It was a gradual progression

Initially, I doted on my husband. He never appreciated it and it never got me any of the things I wanted.

My kids talk trash about what an idiot the man was because they are much like their asshole father -- what with getting half their genes from him -- but find me easy to please. In their minds, it's a good deal to keep me around and doting on them, so they made a few adjustments to their behavior to get that outcome.

When we were first married, I would manually tape his favorite TV shows while he was in the field. It meant my life and schedule continued to revolve around him even when he was away.

Then he got home, spent his first weekend back catching up with the TV shows he missed while away AND ignoring me. No, he never even was like "Thanks, honey!"

It felt like cooking him his favorite meal and watching him consume it with his girlfriend while I served it, got treated like trash and didn't even get to eat at all, much less WITH him.

So I eventually stopped taping his shows. My time became more of my own when he was away and I didn't have to watch him coo at his girlfriend while pissing on his wife anymore.

In Germany, I played hostess to his gaming and told his gaming buddies they could cook in my kitchen etc. This went over so well with his BUDDIES, every single one of them came to my apartment to say a TEARFUL goodbye to ME after their general going away party at the barracks that I couldn't attend because of being female.

He just took it for granted. 

In Kansas, our next duty station after Germany, his gaming buddies were horrific assholes compared to the ones in Germany. Rather than single soldiers trapped in a foreign country who saw our home as an oasis of civilization in an otherwise hostile environment, they were mostly over entitled college students.

Every Friday night, he cleaned up and vacuumed to impress his asshole friends, pretended this made him a New Man style husband sharing in the housework and then his shitty friends would TRASH my home. I would spend three days cleaning up afterwards.

It was in Kansas I realized my health wasn't why I couldn't keep up with the housework and maintain a spotless home per my mother's exacting standards and it wasn't my two crazy making twice exceptional kids. It was ENTIRELY my asshole husband.

He was gone six months out of the year every single year in Kansas and I learned from experience that if he was gone for more than a week, I could get the house picked up and THEN, miracle of miracles, it STAYED nice the entire rest of the time he was gone.

He would come home and within thirty minutes every god-damned thing he owned exploded onto every fucking surface of every room and no amount of work was enough to keep up with it. While he acted like I was a bad homemaker.

The contrast between how clean my home was while he was gone while I put in less effort and the three days required to clean up after his ungrateful, disrespectful asshole gaming buddies made it ESPECIALLY clear to me that him cleaning up the house to impress his shitastic "friends" while pretending he was "helping with the housework" was such utter bullshit. 

The house would have been cleaner with less effort on my part if he had just NOT invited these troglodytes over to begin with AND done NO housework.

Once, he came back from the field having hardly slept the previous three days but still determined to have his gaming buddies over as usual. While cleaning up to impress these assholes as usual, he fell fast asleep across two dining chairs.

His asshole buddies showed up and I lied and said "He's not here." because he obviously needed his sleep. I don't lie well and these shitty people tried to insist on coming in, both making up bullshit excuses why I should let them in and trying to force open the locked screen door.

My six or seven year old watched this go down, saw me instinctively drop my hand towards the umbrella in the umbrella rack while standing down three men all bigger than me and made a mental note to never mess with momma even after he got taller than me.

After that incident, I generally went shopping or something during games and when I got home, these shitbags suddenly had someplace else to be in short order.

In Kansas, I had bad dreams about the husband inviting people over to HELP him piss on my life. At our next duty station, I said we were no longer hosting games at our house and he could go game ELSEWHERE if he wished to continue his hobby.

There's more to this story, but I was married twenty-two years and could no doubt write not merely a book but an entire encyclopedia about it. Enough for now.