I’ve been with my wife for over ten years (married for just over four years) and I found out two months ago that my wife was seeing someone online… and then in person. I filed for divorce and I was just wondering how many others on these fora have been divorced or are going through one right now. How do you keep your sanity when something like this happens?
Hey bro, I’ve been there on both ends. Wasn’t wife, but fiance. Things happen for a reason, and perhaps this is the universe to set you free to find another. That’s what I kept telling myself and it seemed to help take the edge off.
Later I found another girl, and we were together for almost 3 years until last week when she finally had to go back home to Japan for good. Sadly, I found out 2 months ago out that she knew how to unicycle also.
I try to ride around and or tinker with my unicycles when I miss her. It seems to help a bit. I am very sorry for your loss. Good luck to you.
Sean
Sharpen the kitchen knives obsessively…just remember to cut the phone lines first.:o
It’s 2007 and it’s happening to everybody. Whether it’s a great girlfriend of only 2 weeks, or in your case a marraige…it’s probably going to end. The same exact thing happened to my parents right after thier 20th anniversary. We are not living by our grandparents morals, and people these days treat wedding vows as if they were written on toilet paper.
I’d say the best thing for you to do is focus on your current hobbies. Or maybe it’s time to pick up a new one now that you’ll have more “You Time”. Take major advantage of that before another lady crosses your path.
There are plenty of fish out there, so keep options open, and try not to be too bitter towards the next one…I usually am. And for those who believe in “soul mates”…we’ll probably never know, or meet them. Chances are we just gave our “soul mate” the finger for cutting us off at the last traffic light.
I’d personally take this time of sorrow to buy yourself something nice…perhaps that new unicycle that you’ve always wanted.
Unicycles wont leave you for another, and are great, take the time now to fully enjoy your riding. Have any goals? Long distance riding across the states or anywhere? Go out and do them!
The loss is gonna suck as you know, but now the time to try not to think of it much, shit happens and then we move on.
I havent gone through a bad breakup or divorce, but that is what id do if/ when it ever happens. Go out and have fun, forget the bad, remember the good, move on to the better.
Just like that!
I divorced my then husband over twelve years ago now.
I felt so guilty I let him walk away with all the money.
I’ve never regretted it, although it was hard at the time. He really messed the kids about.
Anyway, I have been happily married to someone else for the past nine years.
I don’t know about morals. I can’t think that to remain unhappily married to an alcoholic who never spent any time at home would be any more or less moral than divorcing him.
Times are changing. Perhaps people are less willing to put up with unhappiness now. Certainly there is more emphasis on individual fulfillment, rather than working for the family/society. But perhaps it is time to work to make the changing times easier on the children that it affects, rather than harking back to more ‘moral’ times.
It’s been 12 years since I got divorced. It really sucked at the time. She hit me with it out of the blue. In retrospect, it was a good thing. It allowed me to make changes in my life that have been for the best. I’ve grown more than I would have had I stayed in that marriage and have since re-married. It’s OK to get mad and grieve and let your emotions take over for a bit, but, don’t let them take you over. I dwelled and dwelled on my divorce and let it consume me. I was miserable and felt sorry for myself and started to have a real problem with alcohol. I took much too long to get over it. Try to get on with your life as soon as possible.
Wow, what a deeply personal thread. So just a gentle reminder to everyone that what you post here can be read by strangers and friends alike, not only today, but in a year or two years, or more. Sometimes the semi-anonymous nature of the web makes us reveal more than we ought to.
I married my childhood sweetheart. The marriage went downhill very quickly, but I never considered leaving until one day she said “one of us has to go”. Until then, I felt bound by our mutual vows. Even though I have no religion, a vow is a vow, and all that. Once she had openly said that giving up was an option, something clicked, and within a month or two I had gone.
Like many people after a first divorce, I felt not that I had lost something precious, but that I had left behind a stage of my life. In the old order of things, marriage and parenthood were the “rites of passage”. In today’s society, it is almost as if the first divorce is the moment when you grow up and face the world properly, alone and on your own two feet.
As for how to keep sane: I believe the important thing is to be content with the person you are; learn to be happy alone. If you can do that, and then find someone to share it with, that’s a bonus.
If you feel that your life can only be complete if you have the perfect “other half” then you are placing a burden on them that will add a strain to the relationship. You will be loving what they represent, not loving who they are.
Most people are not happy most of the time. We have stress at work, health problems, mortgages, bills, taxes… yet our society makes us believe we ought to be happy (and slim, and fit, and young…) and we feel depressed because we are failing to achieve the impossible.
And most of us manage with an imperfect home, and imperfect car, or bike, a job we often hate, and so on, but somehow we expect our relationships to be perfect. Why? A relationship is made of two people. No one is perfect, so simple arithmetic shows that a relationship will be imperfection squared. Live with it, enjoy the good bits, tolerate the bad bits, and be confident that you could live without it if you had to. It is often people who expect a perfect relationship who have affairs, or leave, looking ofr that “Holy Grail”. Very few find it.
My father had a 30 year marriage (not to my mother - that was about 30 weeks!) and had ups and downs. Just as they became happy and contented together, she developed cancer and died, ten years younger than him, and he likely to live another 15-20 years. Relationships are no more reliable or “theft proof” than cars.
My current ‘supervisor’ at work told me the other day that prospective employers are now likely to ‘google’ prospective new staff to see what the internet has to say about them!
Hence, the true beauty of user-names (though ‘Underdog’ is my real name;) ). The company I work for makes no secret of the fact that they’ll at least take a peek at Myspace concerning prospective employees. It’s definitely in the public domain.
Mikefule speaks of great wisdom. Learning to be comfortable and happy with yourself and by yourself is a very important life lesson.
To each his own, but I personally like the advice this guy gave on another thread:
With my marriage, 15 years and I’m still learning. Sometimes I go 200 feet, sometimes two. I’m going to get it one of these days and so will you. I have faith.
And whether I take my marriage 200 feet before I fall on my face, or two feet, I love my wife dearly, and I would TRY to keep her, to win her back. I just treasure her too much to file for divorce.
You can still unfile. You can go to France, rekindle the early days when she was teaching you French, and she so inspired you to learn. It’s much cheaper than a divorce.
Personally, I would NOT have filed for divorce, and that seems rash. What was her reaction? Can she possibly be happy with how easily you dispose of her? Were you able to make her feel loved? Did you notice her absence all this time (emotional or otherwise?)? Did you complain and try to pull her back into the marriage?
In the USA, 50% of marriages end in divorce, and 50% of 2nd marriages as well! A compatible spouse is created, molded lovingly, not simply found off the rack.
BTM
Here is a lesson in killing threads, for those who wish to learn from an expert.
I knew there was a reason I like you.
This might be a bit extreme, but it might also be worth a read.
Been there. Joining the circus is the sweetest revenge, especially if you join it with your kids and it tours Bolivia soon. 
Hang in there. If she did those things, she wasn’t worth your time.
consumption that signals our status to others: trophy wives
And like your unicycle, which was shiny and new at the beginning, relationships need maintenance.
Odds are a unicycle that breaks down had some inherent flaws, or the maintenance was neglected.
Problem is, it’s hard to find the education in relationship maintenance in the USA, which is why MOST never make it to marriage, 50% of marriages end, and 50% of 2nd marriages end. And such a course would be much more Affective (Emotional) than Cognitive.
Thurston Veblen’s planned obsolesence in capitolist cultures seems to have spread to marriage, too, sadly.
Billy
a book, Transcending the Economy, states: A good deal of our consumption is what Fred Hirsch, following Veblen, described as positional; in other words, consumption that is supposed to
signal our status to others (Hirsch 1976) [trophy wives]. Enhancement of positional consumption does little to make our society better off. I can only climb up a rung on the positional ladder by ensuring that someone else declines. In this sense, positional consumption is a zero sum game that leads to no gain at all for society.
In another sense, positional consumption is a negative sum game fueled by
the profit motive. Hemlines rise and fall in order to make people dissatisfied with last year’s wardrobe.
That’s all very well but when marriage first came into being people (well men anyway) didn’t get married until they were about 30. Then they died when they were about 50.
Women got married younger (teenagers) but then often died in childbirth.
So the man would marry again.
In those days they didn’t need divorces. If the worst came to the wost the man could always have his wife admitted to the local insane asylum for something horrendous like having an affair, not doing as she was told, cutting her hair and so on. When I was doing my nurse training (aprox 15 yrs ago) there were still women alive who had been admitted by their husbands for such crimes and who had lived there ever since.
My basic point is that marriage was never designed/expected to last many years. Certainly not as long as people expect marriages to last these days.
So where did the idea that marriage should last forever come from? And why?
Marriages probably came into being because people couldn’t survive on their own and needed to join forces with another family. People got married for political and Political reasons.
This is rarely true now (in this culture).
So why do we still believe that marriage should last forever?
Yes, it’s nice if it does. But some people suffer great hardship in their relationships. Statistically the most dangerous place for a woman is in her home.
Clearly the cultural ideal of mum and dad being married forever is not true for at least half of families, in the USA anyway, so isn’t it time we stopped harping back to something that was never true in the first place and think of a way to make the current relationship situation easier on the children involved. Being more honest and flexible about the modern family would at least be a start.
If there are no kids involved, no problem. If there are, i think people just throw away things too easily, but mostly because they cannot envision other solutions. we are trained to think limited. i keep these scientifically demonstrated outcomes in mind when discussing divorce:
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divorce tends to be so painful for kids, they remember the day they learned about it even 50 years later.
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divorce tends to be a problem for kids adjustment, in school, socially, and emotionally.
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even if my unicycle was never designed to last a lifetime (planned obscelence ala Veblen), if i’m careful in choosing one and give it proper maintenance, i might be able to make it last. same with marriage.
Of course your presentation of history is relevant. In the USA, the divorce rate climbed dramatically in the 1970s with the “womens liberation” movement, wherein women moved into the workplace en masse. this gave them the option to leave, and they did. even today, over 70% of the divorces are initiated by the woman, because today she CAN leave. and there’s a good part to that.
however, lots of marriages have survived problems, including a partner being unfaithful, and continued to hold the kids securely. no one was getting beaten in this marriage.
divorce is costly, financially and otherwise, and people should try taking it into the repair shop or couples therapist for an estimate before junking it.
on the other hand, next time you get married, you might consider making the vow to stay married until it becomes very inconvenient or problematic, rather than for your entire life.
be honest forever.
billy
But why is divorce so hard on kids?
I can’t help thinking that part of the problem is that on one level we are all still behaving like most marriages last and that’s not true. It’s not a matter of honesty, it’s a matter of making things easier for the kids.
The way divorces are set up, with winners and losers, ‘blame’ on one side or another doesn’t help.
Being more open about the effects of divorce and how we can ease the effects on children would help.
At the moment we (ie in the UK) are at a certain position with regards to divorce (and the same is true of teenage pregnancy). We are afraid to talk about it, to be open about it, to educate people (children) about the effects in case by doing this we make it happen. And yet we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. We pretend things are OK, that it’s only the unfortunate few who get divorced/pregnant and blame them when it happens.
Maybe. But even though they stopped blaming AIDS victims, AIDS still has a problematic impact on its victims.
We talk pretty openly about divorce and its effects on kids here in the USA. The typical Sunday newspaper magazine, or other weekly news magazines cover the story on a regualr basis.
We’ve been doing it since the divorce rate hit 50% 30 years ago.
It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier on the kids.
I’m not saying more can’t be done on that end, but you don’t seem to be an advocate of prevention (by preventing divorce, saving/improving relationships). I am.
By the way, most teenage pregnancies come from divorced households.
If the family eats dinner together at least 3 times /week, the kids are far less likely to engage in risky behavior like unprotected sex and drug/alcohol use.
Cathwood said: <<The way divorces are set up, with winners and losers, ‘blame’ on one side or another doesn’t help.>>
That is a really poor comparison.
Marriage and divorce are purely social phenomena, and their consequences are purely social. AIDS is a physical disease that can lead to a slow and painful death.
By changing our attitude to “blame” on a purely social phenomenon, we can modify the social consequences.
Changing our attitude to blame in the case of a physical disease does not stop it being a physical disease.
Of course, changing our attitude to blame for AIDS has affected the social consequences of the disease, on the whole, for the better.
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I don’t just mean talking about the effects and impacts of divorce and how terrible it is. I mean talking about different families (one parent etc) as real and valuable alternatives to ‘married’ families. As long as we keep talking about how terrible divorce is and how staying married is the alternative we should all aim for, then alternative families suffer, as they do not meet this criteria. They are different, they are blamed. How difficult this must be for the kids, despite anything else.
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Ofcourse, talking about how bad it is isn’t going to make things better, it’s going to make things worse. To some extent (greater or lesser depending on your point of view), the way we talk about things makes them so. If we don’t talk about the positives then there wont be any for the 50% of people who have got divorced. Or their children.
Instead of wishing things were different and wanting an ideal, looking back to the way relationships actually never were, then we can’t make things better for the way things actually are. For example, my son’s school acts in a way that suggests they think that all parents are married and that the wife stays at home all day. They frequently put things on during the day at a moments notice when, even those of us who are married but both work can’t attend. For single parent/divorced families it must be impossible. Ofcourse the children suffer educationally. Also they expect us to do some kind of homework with the children every evening. Divorced mothers who may be working until 5 o’clock, then having to do homework with the kids late in the evening when they would prefer just being (playing) with their kids is just too difficult and probably not good for either of them. And then the homework doesn’t get done in the weekend cos they’ve gone to their dad’s house. Ofcourse their education suffers. I say keep education at school.
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I am an advocate for prevention. But therapy/counselling is a drop in the ocean. It continues to perpetuate ‘blame’ (ie if they get divorced anyway) and 50% of people who get married cannot (at least in the UK) hope to get access to it. In the Uk it is mostly just the middle class (richer people) who can/do access/utilise any kind of counselling/therapy. Therefore the poor would continue to get blamed for their degenerate lifestyle (getting divorced).
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Billy your last point is amusing. You know as well as I do that parents being married does not in any way mean that they actually eat together never mind talk to each other. I also don’t see why parents being divorced would mean that families wouldn’t eat together. If the system didn’t make the process so adversarial then parents could still act in a more family way even if they were divorced. Especially if this was supported by culture’s expectations, rather than being looked upon as a bit odd.
I say support parents to parent together even if they are divorced rather than blame them for both failing in their marital relationship and then failing again in not being considerate enough of their kids to stay married.
I don’t think that this is any more or less possible than decreasing the divorce rate.