Reddit Stories - Console Over CONNECTION_ Marital Rift Sparks THOUGHTS of SEPARATION at 34_

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #console #connection #maritalrift #thoughtsofseparation #34yearsold  Summary: A Reddit thread discusses a marital rift stemming from a console gaming addiction, leading a 34-year-old to contemplate separation.  Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, console, connection, maritalrift, thoughtsofseparation, separation, marriage, relationships, gaming, addiction, spouse, conflict, decision, therapy, advice, support, familyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.

I hope you enjoy this story. Spouse spends hours gaming and prioritizes their console over our relationship, prompting me to consider separation. I, a 34-year-old woman, have been in a 15-year partnership with my 41-year-old spouse. Years and married for 11 years of those years. We have a 7-year-old daughter. We have sacks maybe once a year since our daughter was born. I'm always the one that has to initiate any type of intimacy. When we do it's hard to get him to stay up and it's a lot of work on my end.

He's seen a doctor and there's no issues with labs and he won't take the little blue pill, because he says he doesn't need it and doesn't have an issue. My husband has always blamed our lack of intimacy on our daughter since she slept in the bed with us. I'll try to get him to go in a different room and there's always some excuse like he's too tired, but then he will go up to our game room and play his video games. Our daughter has slept in her own room for over six months now and nothing has changed. His excuse is still while our daughter has slept in the bed with us all this time. My husband is a good person and a good dad.

He works hard for his family. He works 60 hours a week, but besides paying the bills that's the extent of it. He says he's tired and tells me I don't understand the stress of having to take care of the family financially. I work 40 hours a week, have a small business, make all of our appointments, do anything related to our daughter, I'm classroom mom, on PTO, and do all household choirs. I do all laundry, cleaning, make meals, grocery shopping, take vehicles for oil changes, yard work, I mow and take care of 2.5 acres, and take trash cans out. I do pay some of our bills and I pay for all of our daughter's extracurricular activities which definitely adds up. He just thinks my load of work and contributions does not amount to what he

does. This past week I got on his phone, because he saves reels on FB for me, normally funny stuff and recipes he wants me to try. I saw in his search history all of these sexier girls and groups he's been looking at, which really pushed me over the edge. I wouldn't be mad if he came to me to have sex and I denied him sex. I confronted him about it and he says he doesn't look that stuff up and I told him I'm not naive and it's clear as day. Then the next day he says yeah, he clicks on those girls' profiles and groups because he's a man and likes to look. He's been locking his game room recently while in there and when he says he's sleeping I know he's playing his PS and I guess now he also looks at these different profiles. I've seen lotion up there a long time ago while

cleaning and had asked him about it and he swears he's not jerking off but I'm not stupid and naive. I really just hate being lied to. He says I'm a hypocrite because I watch porn, but I wouldn't watch porn and take care of my needs if he would be intimate with me. It's also not like I'm going to a specific person or their profile when I do pull up a video. I've also been honest with him that I masturbate and watch porn. I admit I am a hypocrite and guess I'm just hurt, because it just seems it's me. To me it feels he's not attracted to me or just doesn't seem to want me. He says he doesn't really have a drive and that's what I had thought,

but after seeing what he likes to click on I feel he just doesn't have a drive towards me. Looks wise people tell him he definitely leveled up. Overall I take care of myself and put effort into my looks. I'm definitely not the hottest or most beautiful, but I'm not bad looking. He's overweight, short, and balding. Why do I feel like now I don't look good enough for him or excite him enough to be with? I told him I want him to get rid of all of the gaming stuff and to not be locked upstairs and to spend more time with me and our family or it's time for us to divorce. He said he's not giving up his gaming stuff and doesn't see how that's the problem.

He told me that I'm going to ruin our family, because all I want is sex. I'm just tired of begging. I feel I shouldn't be begging for intimacy, affection, and him being present with his family. I do so much for everyone and tired of not getting anything in return. I'm tired of putting my wants and needs last. I'm tired of begging him to hang out with us and do family stuff. The only thing that excites him is to go upstairs in the game room and play his video games, and I guess now I know he likes to do other stuff as well.

We've done the counseling stuff here and there and it gets better for a bit, but then goes back to our normal. So am I the asshole and a hypocrite? Am I in the wrong and taking things too far? Editing to add this about our child sleeping in the bed with us. We both allowed her to sleep in the bed with us. I had tried to boot her out to her own room sooner, but my husband kept saying she wasn't ready.

She'd cry and it was a lot of work and bribery to get her in her own room. Editing to add another note. There's definitely two sides to every story and you're just getting mine. We both have different love languages. Mine is affection and physical touch and is his acts of service. He likes a clean and tidy house and I do my best to keep up with everything home-wise. I tried talking to him what makes me happy and what I want. but he's not listening to me. I feel like a spoiled brat at times because yes, he provides

financially well for us and I don't go without. It just sucks. I want to be seen again. We used to be such a team and it's a pissing contest if you does what. My husband really isn't a bad person or dad. Our daughter is definitely a daddy's girl, mostly because I'm the disciplinary parent that makes sure she has to brush teeth, school work, and etc. On our days off together, he'll do a few things with us and then say he needs to get some rest, but he goes upstairs and video games. He really does work too much. He says he works so much, because he wants to make sure we're taken care of if something happens to him, which his dad was never there and his mom did struggle when he grew up. Ada has no consensus bought, but based on the comments,

Oop was NTA. Relevant comments from Oop. Your comment really stuck out. Sometimes I do get to the point of frustration, because I wish he'd just see what needs to be done without me having to nag him. Every year I ask if he can put Christmas lights up and he doesn't do it until I finally snap at him. Christmas lights make me and our daughter happy and he knows it, so why do I need to ask him to do it every single year? My birthday is around Christmas and he doesn't do anything thoughtful. He says it's because he's working and didn't have time to go get anything, but he can make time to game and order stuff for his games on Amazon. I tell him to make a cake with our daughter and have her make me a card, take her to Walmart and let her pick something out for me. I want him to show my

daughter that I matter. I'm sure you saw the TikTok about the wife stocking not having anything in it and that's another thing I have to tell him to find the time to do for me with our daughter. I just want him to make time and may not have to nag him. I think I'm just tired too. I know gaming is his relaxing and winding down time but he's not understanding prioritizing his family should be first. Update number one, January 4th, 2024. I am overwhelmed by the response from my first post and appreciate the feedback. I wasn't expecting to write an update this soon or even at all. Also, I realized as I was blindly rage writing my issues to a bunch of strangers, I didn't write the title properly. So I corrected it in this post update. Yesterday I messaged my husband the

following. Why should we stay together, just for our daughter? What do you love about me besides being a good mother and wife? What do you like about me? What are things you want from our relationship that you're not getting besides financial? What do you think I contribute to our relationship? Do you really not want sex or a physical relationship? Do you think that's not an issue? I need a physical and intimate relationship. That's something that's important to me. It's more than just sex. Am I not attractive to you? Do you not desire me? Please be honest, why do you hide the fact that you masturbate? Why can't you see why I'm upset and that my feelings are valid? You think I'm upset over nothing. I feel you take my words as if they are water being poured into a cullender.

You hold no value to what I say. Why can't you see my pain? You think this is easy on me? Have I thrown too many empty threats to you that you don't take this and what I say seriously? Where can we go from here? Can we work it out? Sometimes my issue is that you can't be honest with me that there's an issue. I hate when you don't take accountability and place blame elsewhere. We're adults, we make mistakes and we should take accountability for what we say and do. I know I'm not who I was and I don't love who I am right now. I don't like nagging, yelling, and begging.

Begging you for help, attention, and affection. I'll go back get a better paying job and help more with finances if we decide to move forward. In return, you'll have to help more with our family. Help worry about finding a sitter for our daughter, who's picking her up from school. You'll need to help and call out when she's sick. Take off for field trips, help make her lunches, take her to extracurriculars, and help more with daily tasks. He never responded. Instead I saw where he played over three hours on his PlayStation.

To me that speaks volumes. Someone messaged me this link, link. That story really resonated with me and it hit close to home. I guess I'm at the point where I don't want a roommate anymore. I just want a partner that cares and can see the value I bring to our relationship and our family. Many of the originally post responses talk about how I just want sex and that's really not it. I want intimacy and a yearning to feel loved and longed for. I want our relationship to be where we are a team again and it no longer feels like a pissing

contest of who does what. I guess we are past that point of working things out. Now my concern is how to make this an easy transition for my daughter. I will continue to put a smile on my face and hold back my pain, because as a parent how she feels and what she sees comes first. I don't want her to feel blame or to be sad. I know it won't be easy, but thank you strangers for your advice even when some of it stung a little. As I've said, I know it's hard to have an opinion when you're only getting one side.

I'm not an angel in any of this and take accountability for my parts for the ending of this chapter. I guess it's time to move on. Relevant comments from Oop. I appreciate your message and your perspective. I really do. When he gets home, he says how tired he is and bolts it upstairs to the game room to sleep before we can even get a hello in. Then I hear him on his game up there. I tell him and I tell our daughter how thankful I am for how he provides for his family. I've helped him lose weight and

I've told him how good he's looking and how proud I am of his weight loss even though he's getting the results by medication. I make sure the house is nice and tidy before he gets home, I pack his work bag, clean his clothes, make his lunches, and buy his snacks. What I get in return is most of our bills paid by him and nothing more unless I ask him several times to do something. When I ask him to go to a family event, he says he's tired and doesn't go. When he goes, he complains the whole time about how tired he is. He can't just do what I do and just put a smile on his face. I think I don't have any more to give. I got to this point and asked him to make a sacrifice for me and his response was no response, but instead he played three hours on his game.

When do I deserve to get some extra effort from our marriage? Brilliant underscore Chicken 153. I can totally empathize. Sounds like he's not even open or appreciative to kind things you're trying to do for him. Well, then the only other thing I could think of is trying to get him to open up to what's making him unhappy to where he needs to escape to his games every waking moment. Put the onus on him to explain what he feels he is not getting that causes him to game nonstop. When I gamed, I would still make time for my family and it sounds like he won't. You may have already made up your mind, but if you're still on the fence,

pushing aside your hurt and concerns temporarily and finding out from his perspective why he is checking out in gaming, might give you some insight. I'm guessing he wasn't always this way. Something seems to be fundamentally not working. Couples therapy could help but a lot of therapists are not that great. Not sure if it's an option, but maybe a separation. or leaving for a few weeks could make him wake up. Barring that, if you do go through a divorce, I wish you the best of luck. They are not fun.

Oop, this was his response a day later. Up if I don't make you happy, then I don't want to force something that's not going to make you happy. I'm fine with what you want to do. I do love you and I shouldn't have to prove that after being together for 14 years. We can go our ways. I will financially support you and Landry to the best of my ability. only have a few requests that wherever you decide to move please stay within 30 miles of each other so I can see Landry and I can help better

I can pay your mortgage on a $250,000 house if you put 100K down and will of course pay for whatever Landry needs when we sell the house I want 100K and you can have everything else I need you to pay the Tesla off I owe 33K we need to at least get 600K

for our home if not more. I hate that it's come down to this but will help you achieve happiness as long as we can agree on some terms with our child and finances. Update number two, August 11th 2024, seven months later. Hey my fellow Redditors. Sorry to Ghost Reddit for a bit. I'm honestly not exactly sure where I left off at but here are the most recent updates. I don't exactly know the best place to put updates but figured I'd just make another post. After my second post I had found some thyroid nodules and thankfully they are non-cancerous, but I will still need to have a procedure to have them shrunk. My husband found out about them and was upset I did not tell him what I was going through medically.

After that we spoke again about if he asked if we could reconcile and we did our best to address our concerns and we have been trying to work on things. He no longer plays his PlayStation, watches porn, or stays upstairs in our game room. I started working more and contributing more financially especially with all of the extra medical costs from all of the labs, testing, and needing to save for the cost of the procedure. Since I work more he has been helping out with household duties and being a present parent. We are working on things, actually having sex, working on our health, and communicating more. After my possible cancer scare, I realized life is just too short to not enjoy it.

I told him I am no longer giving energy to argue. be angry, and be around people that are more negative than positive in my life. He knows if we aren't going on the same path, then I'm not going to stay in our marriage. Like many said, it's not healthy for our daughter to be with parents who stay together just for the sake of our child. He's finally listened to me and has started going to the doctor he's on a CPAP for sleep apnea, lost 60 IBS, and taking cholesterol medication. He now overall seems to be in a better mood. He told me he really didn't realize how long he would stay up watching the PlayStation and how that affected his sleep as well and has

apologized for being so blind. I can tell he's trying and is making efforts to be more involved and present as a husband and father. He is also taking lots more initiative in our relationship. He initiates sex and actually is back to foreplay and I feel like we have true intimacy again. I really think with the amount of masturbating he had death-grip syndrome and that's why he had a hard time keeping an erection which was what ultimately led to the dead bedroom. The bedroom is fun again and I feel like we are how we were before having a kid. We've started doing lots of little things together like watching our weekly shows, having date nights, and we even took a week-long trip with just the two of us and we had a great time.

I'm not saying everything is perfect because we have our days, but we are on a very good path. I don't believe in throwing away something broken until I've given my all to repair it. It's so easy to throw something away and start over with something new. Marriage's teamwork and both partners have to be willing to put in equal parts of effort to make it last. I hate it took the big wake-up calls to get here, but I'm glad where we are at in life. Again I appreciate all of you in this Reddit community. Now on to the next story.

Story 2. My son suddenly looks biracial, so I got a secret DNA test and he's not mine, that can only mean my wife cheated. Hello all, throw away. I made this as short as possible, I'm sorry. I've been married to my wife for three years and together for five. Our son just turned two in early June, and to put it bluntly he looks biracial. His skin is darker than I thought it would have been, he has curly hair when we most certainly don't and his features just don't look like the standard white people which we are. He's a beautiful boy, he just doesn't look 100% white. I asked my wife a few days after his birthday if she thought our son looked white.

She said yes and asked if I'm accusing her of something. I said no because I genuinely wasn't. I just was wondering. I know genetics can be weird sometimes. We fought and I apologized but I wasn't able to shake the feelings so I did the shitty thing and got a test done behind my wife's back. The results came in a few days ago and I'm not my son's dad. I feel conflicted about my son.

I love him, but knowing that he isn't mine is leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Our son definitely prefers me and he's my world, but he's just not biologically mine. I don't know what to make of my feelings. I'm a mix of emotions about my wife. I don't know how to talk to her. I'm angry, confused and feeling very, very betrayed. I'm heartbroken too. I still love her.

She's working at the moment and I don't want to disturb her at her office, but I feel like I'm going to explode. This is all very difficult for me to process and I can't. I can't think of when my wife cheated. We always hit each other's locations for safety purposes and I can't think of any suspicious friends that she has or had. We go on regular dates and our bedroom isn't dead. We were also trying for a baby around that time, so I don't know when she cheated on me or why. Ever since we married, she's been over the moon constantly showing off her ring and talking about me. She's like a teenager in love. How do I tell her that I know? Or get that ball rolling? I don't know what I want to do yet as stupid as that sounds. I've been stewing on it for a few days,

but I still love her so much. Maybe someone can knock some sense into me. I need help. Edit, I'm becoming overwhelmed with the comments, I'm sorry. I wanted to reply to a few, but I can't. I just wanted to say thank you for commenting and that I also hope our baby was just swapped as terrible as that sounds. Our baby didn't look by racial at birth. As he got older, he started developing features that didn't look entirely like ours. If our sun's skin didn't darken over time, I don't think I ever would have questioned anything. The other features can be explained as a fun little surprise or a few generation hops maybe. I know that genetics can be weird. July 17th, 24, 16 days later. I don't know if anyone will see this as the subreddit I posted to

doesn't allow updates after 48 hours, but, hello if you do. Getting the bad news out the way first, my son isn't mine. I feel devastated and will be divorcing my wife. My wife and I had talked about our son a few days after my post and my wife cracked under the pressure. She admitted to cheating on me without me even mentioning the test I had gotten done. All I asked was if she really thought out sun looked white. I mean it when I say that if his skin never got darker, I wouldn't have known. She cried a lot and begged for forgiveness and told me that we can all still be a happy family, but my image of her shattered right then and there. I'm going through heartbreak, so forgive any mistakes. I'm currently living with my parents. I asked her when she even

found the time to cheat on me and she told me that she would leave her phone in a location and use another. She told me that cheating was a mistake in an accident, but how was it a mistake if you had it so planned out? We were trying for a baby around then and she told me that she couldn't handle the pressure of it all and just wanted to escape. She didn't escape very well as she still got pregnant and acted like we were perfect. Thank you again to everyone. My wife will now be known as my ex-wife. I apologize to anyone who would hope and thought it was a baby switched at birth situation. I'm somewhat happy it wasn't because that would be terrible, but extremely disappointed because that means he really isn't mine. There won't be any more

DNA tests because she admitted to everything and showed me some text messages. There won't be any more updates from me either because I just want to move on with my life. I'll get everything sorted and figure out the whole custody thing. Thanks again. everyone. Goodbye.