I was raised a combination of atheist (mom) and Quaker (dad) - the atheism definitely won, though I did internalize a decent amount of the Quakerism… I was engaged to a Catholic girl in my mid-20s. We discussed things early on, I said I’d respect her beliefs if she’d respect my lack thereof, and for a while it worked out nicely, we’d talk about spiritual stuff, but neither of us was trying to convert the other, it was more of a “how do you feel about x” or “how do you explain y”… But after a while, she decided that since I was “preventing” her from going to church some Sundays (I wasn’t, I was fine with her going without me, she just didn’t want to if she had the option to stay in bed and fool around with me, and why on earth would I turn her down?) that she wanted me to go with her the next Sunday whenever she skipped one. In retrospect, this was the first nail in the coffin of our relationship, but of course I didn’t recognize it at the time. It took us moving in together permanently for me to see how controlling she was, and how mean she could be if she didn’t get her way…
My wife lied about who she was and what she wanted from me for 20 years before she started fucking another guy… She even managed to hide that from me for a few months, and continued to try to hide it as I figured out what was going on… I ended up having to talk to the guy (because of course it was someone we both knew) to get confirmation- and I thought it had only just started, he’s the one who told me it had been going on for months. He said she told him we were already separated, just living in the same house to keep things stable for the kids… He seemed genuinely distressed and apologetic to find out that wasn’t true, and from my wife’s change in demeanor afterwards, I think he broke it off with her, though she was still trying to stay close to him, under the guise of letting our kids play together… But I suspect even that’s stopped now, based on what I hear from our daughter… Sounds like she’s latched onto another guy she works with… Which is how we met way back when… And she still hasn’t filed the divorce papers, she started working on it back in March… At this point I’m going to beat her to it, I’ve been talking to a couple lawyers…