I married a man decades older than me because I believed he could offer something I had been desperately missing for years: stability. At thirty, I was already living in a state of constant survival, raising two young children alone after their father disappeared without explanation shortly after our daughter was born. There was no warning, no closure, no support—just absence where there had once been promises. Suddenly, everything depended on me: the rent, the food, the childcare, the emotional weight of two children who were too young to understand why their lives felt so uncertain.

I worked full-time as an accountant, a job that required precision and responsibility, but even with a steady income, it never felt like enough. Every month felt like a balancing act where one unexpected bill—a medical expense, a broken appliance, a childcare issue—could unravel everything I was holding together. That kind of pressure doesn’t just exhaust you physically; it reshapes how you think about the future. You stop imagining possibilities and start focusing only on survival, on getting through the next week without everything collapsing.