life without love has no meaning

I feel so lost maybe this is what people call a mid life crisis.  I don’t know if I am really suicidal or just depressed. It is just hard to imagine continuing life the way it is indefinitely. So I figured I would tell my story and maybe get some advice.  We come from a small town in the Southern US what is typically refered to as the bible belt. So growing up that was all I ever expected and all I wanted. To fall in love and get married and have a family. Things seemed to work out perfectly.  I met my husband in high school we dated all through out school, then after graduation we got married.

He was my only real boyfriend and the only man I have ever been with.  I got pregnant fairly quickly with our first child.  Being good christians we didn’t believe in things like birth control haha.  He went to work, he has a good union job and makes enough that I have been able to be a stay at home mother.  So now I am 35 and I guess anyone would say looking at it that it has been a good life.  We have 4 kids, my husband works hard.  House is paid off we have enough money that we don’t struggle or stress or have to go without anything as so many do in these tough times. Over the years with each child I put on more weight that I was unable to lose afterwards.  Which caused my husband to want to have sex with me less and less.  Which caused me to become depressed and gain even more weight.  At this point I am close to 400 pounds and my husband barely looks at me at all.  Getting so heavy has just made me more and more depressed.

I always prided myself on my looks and feeling like I was attractive to men.  Now my husband won’t even touch me.  He takes as much overtime as he can get just so he doesn’t have to be home with me.  It just makes me lay around in bed all day and eat more.  The house should be a disaster zone but my husband has started doing all the household chores and taking care of the kids, when he gets home from work in the evenings and on his days off. I think he only does so much to keep himself busy so that he doesn’t have to look at me and interact with me.  He won’t sleep in our bed anymore he sleeps on the couch.  He is working himself to death just to avoid me.  All the extra hours he does and its a physically demanding job its having a very negative affect on his health.  Yet he doesn’t care he would rather work himself to death as long as he doesn’t have to spend time with me.

I feel like if I stay with him this downward spiral I am on will just get worse and worse and I will eat myself to death or just kill myself because of the depression.  That the only hope I have of turning things around is to get out of this marriage.  We don’t love each other anymore but he believes in til death do us part, even though I can tell that he is repulsed by me.  Being the devout christian he is he just doesn’t believe in divorce.  I feel like that is my only option I have left though, this marriage is sucking the life out of me and killing me I have to do something.  Where I live it is pretty much a guarantee that I will be able to keep the kids. The courts always side with the mother here unless the mother is in prison or something the kids stay with her.  So if I keep the kids, I will get the house, and as long as I have the house and kids and he will have to pay child support I won’t have to get a job.

I think once I am single again I will be able to get attention from men.  There are some men that really do like big women and if I can find a new man that I feel like actually cares about me and wants to be with me and I can feel like I am sexually desired again it will boost my confidence and self esteem immensely.  Knowing my husband no longer wanted to be with my physically is what has caused most of my depression.  So I can only hope that finding other men that do want to be with me will be the thing that breaks me out of it.

I tried to talk to him about seperating, and he just quoted our vows and bible verses at me.  He is a devoted father though I will give him that he said if we didn’t have the kids he might have thought about it, but he couldn’t stand the thought of what a divorce would do to them, and that if we got divorced and I took the kids it might kill him.  I don’t really want the kids but I need that child support money. If I am going to be able to stay home and not work, while I get over this depression I need him to still support me and the kids.

I just don’t know what to do any more. I don’t want to blame all my problems on my marriage, but sometimes I really do feel like my husband is the cause of all my pain.  We got together at such a young age and I was never able to be with other men or experiment or live.  I just went straight into marriage.  I feel like I missed out on so many other oppurtunities because of my husband.  It seems like this is the only option I have to try to find happiness.  Thank you to anyone that reads this, and any advice you could give me will be appreciated.  I am truly at my wits end and I have no where else to turn.  God Bless you all.