My parents got a very much needed divorce after 18 years of marriage when I was 12. As of this last December, they’ve both passed away now, so I’m no longer looking over my shoulder in terror at the thought of airing dirty family laundry - but they were both very much at fault for the dissolution of their marriage.
At first, because I’d been a witness to several years worth of verbal and physical abuse on the part of my father toward my mother, I completely sided with my mom and almost hated my dad. I was glad he was gone from our home and spent several years in little to no contact with him, because he was an angry man and was bad at expressing himself except in anger. But as time passed and I got older and grew up some myself, I started to realize that my mother was certainly no angel. Shed been emboldened by her perceived ‘victory’ in her fight against my father’s ‘oppression’, and she started to lord her newfound independence over my sister and me in ways that hampered our growth. She was never really very good at taking care of herself or her business, but she WAS quite skilled at victimhood, victim blame, spending other people’s money, and drinking to excess.
Now don’t get me wrong - physical and verbal abuse are NEVER okay. It’s even less okay when you turn those abuses on your young children. My father was eventually able to change his ways and chill the heck out, I think in large part due to the birth of his first grandchild in 2001. We definitely were able to bury the hatchet and became very good friends. We came to respect each other as individuals - helped along by my realization in my late teens that - SHOCKINGLY - parents are JUST PEOPLE!
But my mom? Just a person though she was, I am convinced that she had some form of undiagnosed narcississtic personality disorder. She treated me and my slightly younger sister so very differently all our lives that it was clear she’d picked a favorite. At some point FAR in the past, she started telling anyone who would listen - her friends, my friends, our family - that I was a pathological liar, apropos of nothing, mostly to cover for her own failures. 30+ years later I’m still trying to put out the fires that this has caused in my life. She told my nurse practitioner aunt I was a hypochondriac starting when I was 15, told her so often that my aunt genuinely thought I’d been diagnosed with Muchausen syndrome - when really I had Epstein Barr, chronic migraines, and would later be diagnosed with MS and chronic peripheral neuropathy.
They weren’t a good fit for each other, probably weren’t for several years before they split up. They were both at fault, but my mom absolutely tried to poison my sister and me against my father, and it unfortunately worked for a time. So yes, while there are certainly cases where one partner can be 100% at fault for the dissolution of a marriage, at least in my parents’ case, they both sucked. I am glad I came to realize it before they were both gone.