So, anyone who has ever been divorced (since you can’t get a divorce without breaking your word) has no honor?
No, I’m not saying that (I better not be, I’m divorced, and I can hear the cries of “hypocrite, heal thyself” already. 
) I’m speaking mostly to the idea of “oh, I know I swore to love honor and cherish in sickness and health, but then you got sick and it became, like, hard and stuff, so nevermind”, and the people who seem to find that completely understandable, even natural. If you find that you absolutely can’t keep your word, then divorce is the honorable way to admit that, but divorce should be a big thing. It should be monumental. I had no doubt when I got divorced that I had completely and utterly failed at something that was central to my being. I grew and learned from that, and I doubt that I’ll ever be in a position in this marriage where divorce becomes a possibility (although im not ruling out murder 
). You grow through failure, I would not be the man I am now without going through that pain and growth. If divorce hadn’t been a big thing to me I doubt I ever would have grown at all, and though of course I’ll never know, I might just have been married and divorced a couple more times since then.
My mother had a giganto CVA (stroke) 21 years ago, when she was 59 and I was 21. She was rendered hemiplegic (lacking the use of one side of her body; in this case, the left). As is the wont of such CVAs, speech was intact. Her personality was severely affected, both by dint of disability and brain injury – she became bitter, punishing, petulant, and hostile. I grieved her following that first stroke, whether I was supposed to or not, and very little of my mother is present to date.
My father cared for her at home for eleven years while working until his own retirement at age 62. A few years later, she suffered another series of smaller strokes and lost the ability to ambulate or weight bear. With the help of my sister, who lives in our home town and has been a hospital administrator for years, he had her placed in a nursing home within walking distance of his own home when he could no longer manage. Since then, he has visited daily, for at least an hour. She has a private room for which he pays a premium as well as paying for her meds out of his own fixed income – to the tune of about 1000/month. Day before yesterday, he advised me that her advancing infirmity (to “total care” which means she must be lifted, fed puree, and is dually incontinent) demands a specific type of supportive wheelchair (she can no longer sit up unaided) – the price of which he must also absorb with help from whatever sources of aid he can access with family help. She has been in the nursing home now for more than ten years, and current indications say she could go on for another fifteen, with good nursing care. And she receives excellent nursing care.
Meanwhile, my father has moved in with a “room mate.” He pays rent to occupy a room in her condo flat (assisting him with managing his limited income), and (owing to his prostate cancer treatment) while sex is not exactly a big priority, there is plenty of affection and companionship there for him. I have gone over the years from a judgmental attitude to wishing him and his companion all the best for what remains to them both; as far as I am concerned, she is a member of the family now. He would simply be very unhappy on his own. My mother is kept unaware of the specifics of the room mate situation.
I suspect that the husband in the OP decided early on that his wife was dead – and perhaps in most ways she was – and time failed to bear out that judgment, and now it is far too late to change it. Hence his “it is too hard for me.” No doubt it is too hard for him – how do you go to your wife after eight years and say, “I’m so sorry, as far as I was concerned, you were dead”? And in order to assuage his own guilt and horror at the situation he found himself in, he rallied his children around him as accessories. He really could have done better. We could all do better when it comes to people like this. Trust me, I know – I could do better. But my father, I think, has done well with the hand he has been dealt – though many may judge him unfavourably.
My point wrt the OP is that the intimacies of such situations are like water torture – slow, gradual, and infinitely horrible. The farther away you are from the situation, the more impaired your ability to judge accurately, if you must judge at all. A phone call summing up a situation encompassing eight or nine years in a single sentence does not capture the drip by drip by drip experienced by the family, who must bear it all in excruciating awareness that everyone with a telephone is passing judgment in their unfettered spare time.
That’s a sad but slightly more uplifting version of the story, Gorgonzola. What your father has done is really all you could ask of any man. It makes me a little sick to think that some might look down their snoot at him for actually caring about his own needs in any way.
Weirddave, it’s awful convenient that you were allowed to “grow through failure” and that “divorce is the honorable way to admit that” over what was in all likelihood some kind of personality conflict. But the poor guys who are basically married to a life support system for the foreseeable future would “destroy” their honor “no matter the circumstances”. Personally, since you’ve already had a divorce for lesser reasons I can only suspect that you are puffing up just how “honorable” you are.
Nope. It wasn’t me that filed for divorce, it was my practice wife. I wanted to try different counseling methods. As for the rest, what part of “in sickness and in health” is unclear to you? If you don’t mean it, don’t swear the oath. Live together. Write your own vows. Whatever. But, if you swear “in sickness” and a sickness comes along, well, that was the package you bought. Even then, if your spouse turns into a breathing paperweight and you truly can not hold up your end of the bargain, well, get a divorce, but know as you are doing it that you failed. It’s OK. Everybody fails all the time. The only way to learn from that failure is to recognize it for what it is. “It’s OK, everyone gets divorced/no harm no foul/anybody would do it/it was too hard/etc…”, these are all cop outs.
No, not “nope”. It doesn’t matter who filed for divorce. If you were “proper” by your own standards, you would have just sucked it the fuck up and begged your wife to keep you. I’m sorry, but you are a massive fucking hypocrite despite your extremely careful acknowledgment of dishonour.
And do you know, for a fact, that the husband from the OP did not do any of that when he got married? Do you know, for a fact, that he swore to hold his wife “in sickness?” Do you know if she ever released him from that vow? Because that’s been the point of most of the posts disagreeing with the OP here: we don’t know (and neither does the OP) enough about this situation to accurately judge his actions. It’s not about wether the guy is “honorable” or not, it’s about not having enough information to be able to form any useful opinions in the first place. Certainly, there are any number of scenarios in which the guy could deserve to be castigated as a first class scumball. There are an equal number in which his actions are completely understandable. We don’t know which of them apply here.
I don’t know a whole lot about Canadian health care, but is it not possible that, by staying married to her, he’s able to ensure she has a higher standard of care than he would if he divorced her? If so, is he still doing the wrong thing by not divorcing her?
“Practice wife” WTH? If you see your first marriage that way, that tells me you have a long way to go before you admit to YOUR part in the failure of that marriage.
All of which is irrelevant to this thread, but does bring to mind that old saying, “pot calling kettle black.”
Instead of railing against this guy and judging his whole family etc, perhaps the OP would be better off accepting what IS. Her aunt will never get better, will likely die in this nursing home. IMO, there is more to the story than the tale told by the aunt’s mother and sister to the OP. I think Gorgonzola is closer to the truth. If this woman truly is imprisoned within her own body due to stroke, most likely her brain is NOT what it once was. If she has only suffered a brain stem lesion, then she has some type of “locked in syndrome”–but that is not what is described.
Either way, the effects of it are horrifying to behold. I just (without further evidence, anyway) don’t believe that the husband just up and walked away, with his kids. I think it was a gradual process, over time. Maybe it IS too much for him. That’s sad and in a way his loss, but forcing him to stay at her side doesn’t accomplish much, does it? The kids are harder, and IMO, they should know their mother, at least in some way. But there again, making them do so does what? Keeping them away has already messed with their heads. Making them go now would mess with them a different way. I am sorry the burden (for that is what it is) falls on others–that is not fair or right, but again, it is what it is.
Oh, get over yourself. “Practice wife” is a tongue in cheek way of referring to my 1st wife, long after the fact. I also don’t understand how you get “you have a long way to go before you admit to YOUR part in the failure of that marriage.” from my statement: “I had no doubt when I got divorced that I had completely and utterly failed at something that was central to my being.”. Yea, boy, I’m sure in denial about my failure. :rolleyes:
Thank you for saying this… the next time someone starts a thread about some marital difficulty and the “Divorce him/look out for number one/your personal happiness is more important than some meaningless piece of paper” chorus begins, I think I’ll note the posters and then check back to this thread.
Practice wife= not funny, IMO. YMMV. But if you can see your marriage as " a complete and utter failure at something that was central to my being." why don’t you see this situation in a more sympathetic light? Why the harshness on the husband? We have one side of the story, only, and very few facts. Human nature is hardly noble, by and large, but this describes a behavior that is as callous as it is frightening. I can “see” someone slowly giving up hope and faith as the years go by, finally not even visiting at all. I cannot see anyone just up and dumping a helpless person, especially their spouse. I think something more middle ground occurred. But I don’t think the husband is scum–we none of us know how we will respond to such a calamity–it’s easy to say, “I’d stand by my spouse, no matter what.” Maybe not.
I apologize–your previous statement re “failure” didn’t even register.
To what purpose other than general smug dickishness?
Well… either it will reinforce my impression that particular posters have disingenuous attitudes about marriage, or it won’t and maybe I’ll have to reevaluate that impression.
Which people, precisely, do you think are being insincere?
And, actually, what would constitute an insincere attitude?
No thanks. I have no desire to call out any specific posters and get into endless post-citing gotcha games.
I have the impression that the prevailing attitude on marriage around here is that despite whatever vows the ceremony may or may not include, there’s no particular expectation that it will last forever, and that divorce is a perfectly valid response to any difficulties or incompatibilities that might arise. Until a thread like this one, where all of a sudden those vows are sacred and ironclad and the person who breaks them deserves nothing but scorn and shame. I think there’s a disconnect there that is worth thinking about. That’s just my general interpretation, feel free to disregard it if you’re looking for individual post cites.
I agree with you that I see the same disconnect. But your method of pointing it out sucks since you aren’t willing to engage in conversation but instead are sniping about what you see as hypocrisy from the sidelines.
If you’re too cowardly to ask people these questions directly, don’t sit there and snidely judge them.
Fair enough. Frankly I just wanted to throw the comment out there because I’ve been noticing it a lot lately (must be Christmas bringing out all the troubled marriage threads). I have no particular interest in digging up cites to support it or arguing with a bunch of individual posters about what they really meant when they said XXX in thread YYY from back in September or whatever. I just don’t want to do it. If you see that as cowardly, so be it. Sorry.
I do, too…but it’s really hard to tell if you are comparing individual opinions against the tenor of the board as a whole, which is really pretty unfair. I have trouble with this, because it’s so hard to remember which posters say what, and you might have a general idea of who holds what opinions, there are nuances that are easy to misremember or miss altogether. I think Autumn Alamanac’s point is that this is a good reference thread for remembering people who have expressed a strong opinion in a certain direction.
That being said, it’s maybe not the best idea for Autumn Almanac or any of us to start taking notes on where we think people are being hypocritical…no one is perfect.
No, I was talking about people in this thread who were saying that breaking vows is horrible and terrible except for divorce. I responded to the people I saw saying that, and I do consider it unfair for someone to act like they are taking notes so they can do a snide little dance later without giving people the opportunity to explain.
Which is the same problem I have with the OP in the first place. Judging others and lording it over them without the communication necessary to figure out what their deal really is.
But then, this particular messageboard is a haven for that sort of behavior.
Back to the OP…
It occurs to me that while the relationship between the two spouses in the OP may have changed due to the stroke(s), that although the man in question may have lost marital affection for his wife and taken up with a new mate, he remains married to the women out of duty - not duty to visit but rather to allow him legal access and to make decisions for her either now or in the future. He may not want to be married to her, but also does not want her to come to harm. As a spouse he has access to her doctors and say in what happens to her. As an ex-spouse he would not.
And for all we know, this may be an arrangement she has agreed to as well.
As has been pointed out, we don’t have all the facts. The parties involved may in fact be making the best of a bad situation. We just don’t know.