Thanks for clarifying on the verbal violence issue. Too many people use that term these days to describe mean and cruel and angry talk, so it helps to pull the term "violence" out of the vocabularity of emotional cruelty.

If you're currently making similar salaries, no alimony will happen unless one or the other of you is intentionally under-employed just to get an advantage, and even then it would be really hard, take a whole lot of legal fees, just to get a few bucks out of it. Work on getting him to reimburse your $15K as part of the settlement.

On the rent, that's on him as long as you've filed. He COULD have gotten a locksmith to let him into the house even though you changed the locks, but he chose not to do that (and changing them maybe was a mistake on your part.) Once the two of you have filed, your separate living situations are generally something you deal with separately, unless of course either of you owes temporary support to the other...

Think of it this way: You both have a community obligation to maintain the mortgage on the house and the right to live there. If one or the other is kicked out, then that person deserves to get rent from the other (half the reasonable market value of rent, which probably has nothing to do with the costs of hte mortgage. But for you havign taken over the whole price of maintaining the house, electric, etc., while it's up for sale, you might want to say that's YOUR "rent". And HE is not at any disadvantage for having to pay his own rent any more than you are at a disadvantage for having to pay the full price of maintaining the house that's up for sale.

So I think that unless he pursues you for rent and has some explanation other than that you're paying to live in hte place you're in and he's paying to live in the place he's in... if he has been paying the mortgage maybe and you have been letting it go, then he could come back at you for part of it... but as it is... he has no right to say that he has been unfairly required to pay for your lifestyle while he pays rent separately.

As it is, I'd say your best bet is to sever your ties with him quickly and as calmly as possible. Find a way to swallow your anger for a while and tell him you're sorry for the nastiness, you hope he gets the help he needs for his alcoholism, and you can't be part of the drama any more. Ask him if he has a plan for paying you back for the money you spent on his degree... since it was living expenses for both of you while he was getting it, you might want to offer to take half of the loss on your own and accept only $7,500 as a compromise... (only do this after a whole lot of discussion) and find a way to put that on paper and finalize it before he changes his mind and demands expensive lawyering to come to the same result... because the expensive lawyering to argue these matters will very much exceed the value of the things you're arguing over!

Good luck and thanks for clarifying on the mentally cruel stuff. By the way, it's perfectly reasonable to call it cruelty, just be careful not to mix it up with violence... don't let it get mixed up in anyone's mind. Mental cruelty is evil enough. I mean it's REALLY evil. My husband endured a lot of that in his past marriage. There was also some physical violence that his ex did on him... biting & hitting... but she was so small that it did not rise to the level of causing physical damage (other than broken skin for a very few of the bites... no lasting harm). The mental cruelty was truly evil, though. Physical abuse is easy to point a finger at and say, "wrong"... but the emotional stuff, it really twists your mind and plays with your self-image and is hard to put a finger on. It's very damaging! It's bad ENOUGH and shouldn't need to be combined with the term "violence" to make an impact. And when people mix the terms up and do combine it with the word "violence", they diminish both thier own cause of mental cruelty as well as the cause of physical violence... by making the people who truly experience physical violence or threats of violence look less credible for the fact that inaccurate descriptions of violence are so common.