I in know way would end up resenting my kids. I live for my kids. My love for them is unparallelled. Sure they might “get it” but again, they are way better off with the two of us than they would be living with one of us. I do too much with them, and spend too much quality time with them to imagine being relegated to every second weekend, or something like that. No, they are in a better situation as it is, and it’s my intention to continue like this for at least another 4 or 5 years.
As for a life with no sex? Well let’s just say one has to learn to take matters into ones own hand.
Oh, believe me, I get masturbation, but after more than six months of no spousal sex, I couldn’t take it anymore! You can’t tell me that it even comes close to being as fulfilling as sex with an actual person!
You do what ya’ gotta do: that’s all. Fulfilment comes in other ways. You learn to substitute one pleasure for another and cope. Again, my kids’ happiness and my commitment to them is more important than anything else at this time. I’m moulding little lives here; I can’t be selfish. I need to provide them with the best upbringing I know how. Shattering our home life would not be beneficial to anyone at this point. Geez, talk about spilling my guts… I might regret this all later. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I remember having a discussion about divorce once (maybe here, I’m not sure), where people were surprised that the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women, and wondering why. I was surprised at the surprise frankly, because that’s a no-brainer. For a man, even the most amicable and reasonable divorce almost invariably means not living with his kids anymore.
As a parent, just the thought of that makes me feel sick and panicked. The most friendly, truly drama-free and for-the-kids’s-good visitation agreement I’ve ever seen resulted in the dad seeing his kids three nights a week and every other weekend. You can’t get much more “fair” than that, but it’s certainly not the same thing as living with them. You miss so much when you’re not there every morning and every night. I’m entirely unsurprised that many men choose to suffer a bad marriage, when this is the alternative.
You have my condolences on your relationship difficulties. Do you have an exit strategy for when the kids are older? It’s a virtue to put your children’s needs ahead of your wants, but over time they’ll eventually not need such a commitment from you.
My wife and I are now empty-nesters. Frankly we’re loving it together; it’s like we finally got our lives back.
I suspect the adult ‘kids’ may need to seek their own emotional peace (via therapy or whatever) when they learn or figure out ‘Mom and Dad only stayed together for us’, too.
Its not just women - my brother in law cannot stand to be alone for more than ten minutes (some hyperbole there, not much) - which means he’s stuck it out through a bad marriage until it was suicide or divorce.
Why would kids whose parents stayed together for them (provided that, as **Leaffan **says, the household is a peaceful one) fare any worse emotionally than kids whose parents divorce? An amicable divorce is probably better for the kids than an openly hostile marriage, but alternatively, why wouldn’t a peaceful (if not especially warm) marriage be better for them than a hostile divorce?
Hey, there are millions of ways to mess up your kids. Most of us do it a little bit every day, no matter what we choose. If someone feels that they’re serving their kids’ best interests, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I can’t imagine they’ll be too traumatized by an eventual breakup when they’re maybe 16, 17, 18 years old. The separation should be completely amicable, or well, as amicable as can be expected. Again, there’s no outward hostility happening here, we both just seem to have lost interest in each other. A lot of it has to do with lifestyle: I’m one who enjoys skiing, golfing, skating, food, sun and relaxation. She enjoys nothing. I’m serious. She does not do anything and has the culinary latitude of a 10 year old. I’m starting to bash now so I’d better stop.
Sex isn’t the most important thing in the world. If I had to make a choice between foregoing sex for a few years or ripping my children’s lives apart through divorce, it would be a no brainer. And I’m in a happy marriage, btw.
I’m not sure how the notion that romantic love and a great sex life are the most important things in one’s life came about. Sure, they’re great if you can get them, but they’re not the be all and end all. Sometimes you’ve got to put your pursuit of your own ideal happiness aside and do what’s best for your kids. If that means sticking it out in a marriage with a partner with whom you’re not gettin’ it on but with whom you’re amicable, so be it. If the alternative is to tear your kids away from one of their parents and have them shuffle back and forth to different houses every other weekend, it would be incredibly selfish to think your own pursuit of happiness is more important than theirs.
I couldn’t have put it better. Unfortunately I don’t get a “do over.” The situation is what it is. Life isn’t hell, it’s just not what I thought it was going to be, but who amongst us ever thought it would be?
I took my daughter skiing for her third time ever yesterday. We had a riot. Today my wife has our daughter at her dance class, and my son and his friend are playing Rock Band in the basement while I make them lunch. Tonight my wife and daughter are going to the ballet together. My son and I will crack open a DVD we haven’t watched and I’ll make whatever he feels like for supper: probably BBQ some hamburgers, knowing him! Having two parents around who aren’t interested in each other, but who have varied interests to share with the kids is way better than the alternative.
Yeah, I’m on Leaffan’s side too. (Though it’s hypothetical, since my husband and I have a very happy relationship.) My mom’s parents did not have a particularly happy private relationship, but it was the 50’s and people didn’t get divorced so much. My mom has said that she thinks it was better for her and her siblings, and she doesn’t seem to feel lots of guilt over it.
I think you have to separate the relationships where people bitch a lot from the ones that are actually bad, because sometimes people in really awful relationships suffer in relative silence and sometimes people in decent relationships just like to bitch for one reason or another.
I tend to bitch about DoctorJ a fair bit because although he’s a wonderful person and I love him with every fiber of my being and feel incredibly lucky to have him, he ain’t exactly Mr. Perfect. Sometimes he does stuff that are really rather piffling in the grand scheme of things but nonetheless get right on my last goddamn nerve to the point I could cheerfully bludgeon him to death. My options at that point are to a) stew in silence and let it all blow out of proportion in my head, which would ultimately lead to a fight and hurt him, b) snap at him and start a fight over something stupid and trivial, which will hurt him, or c) gripe about it to my friends or the girls at work. By and large, c seems like my best option because I would rather roll naked over hot coals topped with broken glass than deliberately hurt his feelings.
But anyone who only heard me bitching would either think he was laziest, most insensitive clod to ever slug across the earth, or that I was a horrible, strident harpy, and would wonder why on earth we both stayed in such a relationship.
For me it was I didn’t feel like I was raising my daughter in an environment of portraying what a healthy relationship was like. In my first marriage my wife had a mental illness and my daughter actually lives with me now. In that first marriage we had grown apart, it was pleasant if not boring, but there was zero affection between the two of us. We never fought, but there was also no displays of affection, nor did I feel we modeled what a healthy husband/wife partnership was to my daughter.
In my current marriage it is very different. My current wife is very affectionate, very loving and we have a fantastic relationship! My daughter and her friends see what two people who truly love each other can bring to the table. She sees how important having a partner who supports you, who is truly a partner and who you click with is critical in your life.
She is now interested in boys-and I have seen how she chooses who to talk to. She wants what she sees in our relationship and I am very proud of that.
Frankly I shudder to think of what kind of relationships she would have if she modeled it after my first marriage.
To each their own, we each have to find what eventually you can live with and what works for you. For me it was a eventual no-brainer to divorce my first wife and I am quite confidant I made the right choice for myself and my daughter.
Also, and extrapolating from my own experience (see upthread), I’d guess there’s sometimes an element of this:
Many people will, unfortunately, be aware only as a theoretical of the existence of better relationships; for all the faults of their current one, they certainly can’t point to a better one in their own history. Consequently, they reason, there is no sense tossing out everything they presently have, whether they think much of it or little, in pursuit of the uncertain hope of improvement. Besides, if what they have is less than they hoped for even in the most pessimistic hours of their youth, they need only turn on the TV or the computer to be reminded of how much worse they could have had it.
I’m sure this is true. I’ve seen way too many people marry someone they don’t even seem to like much, simply because they’ve been together a long time, and ‘that’s what you do’, to doubt it.
Even more fundamentally, I think that there are people whose default is “happy”, and people whose default is “unhappy”. I fall firmly into the former category, my ex falls firmly into the latter. It’s both the biggest reason our relationship didn’t work, and the reason it would never have occurred to him that we should break up.
Yeah, well, I’m the product of parents who stayed together, so make of that what you will.
Seriously though. While I’m sure the kids appreciate the logistics of both parents staying together, I can’t imagine that you are doing them any favors by subjecting them to your loveless sham of a marriage. Kids do pick up on what they see around them.
Ditto this. It didn’t make growing up any easier, if anything it was more stressful and it made me question the concept of marriage. I was wishing that they’d get divorced when I was ten, and they didn’t for another decade.
