We eloped two years ago and we are about to have our wedding with family and close friends in two weeks. 
Since February, he has developed a gambling addiction. He blames it on me for trying to have the wedding claiming he is ready. He had led me to believe that I could raise the money (which I planned out for a year!) but then I guess he wanted to also contribute. He quit working with no backup plan and I didn’t fight him about it. I was supportive even though I did not want to lose his income. He never acknowledges him letting go of a decent chunk of our income as being an issue and I would get cursed out if I even tried to say anything about that. He has an ongoing case where he is trying to be medically retired from his federal job. He could’ve been working until that was figured out but nope. The delay in his case has caused us so much stress. We were t expecting the case to take so long and it has dragged out over a year beyond what the lawyers told us. Regardless, I’ve been carrying us financially and this wasn’t a problem for a long time but now, it is. Now he’s developed a gambling problem because he just needs to contribute. Mind you, he does not pay any bills nor does me make payments on credit cards. He has no idea how much our bills even are. He has no idea what I have personally saved and he blew the money I had in our joint savings on lottery tickets. Every month, he has wasted god knows how much on the lottery. Before we met, he had a years-long outstanding credit card debt that was in collections. I didn’t think this was indicative of a bigger issue.

The terrible irony is that he has eaten away my wedding savings with his gambling addiction. So instead of helping me pay for the wedding, he has directly been working against me. I just want to scream at the amount of money that he has wasted gambling and how I could have literally used that for the purpose that he claims he is gambling: to have money for the wedding. He is so clueless and doesn’t realize that every dollar he blows is literally a dollar I can use on expenses. Every little dollar he gets, he puts into gambling. I can never scold him about this or anything. That is a level of frustration I cannot even describe, but he can literally do whatever the fuck he wants and I’m not allowed to say anything at all. If I try to say any little thing, he gets very angry and turns it around on me. It’s like having a bad ass child that you can never fucking discipline when they are bad.

On one hand, I feel like I have triggered him to develop this addiction. On the other hand, he has an extremely(!) addictive personality and he has always been obsessed with winning the lottery and he plays the lottery pretty much every day. He can and does waste hundreds of dollars on dumb phone games in a day. He got interested in the casino because he became friends with these other guys who play the lottery and they put the idea in his head. Now, it is not uncommon for him to drive over an hour to the casino four times a week. It is crippling. I had to remove him as an additional card holder from a bunch of my credit cards and I had to put him on a spending limit on the one credit card I still have him on. He just called me cursing at me because I will not let him withdraw money from the credit card to gamble. I feel like I am in a twilight zone with how obvious it is that he has a gambling addiction and how adamantly he denies it. It is so obvious. He is obsessed. He literally goes and drains all his money every time and every time, he swears he’ll never go back. He breaks his word every time. And every time he goes, without fail, if he happens to be up, he always always loses the money by the end of the night. It’s always the same dumb mistake and it is like he is not in control of his actions. That is so very clearly an out-of-control addiction but he swears up and down that he does not have a gambling addiction. I have done research into BPD and gambling addiction and discovered that this is a common addiction for folks with BPD. I want to get him help but he cannot even admit that he has a problem. I’ve sent him medical articles about gambling addiction and BPD and tried to talk to him. If I try to convince him that he has a gambling problem, he gets very angry. I’m in a state of numb terror at realizing that my life has turned into what it has. I want to help my husband but I don’t know what to do. I’ve cried, I’ve begged, I’ve warned him this I could drive me to divorce because his actions have threatened our financial security and could literally collapse our lives. None of this matters. I have forbidden him from going to the casino and he just ignores me straight up or sneaks out behind my back. I’ve asked him to get a job if he really wants to make money but apparently gambling is a surer bet than having a paying job. 

Everything is in motion and it’s too late to cancel but I don’t want him to break down to the point of no return. I for sure cannot afford for him to go to the casino another 8 times before the wedding. The thought of dealing with the humiliation of canceling everything has been terrifying but I am feeling desperate and my husband is not “normal” and “logical.” If he didn’t have BPD, he could get himself together. But I feel like he has no control over his actions and he’s just going to keep getting triggered. I am just so annoyed that he gets to conveniently blame me for his addiction. I feel like I can’t say anything if I want him to act right when I know he has a serious problem. He was going along with everything just fine but ever since he started gambling at the casino, he has gotten completely unhinged about money and the wedding. 

And gambling affects his mood incredibly. That’s the thing that drives me crazy about him blaming it on the wedding. He is incredibly happy if I can give him money to go gambling. He gets incredibly depressed if he loses all his money which is all the time. If I could hand him 5-10k to go gambling today, his mood would improve significantly and he would be soooooo happy. He would be so loving to me. And I wish I could essentially bribe him this way but I literally cannot. I am not freaking Jeff Bezos. By this point, he has blown so much money that I could have used in other ways. He doesn’t see that and won’t acknowledge anything he’s done. God, he is so clueless and incapable of reflection. I can’t believe how he literally goes and blows thousands of dollars over and over and doesn’t see the pattern. Every time, he thinks he’s figured out the secret. Every time, he fails. He is angrily adamant that he does not have a problem and that it’s my fault. I am hoping that after we get through everything, he will have to face that his problem because I really doubt he is going to stop cold turkey in two weeks. I’m used to being the convenient reason he blames for everything in his life. He is constantly blaming me for all kinds of things that literally I have no control over because I am not some God.