I wouldn’t call it pleasant, but it had to happen. For a year we had been drifting apart, and even though I didn’t want a divorce, once I agreed to move out of the house there was no going back.
Fortunately my wife didn’t want anything to do with the divorce ‘process’, so I hired a lawyer, drafted the separation agreement etc. I crafted a fair deal for both of us… we split up and never looked back.
I regret not being able to enjoy my child as much as I would have wanted to (she was 2 yo when we divorced). My now ex-wife quickly remarried and I enjoyed bachelorhood for 15 years before tying the knot again. YMMV.
My first divorce was devastating. I was young, with two small children, and my husband fell in love with my best friend. It was horrible, but I can’t say that I ever wanted to go back.
My second divorce was some 13 years later. He was emotionally abusive. I was older, with two teenagers and, again, two babies. I never missed him for one second and I thank God every day I got the hell out when I did. Smartest thing I ever did.
Surprisingly enough, we are quite civil now and he lives just a block away in a house I found for him. It’s great to have him nearby because even though we aren’t really friends, the kids get to see him almost every day. So even the worst circumstances can work out well after…oh, eight years or so.
My girlfriend’s parents recently divorced and it was nasty. Basically the father couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he hadn’t had as wonderful a career as he had hoped, and rather than owning his failures he just blamed more and more people until finally he started blaming his wife.
So, long, drawn out court battles, all done with him representing himself, (false) accusations of infidelity, accusations of hiding money (where else could the millions he should have made gone?), demands for spousal support, my girlfriend being summoned to court to testify to the provenance of certain monies, all avenues and appeals exhausted because this guy no longer had anything better to do with his life and desperately needed to imagine that he would have been really successful except for other people bringing him down, and trying to screw over his wife in every way he can.
In the end, judge has assets split down the middle, but court costs taken out of his half since he was the one whose frivolous claims made the court necessary. The court won’t entertain any more appeals from him. The last time any of his children spoke to him was on the stand stating under oath that the claims he was making were false. Just consumed by bitterness until nothing is left.
Except there was also an element of constant fear that my now-ex would become vengeful and try to ruin me, either financially, physically, or both. (And, no, a protection order wouldn’t have helped me. In fact, it would have hurt me, because my non-American husband would have lost his visa. Since he’d stopped stalking me because he was afraid that I’d get a PO and have him deported, my actually getting a PO would have removed his incentive to leave me alone. But I digress…)
Getting divorced was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. But, even now–almost 2 years after everything was finalized–I feel like a fox that had to chew its leg off to get out of a trap. The fox is obviously much better off out of the trap, but the animal will be missing a leg for life.
That basically describes me as well. I didn’t give full-disclosure when I described the happiness of divorce earlier. Divorce so traumatized me that I had basically no will to live for the first few months. Through some faults of my own but not all, I couldn’t function at all and got more and more sick until I collapsed at work and was taken by ambulance to ICU where I was given little hope of living at all and that sounded just fine to me at the time. My mother had to fly up from Texas to arrange whatever came to pass and a funeral was expected. I spent two weeks there and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills (thankfully almost all covered by insurance). I wouldn’t want anyone to go through that unless you know the outcome is going to be better but it usually is.
I made an unexpected recovery despite everything the doctors predicted. A man really can lose the will to live just being slowly beaten down by a harpy wife like Chinese Water Torture. The job that I had fired me for being sick but I got a much better one 6 months later and I am very happy and successful now. Through very karma-like circumstances, my family hit the financial jackpot a few months after I got divorced and my ex is not a beneficiary to it at all but the kids are.
I just rebuilt my life from scratch and it worked out so beautifully, I could write volumes of philosophy about the benefits of not having a spouse. I got joint custody of the kids, plenty of money, and no outside person can interfere with that. That is why I am so anti-marriage to this day. It simply doesn’t work in the vast majority of cases. Every time I go to the supermarket, I see men pushing around shopping carts with their wives ordering them around like slave children. There but by the grace of God go I and I don’t want to live my life that way.
Same here. Oh, I knew she was not happy, but she refused any counselling, she would not talk with me about her unhappiness, she would not do anything to fix the marriage.
And then things got better. We dated again–we went to dinner, we took weekend daytrips to places we liked, we enjoyed each other’s company. We planned a Christmas getaway, just the two of us, in a city where neither of us had any family. We were going to get to know each other all over again.
Then, before we had our holiday, she left in the middle of the night. Called a cab, and she was off to the airport. Never been back.
My daughter told her husband she wanted a divorce a few days before their second anniversary - I was surprised it took her that long. They hardly owned anything in common - she told him to take what he wanted, with the exception of a few things that she really wanted. He was all moved out and on his way back to his mother’s house within a week or so. He signed all the papers, she paid the lawyer, and it was over a year later.
In talking to her during and afterwards, it turned out she knew she shouldn’t have married him in the first place, but she kept hoping it would work out. Thank goodness there were no children involved (other than her ex…) Shortly after he left, she had a new car, a new puppy, and a happier outlook on life.
My poor brother, on the other hand, had a real mess. His ex left him. She was OK with being married to him - she just didn’t want to have to live with him. They went to counseling for several years, even got back together for a short time, but in the end, he decided he couldn’t live that way. Fortunately, she didn’t want anything from him, so it was a clean break. He has declared he’ll never marry again, and since he’s 56, I think he means it. (This all happened when he was in his 30s.)
Some people already mentioned this in their narratives-for those who were the blindside’ees/divorce’ees (when applicable), how long did it take you to get over it, well over it enough to entertain the thought of a new relationship?
This kind of thing is why people should never give up hope, ever, even when their entire world is collapsing around them-you simply don’t know what the future will bring.
He said he never saw it coming, that he didn’t notice anything was wrong was more proof I made the right decision.
We were married 4 years to the day, but the divorce took almost 2 years because whoever filed had to pay.
We had no children, I let him keep the house, I took what was mine, and we each took one dog.
I turned down alimony because seeing his name on a check each month was more of him than I wanted in my life.
His behavior after the divorce convinced me I did the right thing. He owed my father money and refused to pay him back because I didn’t include it in the divorce decree. I said it was between the two of them and had no business in the decree. We had an agreement to split the final tax returns but after I signed the checks he kept all the money because once again I didn’t include it in the decree. He told me I was stupid for trusting him.
Too bad for him when I found out he forgot to take my name off the joint savings account.
Emotionally, it was very difficult. From my perspective, it happened very quickly (the marriage went from my state of being relatively content to disaster to separation in a period of three months) and in fairly dramatic fashion. I was not remotely prepared to accept the idea of divorce after 10 years of marriage. And I I had no idea how immature my views on my relationship were. There was a lot of painful growing up to do in a short period of time. But it was also extraordinarily liberating once I gained some distance and perspective.
The mechanical process of the divorce was relatively pain-free. Thought neither of us were particularly fond of one another during the process (and I was far more the bitter of the two), we were civil and even somewhat amicable to one another when it came to managing the process. We had no kids, which helped. We had a house, but we worked out on our own how to handle that, and the house was actually sold before the divorce was finalized. The most challenging part for me was that I had retained a lawyer (I had legal insurance, so it didn’t cost me anything extra) just to make the process go smoothly, and he tried to turn it into a contested divorce where there was nothing being contested. I ended up having to fire him. We finished the divorce on our own without any more issues.
For me it was faxt and uncomplicated. My husband and I agreed to terms, there was only one lawyer involved, and we had no kids. Two months from filing to declaration.
My ex-husband said he was blindsided by my leaving. It was a shock to him only because he hadn’t listened when I told him that I was unhappy. I’d been unhappy for over a year, and I tried my best to talk about it with him honestly and directly, but he didn’t listen.
He had an ad on Match.com within a month. He’s now been with someone for a year and a half. Someone who’s 13 years younger than me, smarter than me, sexier than me, and generally better than me in every way. She asks for less and gives him more. He couldn’t be happier.
I, on the other hand, haven’t dated. At this point, I’ve had quite enough humiliation and rejection for one lifetime. There’s no need for me to seek more of it out.
