This is a hypothetical and I don’t need a fast answer. 
In specific, how do you ask a spouse to move out who won’t want to? What if he says: “I’m staying put, you can move out if you want?”.
Hypothetical me would want to keep (and pay for) the house, and have shared custody of the kid.
I’d like to hear stories about how what the period looked like between the First Painful Talk and The First Meeting with the Lawyers.
I am sort of there now. I told him we needed to be apart and he couldn’t accept that so I am the one moving out.
This is not the right move for our kids but if I didn’t go, nothing was ever going to happen.
I figure after he accepts that I am not going back to the marriage, we’ll come up with a better long term solution. I just don’t know how long that is going to take.
Aren’t there generally accepted rules of thumb? The wife gets the house; the wife gets the kids; the husband gets the bills?
perfectparanoia, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you move out? Stay with friends/family, or did you find a rental apartment? Can you afford one, and what would you have done if you couldn’t afford a place of your own? How do you make the place livable, when all your stuff is back at your house? How did you deal with the resentment that he should be the one to move out?
Did you take your kids?.
You say: “Otherwise nothing was going to happen”, and that is so true.
My husband and his ex-wife continued to live in the house together until the morning after the divorce was final. At that point she officially received half the assets, was officially able to close on her own condo, and moved out.
He slept in the guest room with the door locked.
I found a small furnished rental. No room for the kids.
I haven’t moved in yet (10 days to go) but I really just need my clothes and stuff (in fact, I am taking one of the cats and she may have more stuff than me).
I am likely going to have to go back to the house fairly frequently anyway to get bills to pay, etc. so if there’s something I need I can just pick it up.
As for dealing with resentment, he’s in a lot more pain than I am right now. I’m more relieved to be finally moving on.
My ex and I had just bought a house four months before we decided to split up <insert your own bitter rant here>. My recollection is that we were being civil to one another and briefly discussed a number of options, including continuing to live in the same space together for a while (which was not reasonable, but at least we considered all options). We knew that we weren’t going to be able to get rid of the house right away, and the deciding factors for us ultimately were that the house was much closer to her job at the time than it was to mine. So we decided that she’d stay in the house and get a roommate while I moved out to somewhere near my job. She took on the bulk of the mortgage (and eventually, with a roommate, all of it) while I payed a much smaller portion of the mortgage and my rent at the new place.
So I guess the short answer is that no one was “asked” to move out. I wanted out of the house more than she did, and we agreed on the solution that seemed the most practical at the time.
My husband was the one to move, but only because I threatened to take the kids and go to the shelter for battered women. Contrary to what some may think is usual, he paid a few utilities, defaulted on the mortgage (which he had agreed to pay temporarily) , and refused to pay child support. Two years later we were looking at a foreclosed house and 18K in back child support.
Now we are another 8 years down the road. He lives a block away in a rental I found for him, and while I still have full legal and physical custody, he sees the kids almost every day. I never expected things could be this amicable. We are not friends but we are good co-parents.
I guess you could say I was lucky because my ex wife came to me and said “I’m leaving” and then moved in with her boss.
My sister told her ex husband she didn’t want to be with him any more and that she wanted him to leave and he refused for a few months. Everyone (friends and family on both sides) kept talking to him telling him that it is over and he needs to man up and move on. He finally did end up moving out, but it took a lot of convincing from others to get him to finally do it.
There was a final straw, I told him to move out, one of us began sleeping on the couch and a little less than a month later he moved into his own place. Two months after that he admitted he was going to leave in a few months when our lease was up anyway. He took his name off the electricity w/o telling me and it nearly got shut off; when I learned **that **I had the phone switched to my name so he couldn’t have that shut off as well.
FYI, when you have the sole account holder’s name taken off the electric bill and you live in an apartment the management company becomes responsible for it again and they can charge any remaining apartment dweller an ‘access fee’ of their choosing. :mad:
Gah.
After he told me about the affair, we continued to sleep in the same room, the same bed… until “the other woman” had a pregnancy scare. I can’t tell you why that was the final straw for me rather than everything else, but until that point I had been justifying it in my head as “why should I move into the crappy bed in the spare room? He can move if it’s a big deal to him”. The pregnancy scare did reveal that even in being honest about having slept with another woman, he’d still lied to me about using protection with her. I went out and bought myself all new bedding and moved into the spare room that night.
Anyway, before all this had happened, we’d put down deposits on land and with a builder to build a new home, and he was dead set on continuing with that. He told me it was a big house and we were still friends - he’d live up one end, I’d live down the other and we’d both live our own lives and it would be awesome. I nodded and quietly moved on with my own plans to move to the city. I thought he’d lost his mind.
I just had three weeks of intense work to get through and then I would be free to go and find a job and a place to live in Melbourne, so I confined myself to the spare room, tried to avoid getting into arguments with him, and indulged his ludicrous pipedream about living together as a divorced ex couple.
He caught me looking at rental properties on a real estate site one night and broke down in tears. I was careful not to do that while he was home anymore after that.
He broke up with The Other Woman (that’s what prompted the pregnancy scare - she faked the whole thing thinking it would win him back), and started seeing someone else. One day, and I think it may have been only a day or so before my brief intense contract job started, he came home and said he’d been to see his shrink (it was his third appointment) and the shrink had said it was unhealthy for us to keep living together so I needed to get out. It was ok if I needed a week or two to find a place, but I needed to go.
Being unable to pay the mortgage myself, I had little choice. I couldn’t find short term accommodation, and as I’d put my plans to move to the city on a backburner to avoid upsetting him, I didn’t have the time I needed to arrange that move. I ended up renting in town, locked into a 12 month lease because there were no other options open to me. I wasn’t even really given the time to pack properly so some of my stuff was left behind and he told me it was ok, I could keep my key until I was fully relocated. He demanded the key back a week later, on our anniversary, and relented when I broke down in tears, admitting he was having his new girlfriend over for the weekend and hadn’t wanted me running in to her.
He requested that I only enter the house by prior arrangement when he was home, and then was unavailable every time I tried to organise going in to get the rest of my stuff. Then after we had a fight about him being on dates everytime I tried to finalise my move out, he changed the locks on the house and tried to tell me I’d agreed to it.
I did get to go in one day with him and his mother, and try to separate my remaining stuff out. It was stressful and pressured, and things were overlooked. Hindsight: I should have started packing the day we decided to divorce even if it did hurt his feelings. I also should have moved in with my parents, but at the time I thought that was a worse mistake.
I’m not sure how much of this was divorce stress making him act crazy, and how much was mental breakdown making him act crazy. He had started seeing the shrink before the affair at my urging because he’d been erratic for some time prior. I’m sure other people’s experience would be less crazy than mine, but after what I went through, I would always recommend getting out the very first second you can go.
No.
Damn you should have told me that a few years ago. It does seem to work out that way a lot.
OP. You are clearly miserable, and have been for quite sometime. From your posts you dislike your spouse, dislike being a care giver to your child, you have had fairly serious surgery to correct your appearance. What is it that you hope to gain from divorce? Will you give primary custody to his dad? Do you think that this will fix your issues? It seems to me that you focus on one thing that will make you happy and when it doesn’t you move to the next thing. I may be wrong, but maybe you should try to think all the way though to an end that will work out for you rather than dramatic quick fixes.
10 or more years ago, I might have given a different answer. The times they are a changing.
Same, well almost we sold the house and agreed to split the funds in advance. So the house sold a few months prior to the divorce and then split the monies and moved on.
Rule number 1, don’t move out.
For us, it was never really a matter for debate. At the time we were having the most painful discussions, we were both being civil, and we both agreed without much ado that I should stay in the house with the kids because they were bonded more with me and that would make the transition at least somewhat easier for them. (As it turned out, the kids didn’t miss him because he was hardly ever there anyway. But I digress…). The night we finally decided that yes, we actually were going to divorce, I agreed to let him stay in the house for a week or so to get things organized. Then two days later I found definitive proof that yes, indeed, he was having a physical affair with his coworker, which he had been denying all that time. Soooo…he lost his grace period and I kicked him out that day.
He moved in with his parents and has been there for the last eight months, and as far as I know has no current plans to move out. I’m pretty sure what he’s doing is staying with his girlfriend on the nights he doesn’t have the kids, but I don’t care enough to find out for sure. I’m sure things will stay like this until either his girlfriend or his parents (unlikely) realize he’s mooching off of them. Knowing him, I bet he never even offers to pay for groceries or does housework or anything.
God, I sound bitter, don’t I? The truth is I’ve never been happier since the day he left. I guess I just resent the way he treated me all those years and it’s hard to let go.
We knew it was over for a year or two but still lived in the same house, without sharing sleeping quarters. After the sparation discussion we decided to get some things done around the house and put it on the market.
Then, a few months later, out of the blue, she had rented a townhouse and was moving out.
I picked up and drove the moving truck, and moved everything she wanted with the help of our 14 year old son, all in one day.
I’m still in the house and left alone to deal with every expense, plus paying her child support, plus trying to clean the place up and get it on the market.
I don’t recommend this action plan.
Good luck.
How was it out of the blue? Really?
Well, because we had discussed what needed to be accomplished around the house to put it on the market. Then, suddenly, she buggered off and left me to do everything.
Hence, out of the blue. Thank you very much. And still wants to be handed 50% of the equity.
Get it?