Living with WAW who will not leave

[Casey]

I have been reviewing the "chaos kid" articles I came across when I first started having problems with W last Sept. Everything makes so much more sense now and is more relevant than when I first came across it. Of course, that is good for explaining the why, but I am more interested in the "how to fix it" at this stage in the game.

This past several days has been very trying for me. I am just about at the limits of my patience, but it has to do with money and not with rudeness or coldness,etc. Since we have separated our accounts I have lost visibility of how much money she has and what she spends it on, which is of itself not important but what I have a problem with is the disconnecting all the bills that used to be paid from that account and refusing to pay any of the joint bills when I request that she do so. In the last week I have had to pay the phone bill, the car insurance, a credit card that she uses which is in my name (I know, foolish; we got it prior to BD), and the electric bill. I have always paid the rent entirely on my own as the lease is in my name, but all the other bills were either her responsibility or shared.

So, I cannot get her to leave, and I cannot get her to start paying her share of the bills while she lives here. I know she has been paying down all of her cards and bills and I suspect she is also hiding money so she is able to leave me. In fact I hope she is because I am thoroughly sick of this. I talked to the wireless provider about getting her off of phone account, but if I do so I get a pretty hefty early termination fee. So I still have about three or four months remaining before I can do so.

This behavior on her part is passive-aggressive, because when we are together she is polite (mostly) and initiates conversations; we have talked about this issue and last time we did she promised to go with me to open a joint account and set up direct deposit from both of our banks to make sure that money for joint bills was being set aside. Yet it was just that; talk. Nothing further happened and when I raised it again this Tuesday she had an excuse and said some other time.

I am sure there are others on this forum who have dealt with a similar issue; how did you handle this problem?