"Here is my story for what its worth…

When my husband and I first got married many years ago, he didn’t know anything about computers. I taught him to use one and from there it went down hill. Three weeks after he discovered EQ he quit his job, he said he had no choice in the matter but of course I knew better. I was however, very much in love with him and continued to work full time and to support us both. At first it was not so bad, he would take care of the house, cook meals, and general be a house husband. But then things started to change. He stopped cleaning, he stopped cooking, he stopped do anything that was not related in some manner to EQ. (Side note: this took place over a 4 year period.) I like many others here took to playing EQ myself. I still do play but it’s a hobby not a lifestyle for me. I am sure you all have heard this before; I started playing to have something that we could do together. He started a new character so that he could play with me. They turned into my character power leveling his character. Of course since I didn’t play nearly as much as he did his character became higher level then mine rather quickly.

Finally he got a job after 4 years of us struggling to pay on the bills on my paycheck. I actually did make enough to pay the bills and live comfortable but his video game habit was expanding at an alarming rate. Now it was not just EQ but all sorts of games, be they on-line or single player. We had to have an X-Box, a Playstation 2, a Playstation 1, a >Game Cube and just about all the games that go with them. EQ remained his base addiction but now he had all these other games as well.

Communication, there was none between us anymore. The only thing he wanted to talk about was the games. He then quit the guild that I had created and went out on his own, our days of playing together on-line stopped. He started becoming very secretive about what he was doing on-line and even turned his monitor so that I could no longer see his screen.

OK, so I knew what was going on somewhere in my mind but I just refused to believe that I could lose my husband to a game. I worked very hard to involve him with the goings on of the family (I had two daughters and each daughter has a son), his parents would come to visit and he would sit in front of the computer and all but ignore them if my parents came he completely ignored them. By this point we had lost all of our friends, after all would wants to hang out with people that never leave
the house.

To make a long painful story short, he ran us into the ground, I had to file bankruptcy and a few days after I did he showed up at the house with divorce papers. I know I should have seen it coming but I guess I was just turning a blind eye to his activities. The all night sessions of playing EQ, moving out the bedroom to sleep on the sofa with the excuse that he didn’t want to wake me when he came to bed, lack of
communication, yes, I should have seen it coming, but I was to busy trying to fix the problem any though I didn’t know what it was really. The day he handed me the divorce papers the phone calls started. His EQ lover started calling the house the minute he would get home and they would talk all night. This lasted until he left; he left to move in with her. That of course didn’t happen, he went to met her and it lasted a few hours. I won’t get into the details of what went on but he was calling me to give me blow by blow details, even when I was hanging up on him. He came back when it didn’t work out with her, want to move back in with me, even though the actually court date for our divorce was just a few days away. I didn’t let him.

There is life after EQ. All this happened over a space of 9 years. My marriage was destroyed and our divorce and my bankruptcy was final a few months ago. I have a job and decent place to live and I am getting my life back together. I still play EQ but that is not all I do. EQ is a game and like all games there really is no other point to it then to enjoy yourself. As long as everyone understands that its ok. As long as you are still maintaining a full functional life outside of the game, everything is fine. As a side note, I don’t’ think I will even date a guy that plays EQ."