We’ve been married for a year and my husband has threatened to leave me 2 times since our wedding day. That’s also the amount of arguments we’ve had since getting married.

The first time he was driving recklessly because someone pulled out in front of him and it gave him road rage. He was cussing and speeding and swerving all over the place, at one point he reached a speed of over 100mph.

I yelled at him to slow down and to calm down, that he was scaring me. And he just lost it on me. Just started cussing and yelling and saying very hurtful things to me. Next thing I know he pulls over in a parking lot and screams at me to get out and drive. At this point I’m not in any better condition to drive than him. I’m crying and can barely see because of it and I’m having a full on panic attack and can barely breath.

He then gets angrier and told me “I knew this would happen. This was never going to work.” And goes on and on about how doomed our relationship is before getting out of the car and walking down the road. He got far enough for me to lose sight of him.

I broke down and just sobbed in the car in that stupid parking lot until he eventually came back and had the nerve to ask me if I had calmed down yet.

I told him I didn’t like being treated the way and that I didn’t understand why he was threatening to divorce me over telling him to calm down and that his driving was scaring me.

He just shrugged and said he didn’t hit me so I shouldn’t feel like shit.(he has never touched me in an aggressive way whatsoever so I’m honestly not sure where this disgusting comment even came from)

I told him he wasn’t exactly setting the bar very high for his standards and he proceeded to tell me I’d be driving everywhere from now on because he didn’t like people giving him shit for his driving.

The second time he threatened to leave me was after a misunderstood comment. He had built me something I had asked for, but never consulted me on what I wanted it to look like or anything else about it. It ended up being just thrown together scrap he had laying around the house and not only did it look nothing like what I wanted but it didn’t work the way it needed to either. It was supposed to be a project for us to do together, but he excluded me from it on every level.

When he first asked me what I thought of it, I was nice and just told him I appreciated it. But he kept pressing me to be honest so I finally was and told him that I wished he had asked me what I wanted it to look like.

He then got angry immediately and began complaining that I wanted something “fancy” and for him to spend a fortune on it. Which wasn’t the case at all, I just wanted a very basic space that looked nice and would do its job and last a long time. Instead I got random pieces of chain link fence, tarp, and scrap metal thrown together.

He then kept making comments about how I was never happy with anything he did and that I was impossible to please.

Then he dropped the comment that all women are the same and you can’t please women and to “just look at my brother in law, he spent a fortune on my sister and she’s miserable.”

That was the straw that broke the camels back. So I pointed out that if anyone had spent a fortune in this relationship it was me, because my lifes savings that had existed long before the two of us even met had bought the land we were living on in cash. We wouldn’t have acreage if I hadn’t been smart with my money from a young age.

All I was trying to point out was that I was a successful person and that I contributed to our finances just as much as he did so he would stop making these sexist comments about women and having to spend fortunes on them.

He then got very quiet and said “so you finally said it. I see how you really feel now. Well you can have it. I’ll get my shit and go.”

He then stormed around the house yelling about how he thought that he had married me for my money and on and on and on. He said he’d give me the land in the divorce and we’d figure everything else out in court.

I asked him if he loved me and he just said he used too. Which broke my heart.

I eventually was able to shut him up long enough for him to listen to me explain what I meant.

In between these horrible fights everything is fine. He’s the most loving, kind person I know and he treats me well. But every 5 months or so something happens and we have a horrible fight that ends in him threatening to leave me. When he cools down he always begs for forgiveness, but the things he says when he is mad are always in the back of my mind and it has rattled my faith in our relationship.

If he was like this all the time I never would have married him. But in the months of down time between these fights he really is great.

I just wonder sometimes how long it will last. When will he get mad and threaten to leave and instead of stopping him I just let him go because I’ve had enough? I don’t know the answer to that, but I hope he learns to control his temper. After this last fight I waited a few days and told him how bad it made me feel when he says things like that.

He acted like he couldn’t remember half of the things he said. So he either loses his temper so badly he has no idea what hateful things are spewing out of his mouth or he doesn’t have the guts to own up to it when he is thinking clearly.

He won’t do counseling. He thinks it doesn’t happen often enough to need that or claims it won’t happen again. Twice in one year seems way too often to me already. I do believe that he is genuinely sorry for acting like this when he is angry, but that doesn’t excuse the behavior. I have no desire to be treated poorly for the rest of my life, but I do love him and want to do my best to work past it and for him to control his temper and stop doing it. But if this is still happening a few years down the road? I probably will just stop begging him to stay and let him wall out the door.