TL/DR: My husband decieved me about who he is, he cheated and doesn't understand the depth of the betrayal, he never learned to adult, and I want to leave but my financial situation would probably leave me homeless.

Get a snack, get comfy, and settle in for this novel of a post.

I (50f) am so tired of raising my (50m) husband. We met online 23 years ago, we dated for 3 1/2 years, engaged for 1 1/2 years, and those must have been the most exhausting years of his life, because he pretended to be a different type of person the entire time.

I was a moderately active person, and I made it clear in my dating profile that I worked hard so I could afford to play hard(ish). I'm an amateur photographer, and I love to have little adventures like a light hike to shoot a waterfall, or (mostly safe) storm chasing, or macro flower photography. I loved museums, roller coasters, mini golf, dancing, and comedy clubs. I didn't go out every weekend, but it would be unusual for a full month to go by without something fun. He told me he also LOVED all those things, and we did all those things until a couple months after we were engaged. He, very sensibly, suggested we start saving for a down payment on a house while we were saving for the wedding, so we stopped doing all the things I loved.

We had agreed before marriage that we would have an even division of housework labor. This will be important later. I should mention here that when he had his own apartment while we were dating, I stayed over sometimes, but I never moved in. The place was always neat and clean, but I never saw HIM actually doing dishes or vacuuming. When we got engaged, we sat down with our families to make financial plans, and we decided to save money by giving up our separate places and moving in with his parents because they lived closer to our jobs. When we moved in, his mom insisted on doing EVERYTHING. She had her baby boy home again, and she was determined to make the most of it.

His parents lovebombed me just as much as he did for that 18 months. His family was very different than mine, and what felt like love and true acceptance blinded me to a lot of things I should have noticed. He was so comfortable falling into a child's role in the household. He literally did nothing. He didn't help with mowing, yard work, or home repair, he didn't help with any cooking or cleaning, not even his own laundry. I, feeling the need to pull my own weight, tried to pitch in, but his mom wouldn't hear of it. She claimed that she had an energy efficiency plan that required things like cooking, laundry, dishwashing, and vacuuming to be done only during certain times or only on certain days, so it was best to just let her handle it to avoid high utility bills. She said that mowing and yard work were the only exercise that my then fiance's father ever got, so we didn't need to help. It was really weird for me. Also during this time, I didn't use a wedding planner, and I made a lot things for the wedding myself, so I was too distracted to take a hard look at who my fiance really was. Looking back now, I see he was coddled and indulged, excuses were always made and accepted for his behavior, no matter what he did. All he really enjoyed was sitting in front of the tv and being tended to by mom.

We should have had premarital counseling, because I probably would have learned then that people often want to recreate the homelife they grew up in. After the wedding, honeymoon, and the roller coaster of home buying, we settled into our life together. Because we both worked outside of the home, and we needed both incomes, we traded off on all the interior housework, and I thought it was going fine. I didn't find out until over a decade later that he was brand new to all the things required to care for a house, and he felt overwhelmed and resentful that I didn't handle everything the way his stay at home mommy had. Turns out she had been coming over and cleaning his apartment and doing his laundry during work hours while we were dating, and he never told me. Very slowly, imperceptibly, to me, he stopped helping around our home. Due to my childhood, I was a people pleaser, very sensitive to criticism, and desperate to hold on to what I thought was the first real love I ever had. He started making little comments about the cleanliness of house not being up to snuff, and I just absorbed it and tried harder.

Unbeknownst to me, at this same time, he was having a relationship with his high school girlfriend. I caught him in 2014, just via inappropriate text messages, and he lied, and lied, and came up with props to lie some more, followed by lovebombing, and I allowed myself to be fooled. In my very religious upbringing, divorce is one of the biggest no-nos, so I stayed. I tried to work on us, but I was the only one doing the work. I was stuck, emotionally, because a part of me never believed his story. I started really observing my life closely, and I realized I had become dear old mom. We had never gotten back to doing the things I loved, allegedly because the house always needed something that consumed our finances. He had completely given up on housework, and I was essentially working two jobs to keep everything the way he liked it. He plopped down on the couch after work every single evening, and didn't lift a finger except to chat on Facebook. I washed his clothes, cleaned the house, fed him and got him to bed at a reasonable hour. I was breaking from the stress of carrying him, and I realized I didn't trust him. Towards the end of 2021, I put spyware on his phone and found out he was sexting all new women, he actually hated all the activities that I love, and our finances weren't crippled due to home repairs, he had secretly given thousands of dollars to one of his girlfriends.

I blew up, then I shut down. The enormity of his betrayal was too much for me to cope with, and I just withdrew. From 2005 to 2021, so much had happened. In 2008, I discovered I was infertile, and my dream of children would never become a reality. In 2012, my mother died, and my father had a complete mental breakdown. He lost everything, my childhood home was sold to pay medical bills, then he died in 2015. I contracted covid in 2020 and still struggle with long term effects. In the beginning of 2021, I lost my job because the company I worked for couldn't survive reopening after the height of the pandemic. I was broken, and just going through the motions of life.

My husband begged for forgiveness, and set up marriage counseling. During counseling, the trickle truth started, and eventually he revealed that over the first 9 years of our marriage, his affair with his high school girlfriend had progressed from sexting, to photos and video, to in person hookups. Great. Knowing more was not what I needed. Which brings us to now. I haven't been able to find another job, I think ageism is a factor, and our savings are gone. We're 18 years into a 30 year mortgage, and we'll never get out of the house what we've put in. I don't think we'd even get enough to cover what we still owe. I don't have any family left to fall back on, and my friends aren't in the best shape either. Where do I go from here?