a healthy person; he's still functioning like an alcoholic, & his ex & daughter are still pushing the same co-dependent buttons. It won't get better, it can't get better, without guidance. You've been pulled into the unhealthy web in the role of enabler: you don't like it, but your presence makes it possible for hubs to keep engaging with ex & daughter in the same old ways which, in fairness, are the only ways any of them know. You're the only one who can change the way you interact with hubs, & he's the only one who can change the way he interacts with everything. I think you need to find expert guidance, counselling, Al-Anon, something, for your own benefit/sanity/peace of mind. ("Pull down your own oxygen mask before you attempt to help anyone else.") Meanwhile, right now, if I were in your position, I'd sit hubs down & tell him, this isn't a discussion or a dialog, it's a monolog; I'm going to talk until I've finished what I have to say, & you think about it before you say anything back to me, & then I'd tell him that he's still "married" to his old messed-up life & that it isn't working for him now any better than it ever did, & that it's making me unhappy too, & that I would like him to explore counselling. & I do admire your restraint; if some man gave away the crystal angel I had bought him, there would have been broken china at the base of every wall in that house... I wish you the best.

Update... I had a long talk with BF last night. It was a very difficult conversation in which he agreed with tears in his eyes that I was right and he was sorry that he didn't have money to buy me a ring as soon as he'd said he would. I told him that I was frustrated that we moved in together under one circumstance (getting engaged with a ring in February, which is what he had said) and because of unexpected increases in his bills and financial problems, and my own somewhat cold feet about potentially becoming a SM, things have been delayed and delayed. Although I am able to adapt to changing circumstances this is (a) embarrassing me in front of my friends and family and (b) making me feel like a hypocrite. As far as his side, he told me June, then September, then Christmas... I keep oscillating between hope and dread, and then thinking, fine, I don't want the stupid ring anyway, just forget the whole thing. So what if we get engaged? Because I am not marrying him with 5-figure debt anyway, and it will take him 2-3 years to get out of it, so we might as well just work on our conflict resolution skills and stick this out together. His finances are being reviewed by his new financial planner who is going to make a suggestion to him on a couple of different ways he could go as far as a combination of debt snowballing, debt reduction and debt consolidation this coming Friday afternoon. I looked at his monthly budget with him last night and I have to admit that even I was shocked. There are too many minimum payments per biweekly pay period that are just too high to squeeze all in - I honestly don't know how he has been making it, and we live together!! I am surprised he never tried to borrow money from me - but glad too that he is working it out on his own. Although I did consider moving out as something of a "motivational tool" for him to clean up his financial act, and showing him that I deserve better, I felt at the end that it would just make me materialistic and selfish. He already knows that I am at the end of my rope!! He offered to move out and continue paying rent and bills to the end of our lease, but in my heart that really wasn't what I wanted. I just want him to be honest and not overly-optimistic about his situation. He is in a bad place - some of it is his own fault, but not all. We do not have joint debt, we do not have children together, and I am getting done the things I need to do. It is not going to hurt me to stick by his side when in 90% of our relationship area he is doing great. Also, at the end of the day, he has been doing everything I have asked him to do, i.e. involve a professional or team of professionals because it is clearly beyond his realm. After much discussion, I decided that we should continue to live together, and work on getting mostly out from underneath our debt over the next year, and not discuss marriage or getting engaged again until that time. I just don't see it happening. By next year at this time I will be out of debt myself, other than student debt, and will begin saving for a house. If there has not been significant progress in his financial picture (his money management style as much as anything else) I told him that it will really be a dealbreaker for me. He was not thrilled with that but agreed. I know that he has been very humbled and embarrassed by all this, and frankly he put up with a lot of humiliation that a lot of guys wouldn't have. I said a lot of things I wanted to say, but I also said a couple of things that I should not have said, and I regret that - namely rubbing it in that he did everything for his first wife to have a big diamond and be a SAHM, and all I get is the debris that's left. He should have told me that was a cheap shot, and challenged me whether deep down I wanted to really set a date with or without a ring, but he just said he was sorry and that he understood whatever way I went. He has proposed to me 100 times, and still somehow I don't feel like it is settled. Summary: I'm either a victim, or I make a decision based on how it feels to live in my skin every day. So I made a decision. I didn't get much sleep last night.

Well, I guess I'm thankful I didn't explode all over my kitchen after that insane dinner I ate about an hour ago. I cooked most of it--Southern fried chicken, gravy, all the Thanksgiving trimmings, lots of whipped cream...yadda, yadda etc. I had so much chicken cut up I couldn't cook it all in this century. So I contemplated aloud that I should just throw the raw stuff out. Overhearing me, my teen granddaughter admonished me about wasting perfectly good food (first world problem for sure). So I asked her if she'd like to have it raw cause I wasn't cooking anymore darn chicken. Anyway, I am most thankful for my precious granddaughters who light up my life (along with my roses). Diane