We have been together for almost 7 years. I was 19 and he was 30. He already had 2 kids and I have been a stepmother to them ever since.

I think in the beginning, it felt like we had a lot in common because we worked together. We actually don't have much in common at all.

At that time I felt like I was mature, I had a rough childhood and I had a lot of "experience". I felt I had done my party girl years and was ready to settle down.

Fast forward to now, we are married and we have a son together. He is 3.5 years old. He is autistic and non verbal. We don't yet know whether he will ever live independently or start speaking or attend mainstream school.

On 2 separate occasions, I have stumbled across sexual conversations in messages with random women on my husband's phone. No I was not snooping. The first time, I was trying to turn off an alarm and saw he had Skype open where he had been having a graphic conversation with a woman. The second time, I had lost my phone in the house while he was a sleep and used his phone to call it. I noticed a snap notification (he has always said that he hasn't got Snapchat.) I found hundreds of conversations with random women. Another time, an ex colleague messaged me to tell me she had spotted him on a dating site with a screenshot, my husband managed to explain this away as an old account but I cannot verify that either way.

I have no reason to believe he has stopped doing this. I have no reason to trust him at all.

That moves me on to the more mundane aspects of our issues. It's the same things that everyone in broken marriages complain about. The things you always think won't happen to you. Being taken for granted, financial issues, feeling like a housemaid, boring sex, differences in parenting style, never feeling appreciated. In a healthy relationship I suppose these things do crop up but the good should outweigh the bad. In our relationship, it just doesn't. We never have fun. In fact, I remember being a very fun and happy person when we met. He has somehow broken that out of me. Everytime I would laugh too loudly or too much or get too excited about a topic I was passionate about he would scold me to "calm down" and make me feel embarrassed. A few times this made me cry and he would claim he was "joking". Eventually I just stopped laughing or getting excited.

I asked him last Christmas if he would take me on one date in 2022. I told him exactly where I wanted to go. I just wanted to go out for 1 meal, i reminded him often. It hasn't happened yet.

Another issue is the older kids (his kids/my step kids). Everytime I have wanted to leave, they have been a huge factor in my decision to stay. Now, I feel that they are a reason to leave. And I feel like a piece of shit for saying that. They have very serious issues with their behaviour, they're totally disrespectful, violent, they have terrible hygiene, they lie everytime they open their mouths. I have poured years of my life into helping and loving these children and they treat me with nothing but contempt. My husband often leaves me to look after my son and the older 2 children, as well as the house and everything else.

So yeah, I am unhappy in my marriage. Even offering my husband a way to make me feel even a tiny bit appreciated (a single meal in a restaurant) has fallen on deaf ears for over a year while he continued to cheat on me, treat me as a maid and make me raise his horrible children.

This is all without going into the thousands of pounds of my inheritance he has spent and left me with absolutely no savings at all. And that is the issue, I cannot afford to leave. If I could just scoop up my son and walk out of that door knowing I would be okay, then I would. But I have no money and nowhere to go. That's the only thing keeping me here at the moment.

So, can I help him give me another reason to stay? Do I just wait this out until the end of my life?