a divorce thread

Oh that was the cool thread you started, n/m.

is there a happily married thread? I SHOULD START IT /marital braggin

how about "this is the thread where we talk about how awesome our marriages are"

I said it was anecdotal and so did shakey; I even specified that one of the examples is my sister. I never claimed to be impartial or w/e.

I'm sorry for posting that in the divorce thread, seems insensitive
I'm still p young so I dont know many divorcing couples. don't know that many married ones, either, I just married young I guess

yeah i'm being a dick but it's just weird how the anecdotal evidence is like 100 percent indistinguishable from every shitty sitcom of the past 30 years

But with all due respect, because I'm very fond of both pp and sunny and lots of you, the idea that a man is someone who got what he wanted when he got a wife and now he can just sit back and that that desire is crucial to "manhood" is a) even more of a generalization than anything I've posted, and b) in cases where it is actually true, seems like a big part of the problem?

Fair enough, but remember, I'm a wannabe shitty sitcom writer.

I thought sitcoms were all baout lazy jerks being married to sassy women way hotter than they are

tbf I haven't watched a sitcom in like 20 years or something

Archie grew IN the relationship, Edith grew OUT of it.

"every shitty sitcom of the past 30 years"

Yes we know, we wear their fake corporate logos across our chests proudly, quit hating on our national pastime please ...

Edith "grew out" of the relationship by dying of a stroke, I don't think that's really comparable to divorce

feel like i have a take on this even though i'm a man with a man. 1) i'm basically my mother. 2) i feel like i'm changing/growing faster than he is (i'm ten years younger). i've thought about making this cause for "moving on" but i sense 0 resentment/weirdness from him for my changes/choices (from what i can tell his heart is totally in the right place wrt "supporting" me), and it would be really unfair to him and to me to end things because i have expectations of him he can't meet. i find i have a lot of them! (based on poor models.) i think it's hard to to redefine expectations, basically. (if you're outgrowing a relationship, aren't you really just outgrowing expectations, and shouldn't you be able to redefine expectations if you want a relationship to keep happening.)

IDK, while we're generalizing anyway, I think that "I grew and (s)he didn't" kind of sounds like a rationalization for "I want freedom and adventure not boring marriage"? Because honestly I've never had any friend, male or female, who I thought got more interesting or cultivated over time. I've seen people take on more responsibility, or become better at negotiating relationships, and I guess that's personal growth of a kind but I don't know if that's what's being talked about here.

Or if not "I want freedom and adventure" maybe "I'm the kind of person who gets bored of sameyness"

yeah I dunno what's really meant by personal growth either

ps I am a man

btw I'm male

I've seen people take on more responsibility, or become better at negotiating relationships, and I guess that's personal growth of a kind...

this is def what I was getting at fwiw

also a male

i figured shakey was just talking about a mismatch of ambition. like one person hit 35 or whatever and was like, this is cool, and the other person was like, i want more of [x]

in both cases I was talking about yeah it seemed like the wife wanted to keep living (or revert back to?) their fun/glamorous/dynamic 20s or something. which seems like the opposite of growth to me but what do I know I'm just some asshole guy thinkin baout stuff

I guess I know only a few of divorced/divorcing couples.

In one, they married too young, the guy became more of an asshole than he already was, and the guy joined the navy after they got married, which she never really supported, and she hated the life (he chose to be on a sub so he was really away a lot, plus she had to live wherever). I didn't blame her at all - navy submariner wife is kind of a special situation and not what she signed up for at all, and the guy was a real dick.

In another, guy is a really good guy in a lot of ways and a stay at home dad who does an amazing job of it. But he's also failed to really look hard enough for work since he lost his job and is devoting himself to somewhat pipe dreamy projects that never go anywhere (and she doesn't really make enough money to make this work). He also got all weird while she was pregnant and started going out with women "friends", one of whom was clearly interested in him -- I don't know whether anything actually happened. OTOH since I've known them she has been a perpetually dissatisfied person about pretty much everything, and whenever I was around them she was constantly hard on him and he just took it from her. So harder to take a side there.

Neither of those fit the "coasting" narrative fwiw. In one it was the guy who drastically changed, and in the other the guy has ambition but it's somewhat unrealistic ambition.

My first divorce was because the guy spent 10 hours working with his buddies at the tv station, then would get home at 11:30 pm with all his friends/co-workers and they'd hang until 4 am, sometimes 6am. Any projects, parties, nights out, dinner, movies always involved him bringing along two or all of these guys. I felt I was married to five guys. They were at the table for Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday., his birthday...more reasons but that aspect is what sort of cracks me up now.

But my feeling is that wanting the person you're with to want to take your life together to new places can conflict with how you want your life to be. I.e. if you want the person you're with to change and grow and have ambitions and take their life new places, you also have to be prepared for the fact that those newnesses might fuck up your own plans.

that sounds bonkers tera

yeah that is

I mean did the guy refuse to stop doing this when confronted?

Because honestly I've never had any friend, male or female, who I thought got more interesting or cultivated over time.

Yeah I'm doing a terrible job of defining that, sorry. Maybe...you get interested in things that you didn't know about before, and from those new hobbies or interests you learn stuff that makes you more complex, makes more opportunities for future mental connections. Or you meet new people and from those people learn about new ways to be, that makes you more flexible or nuanced in relationships and in understanding others. Or...you realize that all your life you've had a mental or emotional block that has hurt your relationships to people or to creativity or something, so you spend some time thinking about the cause and how to grow past it or heal or w/e. You contemplate how far you've come and where you're going and adjust your mental state to strive for a healthier um attitude to the world? Just...living with an eye to these things and not to, like, what's on tv and doing the same thing tomorrow that you did today.

UGH SORRY is that vague enough?

sorry I was drinking beer and watching TV, did you say something?

I can laugh now. I had my own friends and interests and spent time with both as much as I could but that made for a roomie situation. Then I stopped hanging and was waking up when he was going to bed.

Basically you look at the pressure-points in your life where things go badly for you, sources of anger and frustration, and you either smooth them out or figure out whether they're non-negotiable and then make them the start of a new outlook on that thing.

ilx is a weird place to have this convo b/c almost everyone here is self-selecting for having a variety of interests and verbal skills and a desire to communicate & share ideas w others and all that.

He never thought he was doing anything wrong. At the time I wasn't sure he was doing anything wrong. I finally decided to stop trying to live a life together and got a 2nd job working at a thrift store on the weekends. That is how I met husband #2.

2nd divorce the guy just asked for it out of the blue after 5 years. I just bought a new chicken coop, planted a garden, a fig tree and an oak started for me by my granddad. Thought I was settled, never saw it coming. He went off his meds, was having serious issues at work...broke up the band he started, became obsessed with trying to get a new a new co-worker fired. His schemes kept blowing up in his face at work and I thought he was headed for a breakdown but not divorce.

His mother had been having "private" meetings with him and stopped talking to me a month before he asked for one. I always thought that had something to do with it. His parents lived in town and every Sunday we had to go over at 11am and would stay until 10pm. Then mid-week there was always a play or restaurant outing with them. They called him daily. ICK! This all just sickens me just recalling that time. Weird how you think you are happy in a situation like that only to realize you were just nuts.

Geeez how many times did I use "just" in that post?!

oof parent-thing is def weird

fwiw Jacob seems like an all-right dude :)

YES!

My divorce was relatively painless. We get along better now than we ever did.

Because honestly I've never had any friend, male or female, who I thought got more interesting or cultivated over time.

Yeah I'm doing a terrible job of defining that, sorry. Maybe...you get interested in things that you didn't know about before, and from those new hobbies or interests you learn stuff that makes you more complex, makes more opportunities for future mental connections. Or you meet new people and from those people learn about new ways to be, that makes you more flexible or nuanced in relationships and in understanding others. Or...you realize that all your life you've had a mental or emotional block that has hurt your relationships to people or to creativity or something, so you spend some time thinking about the cause and how to grow past it or heal or w/e. You contemplate how far you've come and where you're going and adjust your mental state to strive for a healthier um attitude to the world? Just...living with an eye to these things and not to, like, what's on tv and doing the same thing tomorrow that you did today.

UGH SORRY is that vague enough?

― check the name, no caps, boom, i'm (Laurel), Friday, 27 July 2012 22:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is all otm! & not super hard to get i don't think? a relationship takes more work, to be healthy, than just coexisting next to one another. & there's no reason that someone you meet when you're twenty would be someone you click with when you're thirty, because people cycle through changes for all that time. but still being curious, & still trying to evaluate what makes you happy, and whether another person is happy, and how practising what makes you happy fits with your ability to effectively relate to another person, and what would be best for a relationship directionally are all really important. this isn't an eyeroll at schlumpy guys who sit on the couch all day & let things pass by; i think it's just as easy to keep things as they are out of a deep contentment, not out of fear - out of a recognition that the status quo of a relationship is still superior to whatever you had as a single person (i remember vertiginously realising that i liked snuggling way more than i liked a bunch of the intellectual pursuits with which i'd previously filled my time), out of satisfaction. but it seems like a sensible & minimal goal to make sure that something that could ebb is nurtured, & that an affection and magnetism towards one another, an ability to relate to, & feeling of kinship & attunement towards, a partner is sustained, not just counted on. i know this sounds lecturey & this is not the secrets of my thirty-five year constant backmassaging marriage, it's from a history of a comfortable inertia that screwed things up. i just think there is a way you can be better than yourself as part of a pair, spend all your time trying harder, giving more. & some of that has to be in staying vaguely aware of the distance between working out what you need & what your relationship needs.

seems weird to marry someone with the expectation that they will later be a different person from the one you married, i dunno

― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Friday, 27 July 2012 20:43 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like this is weird to me: obviously the person will later be a different person, because you are not the same person when you are 25 as when you are 45 or 65 or whatever. even if you think that we have an immutable human core or w/e, your priorities change so much & there's no reason to assume that that's going to just naturally be in sync with a partner's development. i am sure people grow in different directions & grow apart, but wrt one person changing & the other just not, i feel like some of that rests on their inertia (whether romantically governed or w/e).

I married a divorced woman whose previous marriage had lasted ten years. Ours has now lasted 28 years. She appears to have no regrets in either case.

I was wondering what happened there, thebingo. Glad things are ok now.

I feel like I'll never get over my divorce. Barely talk to my ex now as she remarried and has a child and one on the way and is mostly living the life she wanted so it turned out ok for her. I miss her everyday. We've been apart 9 years.

Schlump and laurel otm

^^

Man, so we have our first friends who are getting divorced with child. Guy was a good stay-at-home dad but a terrible husband (got them into debt, may have cheated, failed to look for a job even though she didn't earn enough to support them, comes from a bad home, etc.), woman contributed to the problems somewhat by not wanting to make an effort to fix problems early on before they got worse, but she's doing the right thing by leaving him afaot.

But we just visited them for the first time and she has this new boyfriend (divorce hasn't even gone through yet) who is EXACTLY LIKE HER HUSBAND -- looks like him (tbh a much less good looking version) and is the same dreamy childish charmer type that will cause them the exact same problems. It was actually uncanny and creepy -- the guy has some very striking and specific similarities to her husband. The whole thing is sad and painful to see, and I feel for their three year old more than anyone, because as bad as the marriage was this guy was great with his son and in any case its his father.

One of my favorite law professors, an old guy who had been married to the same woman since he was 20, told me "A lot of people who divorce really shouldn't bother, because when they remarry they just marry their exes again."

My sis never got divorced but she was with someone long enough it might as well have been -- and her ex ended up marrying someone who looked a LOT like her.

painful subject

We were kind of debating whether to give her a "what the hell are you doing?" talk. BF was a nice enough guy (although he was so obviously on his best behavior to impress his divorcing gf's old friends that it was hard to tell), but he was basically a jobless artsy dreamer type with probably a lot of the same personality flaws as the husband. Like, if money and responsibility were huge problems in your marriage WHY ARE YOU DATING SOMEONE WITH THE SAME PROBLEMS BEFORE EVEN FINISHING THE DIVORCE? If not for there being a toddler in the picture I'd probaby leave it alone but.

that sucks, hurting. i'd do the talk, but that's me as an outside observer.

Guy was a good stay-at-home dad but a terrible husband (got them into debt, may have cheated, failed to look for a job even though she didn't earn enough to support them, comes from a bad home, etc.)

First three i understand, but "comes from a bad home"? Please tell me you don't hold that against him.

I come from a bad home too. Good thing I'm not married since I'd make a shit husband evidently....