My husband lied about his debts — is my marriage beyond help?

Although you describe yourself as ‘at a crossroads’, it sounds as if you have already chosen the road you wish to travel, and are feeling the fresh wind from a new direction on your face.

Is there any future for this marriage? Because of your daughter I will cling to a fragile hope — in the knowledge that you are even now weighing up your own future happiness against hers.

Your husband has made a hash of things and his chief crime was not ineptitude with money, but fundamental dishonesty. If it wasn’t bad enough misusing the cash of putative customers, he concealed from you the truth of the situation — thus depriving you of the chance to advise and help.

When sharing ceases to be a central pillar of a marriage, the roof is in real danger of falling in.

You have a fine, essential job (omitted from the above) and that makes me wonder if your husband hasn’t been nursing something of an inferiority complex concerning your respective situations in society as well as earning power.

that is no excuse, but it might be an explanation for his cover-up. Now one outcome of that stupid concealment is the humiliation of being put firmly in his place, paying rent in his own home, and so on.

he has pushed you to the brink —

and although you have paid the price in a burden of anxiety and responsibility, so has he...in what must surely be shame.

No human being likes to be seen to be a failure. The trouble is — you do see him in that way and feel pretty fed up with his (irresponsible?) family, too. You say you don’t ‘think’ you love him. Is there a chink of light there? Obviously, I would like you first to go for counselling together

(relate.org.uk) to talk all these things through and — with your daughter at the forefront of your minds — work out if there is a way forward together.

Is it not the right thing to try, before you go to a solicitor? In any case, even if you have decided the marriage is doomed, impartial counselling (think also of mediation — see National Family Mediation’s website, nfm.org.uk) is the way to help you part with intelligence and (hopefully) mutual respect.

You’re honest that you yell at him; I suggest your understandable frustration shouldn’t outweigh the awareness of how bad this can be for a child who overhears.

At 36, you lack that terror of being alone, which can so often keep an older person locked within an unhappy marriage.

And I hope you are also young enough to understand that people

can change — and very often deserve a second chance.