Married in name only

[Casey]

I guess this should actually be moved to my newcomer thread or that thread moved here. I posted my situation again over there after several days had passed while I was in moderation, and I thought maybe my original post had not gone through...

Anyway, my W's complaints have had to do with control and decision making. There have been other issues during our marriage but they seem to be tied to those two. A little background is in order:

Met W during deployment to former Soviet Central Asia country; she didn't speak any English and I spoke very little Russian. We didn't start dating until I returned to US and it was LDR for most of a year until I returned as a tourist several times to see her in person and meet her family. I did fiancee visa for her and it took another year to complete that and get her to the US. During that time she took private English lessons and I studied Russian so we could communicate better. When she arrived in US she was completely dependent on me because of language issues, lack of family and friends, restrictions imposed by visa and green card process (no work or driver license until getting SSN which needed green card as prerequisite), and others due to living on army base.

After living together for six months I get deployed to Afghanistan for a year, during which time our son was born. During my deployment she lived with my mother and her partner and at some point during the stay she became involved in an EA and PA with mom's partner. After I returned from deployment we resumed our life together which was a year of torture because for most of that she was in withdrawal from OM and dealing with stress of being new mom. I deployed again to Iraq for another year. Son stayed with his grandmother in wife's country during that time and W worked full time and lived with her girlfriend and her husband. She starts having an affair with her boss at which point I buy her a plane ticket and send her to live with her mom and son for the duration of the deployment. Afterwards, we move back to my father's house in CA after I leave the Army, and we both start going to school full time until we move to ND for work. The period of time after I left the Army until she started working in ND lasted about 3.5 years and during that time there were no affairs and we had the best R that we have had during our M. W got her driver license and SSN, green card, etc., during that time period, we brought her mother to US twice as a guest, and we reconciled our past issues.

W is extremely beautiful and keeps very well in shape and she is very proud of her figure and her beauty, almost to the point of vanity. Her family was and still is very poor and we send money to them to help out. W's childhood was difficult; her father abandoned them when she was very young and they were impoverished when the Soviet Union ended, and lost their townhouse a decade later when the ruble was devalued and they were forced to sell it and move to her mother's village just to get food to eat. W talks about that time period as one in which there were episodes where they went for days without food. W has a hard time making friends with other women and has very few friends. Her first sexual experience was when she was at a university in her country where she was raped after she had been drinking with a classmate. Most of this I did not discover until years after we had been married.

The previous affairs in hindsight show a pattern of infidelity but at the time I forgave her because I felt a lot of the blame had to do with the long separations and loneliness from that. The serial affairs right now are something new and I cannot excuse them. Prior to BD she had been getting more independent, especially after beginning new job, and started asserting that I had been controlling her and she wanted more of a say in decisions (moving to ND, sending S7 to private school, etc.), which she felt I made all the important ones. Her complaint is valid; I always made the decisions; this has had more to do with her relative helplessness during the first years of our M as a foreigner in this country and lack of understanding of the language as well as not knowing how to do things us native-born take for granted.

Realize this is a long post but I feel that this background might help to make more sense of current serial affairs.