There are lots of reasons people get divorced. If possible, I would like to keep this thread limited to this very small subset of divorces. Please only respond if you were in a marriage where:
Your spouse was generally a good person
You had little to no sex because there was a lack of passion
Basically you were like roommates or friends who just happened to sleep in the same bed
If your spouse was evil or a cheater, please don’t reply. If your spouse was withholding sex to be manipulative, please don’t reply.
I find myself in a marriage like this. I got married young and have been married a long time. There’s nothing really wrong with either of us, but there is no spark. It’s like when you grow apart from best friend from childhood. At first you wanted to spend all your time together, but eventually your interests changed and you drift apart.
So for those of you who were in a similar marriage and got divorced, how do you feel now? Are you happier? Do you regret getting divorced? Now divorced, what advice would you have given to your married self?
Mine was common law - but yes, there is regret from time to time. I think had we talked, and had we worked and compromised on unspoken needs that could have increased passion and had I been more mature and realized that passion wanes and waxes perhaps I could have worked at things more.
In my current relationship, although there have been dry spells and issues, we’ve never stopped working on things, and I would not do the same again.
It is far more work to create a comfortable partnership from lust, than to bring lust back into a partnership. When you both are 90 years old and the plumbing doesn’t work, which one is more valuable, lust or friendship?
Unless you actively dislike or hate your partner - I would work on things instead of splitting.
I’m curious about this one. I’m finding myself in the same situation, and I have stayed in my marriage of 12 years pretty much purely out of financial concerns. One household can live cheaper than two.
Plus, as much as my marriage is meh, I get to live with my kids this way. There is no way I’d get custody over my wife, and as much as my wife is basically a good person, she can be vendictive, and I’m scared of what she’d do if custody came up. Those two factors have kept me in my marriage, but I still wonder if I would be happier alone.
I am there, exactly, and we decided a week ago to end it. He and I are both good people, just not together.
There’s no anger, no finger pointing, it’s just that both of us feel we would be happier alone or with someone else.
I’m terribly relieved the situation has been resolved. Especially as it came to light this weekend that his ex’s townhome is in foreclosure and his sons (19 and 12) will now be living with him. Thankfully this didn’t come to light a week ago or I would have been branded a Very Bad Person. Because I’m NOT living with those children.
Married about 20 years. Many, many discussions over the years. We have good communication. I think the current situation is because we got married as 20-year-olds and we are no longer those same people.
My spouse is nice and I enjoy doing things with her, but there’s just no spark. I feel like she could be replaced with generic-nice-person and the relationship would be just about the same.
We do have kids. I wouldn’t consider actual divorce until they move out of the house. If there weren’t kids I feel I would be fine divorced–I’m pretty independent anyway. But I wonder about having to split holidays and stuff like that.
I don’t regret the divorce at all. If he’d had any passion for me, we might have made the marriage work, but he never will and, anyway, for other reasons I’m glad he’s not my problem anymore.
But he was a good guy with a lot of positive qualities and we remain distant friends.
I don’t have any regrets especially over two years later. My ex-wife is a good person, pretty with a good resume and pedigree. She looks good on paper but I just lost interest completely. I would have loved to spend a night hanging out with any random person rather than her. She bored me to tears but I think anyone would have after 17 years together. I would have stuck with it because I love being with my daughters so much but she is not one to settle and pushed for perfection way too much and I simply didn’t want to put any effort into anymore because I didn’t want it fixed. I wanted to be gone but not to have to suffer too much in the process. That took some time to engineer.
Divorce is messy and takes a while to work through but it is very worth it at least for me. I don’t think I will ever get married again though because I truly believe that it works out to some version of bad for the vast majority of couples over time. I am not playing that game anymore. I focus on my daughters, work, and myself. That comes naturally and makes me happy. Marriage did not even on good days.
I don’t really know if she is or not. I think she mostly is, but she’s selfish in the way where everything is her and there’s no give and take. She’ll also BS for all it’s worth, even if she gets called on it.
That was almost all her. I tried to be romantic, but she wanted no part of it. She said it was the kids and she had no libido. Well she BSed about that as she found someone new a couple of months after she moved out. So the lack of passion was on her part.
We were more like roommates for the last few years who sometimes slept in the same bed, and even rarer had sex.
I did at first really regret it, then again she did the leaving. But now eight months later not as much. I don’t like not seeing the kids every day, but I don’t miss the fact that I don’t get any type of affection at all. I don’t so much miss the sex, I miss snuggling with someone, the kissing, the walking together, the holding hands. I don’t so much miss her any more.
I’m not sure if I’ll get married again, I’m not sure if I’ll live with someone again either, though I do miss having someone around from time to time. I guess I’ll have to see how things work out to even know what I want.
I think I qualify. My ex-husband is a good person, he really is. He’s just so negative and has such bad trust issues I felt smothered all the time. The sex was awful because I just didn’t feel any attraction after about a year. Physically he was great and when I found myself in the mood (rare and drunk usually) the sex was awesome but I just felt like we would have been better as friends. There was no passion on my part, and this of course made him think I was getting it elsewhere so his reaction was to trust me even less.
We tried going to a counselor but the counselor told me on my own that I would be better off without him; that he was a dark cloud. That’s what he called him: a dark cloud.
So the OP is getting a lot of interesting answers from folks who didn’t have the problem specified in the first post. Not really a criticism, just an observation – he (she?) asked for stories about people who would have a good marriage if the sex were there, and he got responses from people who were married to folks who could make a good spouse for someone else, but were no longer a good match for the people they were with.
Anyway, filmore, if the lack of sex really is the main problem, perhaps a sexually open relationship would solve it. That way you could bleed off your sexual desires without making your spouse feel that his/her different libido is causing you to be unhappy.
This describes my marriage perfectly. And we are still together, so I can’t answer the questions about divorce. We’ve been married 10 yrs, but living together another 6 yrs before that.
Our intimacy challenges are a combo issue: plumbing may not be working at optimal efficiency, not a whole lot of interest, and inability to communicate about this subject. To be fair, he was never the sex-focused man that some men are, and that was fine with me. I think I saw a show (maybe a newlyweds kind of thing) where people talked about having sex multiple times a week when they started out. We have never been any where near that kind of frequency.
We are growing apart in quite a few ways, and sometimes I wonder what keeps us together. We don’t have kids, so its not like there’s that kind of fallout. I wonder if he just sticks around because I do such a good job of enabling his lifestyle. I earn a decent salary and he’s been able to be unemployed for years in a row without completely devastating us financially. Though there were a couple rough spots where I was sure we would have to file bk, but we never had to. He was able to pull part time jobs just in time to keep us from the real brink of disaster.
I get irritated and think about divorcing him, but he keeps me more active and involved in hobbies and people than I would on my own. So I get a benefit to the relationship too. Plus, he lets me get all garden crazy and take over his lawn, so that’s pretty cool.
Oh, did I mention that we both enjoy getting loaded on weekends? It contributes to our enjoyment of the other as a person, and to the decline in libido.
Actually, it is the latter case that I’m interested in. Lack of sex is just part of the whole lack of passion in the relationship. There’s no physical passion, no passion for each other’s interests, etc. The lack of sex is a huge issue, but it’s not the only one.
I’m in this exact situation myself. No passion and it seems we have nothing in common anymore.
I’ve been unhappy for awhile, so I convinced him to sell our home and relocate nearer to our grown daughter. I had hoped the change would reignite a spark in our life, but it hasn’t.
And now I don’t feel like I can bring up the possibility of our splitting, since he quit his job to move with me. I feel stuck and it’s not a pleasant situation at all. But he is a good guy, just not the one I want anymore.
My marriage is like this. Sometimes I wonder how we can continue the next fifty years like this–if we live that long. Other times, he’ll say something or do something that reminds me that he knows me better than anybody, he still loves me, and there are worst things in this world than living with your best friend. We have stress in our life, probably mostly my fault, and there’s no spark at all. But we genuinely like each other still. We’ve been together for 12 years, married for nearly 10.
My marriage resembled a lot of the marriages referenced in this thread. pepperlandgirl’s post in particular reminded me of my ex-wife’s attitude about our marriage (though I don’t know if she would have blamed herself for the stress).
We both had an attitude that, because we were best friends (and both had self-esteem issues), we were doing as well as we could be doing – we didn’t think that a better match could be found out there. So the thought of divorcing never really crossed our minds for the majority of the 10 years we were married – we celebrated our friendship and mostly tried to bury the fact that there wasn’t a romantic spark between us.
I think it’s safe for me to say that she has no regrets now about getting divorced and finding someone who seems to be much better match for her (not in that order, unfortunately). Nor, for the record, do I.
I think a lot of you and people in general are too hard on yourselves. Even based on the descriptions, you are at least average in terms of marriage quality and probably well above average because you didn’t mention any major scandals like affairs, theft, abuse, etc.
The one thing I have learned over time is that the fairytale version of a marriage either does not exist or I have never seen it in person. The only people that claimed to have it seem to be the ones that are covering up something and it gets exposed in due time. What you are describing is basically the goal. I am not saying there is no room for improvement but comparing your marriage to some mythical marriage that doesn’t exist in the real world isn’t fair to anyone. I am firmly opposed to the institution in general because I am a true loner and don’t need it but, for people that just like having someone around most of the time for security, you signed up for what you got. That is the dirty secret in the marriage business.
Do you honestly know of any good ones that you would trade places to be in yourself and could sustain in while still being you? That is a real question.
There are no fairytale marriages. There are fairytale WEDDINGS, followed by divorces since those sexy sexy soulmates eventually reveal themselves to be ordinary blah human beings.