My heart aches for you. I'm brand new to this forum and I realize this is a long response, so feel free to stop reading at any point.

Nobody gets married because they want to get divorced. However, we all have our limits, in addition to which, I truly believe that you need to put the safety and welfare of your own minor child before all else -- if you are not happy and healthy, your bio child will suffer.

I wish I had left early in my marriage when I still had current job skills, I could still have had bio kids of my own, and my friends were still talking to me. But I had given up my job to become the stay-at-home mom to my two step-kids. They had many mental health issues that everyone was ignoring until the school begged me to take control of the situation when I went in to introduce myself as their "new mom". I am a hard worker and very competent by nature and a do-gooder by childhood religious indoctrination (which is a lethal combination, and what I know made me so attractive to my husband in the first place) and the longer I stayed, the more I became financially dependent on my husband and the more I became convinced by all the mental health professionals we enlisted that the skids would wind up in jail with multiple teenage pregnancies to their credit if I left.

I adopted the skids when I realized I had no legal standing and no protective powers as a stepmom and it became clear to me that nobody else would be able to handle them if anything were to happen to my husband. My husband had adopted the kids at birth with his first wife -- she died of a well-documented terminal disease when they were 1 1/2 and 5 years old. It looks tragic and romantic on paper but is in reality an indictment of the American profit-driven adoption industry.

We spent a fortune on psychotherapy of all kinds, plus educational therapy and private schools. We even re-located to a new state at our own expense to give our "daughter" a fresh start in high school -- her reputation and history were that bad.

I was attracted to my husband in the first place because he truly is a good and smart man who I believe was lied to by his first wife and was trying to be a good husband by giving her the children she was desperate to have by any means possible. He still is that truly good and smart man. I ended up staying to the point where we both became so invested in our situation on so many levels that we now have a strong bond with each other, forged by fire and pain. Neither of us has any kind of bond with our "children", however, hence my endless sorrow.

Here's the thing, I ruined my mental and physical health along the way, alienated my friends and my own family, and destroyed any chance of returning to a meaningful career because of staying out of work for so long - 16 years now. I tried going back to work after the youngest finally left the house (long story there), was constantly turned down because of being out of work for so long and told I would need to re-train. I did the math on several programs -- I would never be able to recoup the investment in school.

So I decided to take comfort in my forced early retirement, even though it means we are living a much smaller life than we had hoped for once the kids were finally gone. And now I have been diagnosed with cancer, so it's handy that I have so much "free time" to go to chemotherapy, etc. I truly believe my cancer is stress induced.

I think you need to choose whether to get out now, or commit to the long haul. I just read this in the book STEPMONSTER by Wednesday Martin, Ph.D. (I learned about this book on this site, thank you!)

"Although the divorce rate for remarriages with children is dramatically higher than that for remarriages without children in the first three years, such marriages, having passed the three-year mark, are actually more likely to survive than first marriages. In fact, after about five years, researchers have found, a remarriage with children is more likely to succeed than any other type of marriage. The extraordinary effort of coping with the ordinary struggles of stepfamily life, it seems, cements couples who do not succumb to the pressure early on."

I've read that elsewhere, but this author goes on to claim that, "Passing through this crucible is more than worth it, my subjects who managed to come out on the other side told me over and over."

I'm not sure I agree with that last statement. My ruined mental, physical, and financial health say otherwise. I believe I could have been very happy if I had continued working and possibly become serially monogamous, or had even gone back to my first husband - a child-free situation.

But you have the welfare of your own child to consider first of all. Can you find a way to stay sane and healthy in your current marriage, for your child's sake, or can you envision a better life for the two of you away from this marriage?

The marriage counselor I went to with my first husband was trying to nudge me toward the inevitable but I was trying to save my marriage. He said philosophically one day, "Well, the first divorce is the hardest."

I was appalled! How many divorces did he think I planned to have?!?!! But I finally got out of that marriage, which he knew was necessary, and many years later I can say there is some truth in what he said almost under his breath that day. It is that when you first marry you feel pristine and full of love and determination. When that pristine world is ripped away from you and you get that divorce, you are a changed person. The next time you marry you realize many things are out of your control and you'll be damned if you'll ever go through so much misery again.

So, Drew, how much misery are you in? What is there to save? What is your best case scenario given real world options?

I know that my dh now views his 14 years with bm as a "waste of time" at best. In those days he could not picture how much better life could be. Is it possible your life will be tremendously better if this marriage ends?

If it's true that you are being gaslighted (don't know your story, others apparently do) then ruuuuun! And don't look back. Someone who does that to you does not now and never will have your best interests at heart.

Maybe she is gaslighting you, or maybe you are just an asshole. Impossible to say, since you give no examples.