AITA For Telling My Wife We Either Share Our Lotto Winnings Or We Separate And I Get Half Anyway?

AITA For Telling My Wife We Either Share Our Lotto Winnings Or We Separate And I Get Half Anyway? ----- AITA For Telling My Wife We Either Share Our Lotto Winnings Or We Separate And I Get Half Anyway? She Called It Her Winnings, So I Decided To Legally Prove It Was Joint ----- My wife and I used to daydream about winning the lottery. We weren’t greedy—just wanted enough to pay off our mortgage, cut back on work, and spend more time with our kids. It was a shared fantasy. So when it actually happened—not the jackpot, but enough to make those dreams possible—it should’ve been the best thing that ever happened to us. Instead, it nearly destroyed our marriage. After we paid off the house, everything changed. My wife, out of nowhere, said she was quitting her job entirely. I was stunned. We had always talked about scaling back together, not one of us stopping completely. When I pushed back, she said it was her ticket, bought with her money, so it was her decision. She called me a gold digger when I brought up sharing it, and from there things spiraled—cold silence, shouting matches, her making herself the victim to our friends. I was completely blindsided and devastated. Eventually, I contacted a lawyer, not out of spite but out of desperation. I learned that in our state, lottery winnings are marital property, regardless of who bought the ticket. That turned out to be truer than I realized—her HR department accidentally exposed that she’d claimed the winnings jointly, listing me as a spouse, using our shared address, even referencing me in a recorded call. When I showed her the legal proof, she didn’t yell—just froze. That was the turning point. One night, I came home to find her staring out the window. Quietly, she told me she had lost herself. That the money felt like an escape hatch from a life that had become all routine and exhaustion. She said she panicked and made it all worse. She apologized—not just for the ticket, but for shutting me out, for the names, for the resentment. We talked. Really talked. About the burnout, the pressure, the way we had stopped living. Now? We’re trying. We’re in therapy. She’s on leave instead of quitting. I dropped to part-time. We took a modest vacation with the kids. We moved the money to a joint account and built a financial plan together. The damage isn’t magically fixed, but we’re no longer fighting. We’re rebuilding. It was never about the money. It was about what we thought it represented—freedom, control, escape. But in the end, the thing we needed most wasn’t more cash. It was each other. ----- #redditfamily #reddit #familyrelationships #redditstories