She doesn't do anything for herself

My wife and I have been together 17 years or so. I was basically the dad to her two children and I was a father of my own through a different marriage before. I did all of the midnight band things, and all of the summer school stuff, and taught the kids how to grocery shop, cook, and repair cars, and all of the things a young kid should know the basics of.

The kids have all been out of the house for about 3 years now - life has gone way downhill from there. I have suffered many medical problems (heart failure being the biggest one), which I am now thinking are due to stress, but nonetheless.. I have medical devices keeping me alive each day and incredible amounts of bodily pain each day. I just recently stepped down from my good paying career, to take a less stressful, and less physically demanding, part time job. This was a decision that was long coming because I was literally dying, but enough on that. My wife makes the big bucks now and I just work to keep from going stir crazy basically.

Once I took the part time job I started piecing together how I got to this state. Our kids have periodically called me on the phone and asked me for help with random things and eventually we got around to the topic of their mother / my wife. They have told me repeatedly how they wish I would just get out of the relationship. The kids are the only people who have seen the true side of what I live with day to day. My wife has managed to put on a fake show for everyone else. Our children would constantly see how I would do everything around the house, and she would wait around in her pajamas for dinner to get made for her and the house would magically clean itself.

I literally have zero friends at all, I have tried finding new friends or at least people to talk to and just have constant rejection for some reason. Oddly enough, I have grown accustomed to it. My wife has maybe 10 consistent people that are usually trying to call her to hang out and she constantly rejects their offers. I have tried getting onto chat sites just to have human conversation and apparently everyone gets on those sites just for sex. I have literally no one to talk with and for all of this time I was okay with it, but now I am so depressed I don't know where to turn.

A typical day consists of my wife coming home from work and changing out of her work clothes and putting on her pajamas at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and then sitting and playing games and watching TV. If I am not working that day I will spend the day cleaning the inside or working on the outside of the house. Lawn maintenance, cooking, cleaning, dog watching, any kind of dusting, laundry, home repairs, car repairs, Etc are all my job and always have been. If I do not have dinner ready at 6 p.m. My wife will order something from delivery. That is fine but very wasteful when I have already purchased lots of groceries and other things to make dinner with.

I cannot have a conversation with my wife because she just won't speak back, if I do corner her into a conversation things usually get extremely violent and I have on many accounts had her start to swing kitchen knives at me. My kids have seen this before, and that is why as soon as they hit 18 years old they moved out. My wife drinks up to 2 liters of hard liquor per week at times, and she has began smoking again. I have threatened to dump her liquor down the sink and throw her cigarettes in the toilet, and I have tried other methods to get her to slow down at least, and this only results in her running off, getting dressed, and leaving somewhere in her car (sometimes drunk). Or perhaps getting into a huge knife fight, literally.

Obviously my wife is on self destruct, so the safest option for me is to let her do her thing and just have dinner ready by 6. The last few knife fights she has started I have had to grab her wrists to keep from getting stabbed, and perhaps once or twice she has had light bruising on her wrists and she will tell her friends that I am abusive. I have many times suggested marriage counseling, and she will not have it. Our children, when they were younger, witnessed a few of these and that, to me, was worse.

The stress is so built up inside of me that I just do not know where to turn. Now that I have stepped down to a lesser paying part-time job I cannot survive financially on my own. I keep having hope that somewhere in my wife's body is a person just needing to talk and vent, and maybe things will start to look up. I probably will not be alive much longer, because my bodily functions are slowly shutting down. I have been to multiple Specialists and cardiologists and been put on different drugs to help with some of the problems that they have found but nothing seems to help. I have read many books about Buddha, and I have tried to follow that path to try to help with the stresses. But everything is beginning to collapse all at once. I even went out and got a dog to have someone to hang out with, rather than remaining in this toxic environment more than I have to.

I guess the subject of sex will come up at some point, and I can make it simple for any reader: I didn't talk about it because it doesn't exist.

I guess my story is more of a warning for people, if you do not do something about the stresses in your life, they will physically affect you at some point. People say you are only as old as you feel, if that is the case then I am already dead. I am not having a pity party here, I just would very much like to find someone to talk to besides the walls in my house. Anyone I talk to at work, I have discovered, they hear but do not listen. It's very depressing.

Aaaargh, Jedi hugs!!!

And I tip my hat to your for working and housekeeping and nurturing good kids into smart, compassionate adults. I wonder two things, do you have a mental health professional on your team? (If not, I think it absolutely couldn’t hurt to get one. And if that one doesn’t click, try a few more until you find someone who feels right).

And might it be worth paying a visit to a divorce lawyer? I feel like it is worth investigating how the cards might fall if you broke up. (In the splitting of assets, maybe there will be enough funds to make a break up viable).

'My wife drinks up to 2 liters of hard liquor per week at times,...'

- Your wife is a full blown-alcoholic, and you need to get into Al-Anon ASAP!!

Sometimes, when faced with loss of a spouse, alcoholics stop/change..., sometimes.