I know how you feel, after putting your entire life into this marriage and then at the end you are either given the shaft or given the $hit, it is hard to tell anyone that it is better to go away from the abuse than to stay for any amount of money or benefits, they are wrong, when you have zero and they have it all it sucks. Somewhere somehow once you hit that magic number of years you get to keep benefits. The income, we put in our years and somehow we end up with the short end of everything when usually we do it all.