Title. If she assumed your last name then blindsided you with divorce, cheated, went crazy town - did you ask her to change from your last name?

I am tempted to do it after divorce finalises. Can't think she'll carry my family name after what she did.

I've been considering divorce for years. It feels so hard because by and large she doesn't treat me that bad. Sexless marriages are par for the course, aren't they? So if my life is comfortable then what do I have to complain about?

There are so many thoughts and emotions to consider but at the end of the day I feel like the decision rests on three things:

1. Honesty: I've already strayed and she doesn't really know the half of it, how serious it has gotten with another. So I imagine if I told her everything everything then it would be done. So do I have an obligation to do that? What about my obligation not to hurt her? Has that ship already sailed?

2. Fulfillment: I haven't really been touched in years. And when I did get touched, it felt obligatory as opposed to desire. I think there was always a physical mismatch there and she just faked it until I was locked in. She has pretty much said as much. Do I deserve physical fulfillment? Is that too petty a concern? Selfish?

3. Ownership: I usually agree with her and let her have her way because she will argue about anything until you are battered down and agree. She does it nicely though. But after so many years of small concessions, it feels like my life is not mine. I live in her house that she decorated (I just pay the mortgage - but the money is not the issue). We do the things she wants to do. We watch the shows she wants to watch. We take the vacations she wants to take. Slowly over time and always with my "permission" I feel like I have given my life away.

I watched my father work himself to the bone for his wife and family just to be generally deeply miserable and unappreciated. I can't tell if it is a problem internal to me or if it is my circumstances. I don't want to blame her, but sometimes I feel that I do. She's a good person and it makes me feel like an evil bastard for hurting her, but how much longer can I go on being unhappy? Should I just do it until I die, like my father?

One thing I hadn't considered that has happened to me is the destruction of my confidence. That is probably a result of traumatizing work (working in schools) more so than a sexless marriage but it's probably both. No confidence = bad leadership which makes my work life even harder.

It is hard to imagine a new life but how did you all navigate this? Which of these feelings stands out as legit and which is bullshit? How did you figure it out?

My biggest frustration navigating my divorce is how the system has been built.

Its built to generate conflict, to reward greed, to tickle at our worst impulses. The checks and

balances built to stop the tyranny of the legal system has been dismantled, in the ''best interests

of the child'' when it does anything but.

The lawyers(yes even yours), judges, State government employees(hello title 4), therapists are all

in bed with each other. You ask , ''why dont they fix it? anyone can see this is broken'' .

Wrong. The system is working as intended , just not for you. Their VERY existence depends on

picking the meat off your bones.

The children, you say? an after-thought. Once the smoke is cleared, the damage has been done.

Two adversaries once sworn enemies are now magically supposed to co-parent. The damage is

not even the divorce itself, its the process that causes the most damage.

Until the money/ incentives are untwined , this will continue.

One common theme I hear is to avoid alcohol when going through a divorce.

This is tough since I usually have a drink or two to calm my nerves, but don’t over-do it. I find this helps me significantly when done in moderation.

I also have quite a few friends that are comforting me during this hard time and usually get together with them for a beer or two.

I’ve already reduced my alcohol consumption but haven’t cut it to zero.

What have you found works for you and why?

I have basically gotten what I want with 2 x AIs vs her paid lawyer, they’ve conceded everything so that it is a fair split of assets and custody which is great.

Her latest legal letter states they want to sell the house with no improvements (it needs a lot of work) within 30 days of my accepting the later proposal which is all fine except for house sale logistics. We will likely lose $100k or more because its condition.

Then there’s the kids, they don’t know yet and they are soon to find out and they’re not going to be happy they’re losing their house, who would be?

Needing to find somewhere to live is hard with 1% vacancy in our area there’s limited options and a solo dad on 80k a year with 3 kids is scraping the barrel, my ex is in the same exact spot but has no idea what to expect in my opinion.

I am learning about my failures as a husband, as a person, but all those things don’t matter now as it is truely over. And she has started all these proceedings and pushed for this end result. I am in a nervous system battle for sure.

I have to give everything away, half my equity, half my time with my kids, my identity, my house I basically half built and my touches are on every square inch, everything about me, my financial situation, my relationship to the kids, their familiarly with their routine, their house, all of us under one roof, their security because of that, everything is changing, nearly everything, that counts to me anyway.

How did you do it fellas?

One year later, after countless therapy sessions, after uprooting myself from my home state to get away from him, after losing one dog that we raised together for 15 years,
after months of him reaching out to me and harassing me…after it thought I had healed and recovered, I woke up last weekend to feeling extremely sad, lonely, angry, and every other emotion known. I woke up to knowing that this is still a real thing to me. I’ve yet to recover and I honestly don’t know how long it’ll take. However if there’s one thing I know I can do is stay strong and remind myself that I’m young and this will all be over one day.

I mean from the 5 year mark, to right before you filed. Did you do the nasty all the time ? Did it dry up?

I think cheaters do it differently than regular people, but did you still get bjs and hand massages?

Did y'all kiss? Take baths together etc .. did it keep going from the beginning all the way until the end, or did it start to decline at a certain mark?

Thank you for sharing, because I really want to know if there's a drastic correlation.

Your ex-wife betrayed you, had an affair, divorced you, and blamed you for everything?

Part of grief is accepting the value of what you had and learning to let go. Grieving is a necessary step for healing and moving on.

That totally makes sense to me if my ex-wife had say passed away. I don’t know how I’m supposed to grieve with what actually happened…

Edit: I should clarify that this happened a little over a year ago and I’m doing a lot better. I know I’m doing all the right things like hobbies, gym therapy, etc. I guess this was more of a philosophical question grieving…. I was reading somewhere about how it’s important to grieve in order to move on and what the definition of grieving was and that’s what started to make me think about this.

Hello Reddit,

Where do I even start?

I’m a man in my early 30s. My wife and I have been separated for about 10 months. We’re still legally married, and I still love her.

Since the separation, I’ve gone back and forth a lot in my head. Sometimes I’ve been angry at her, sometimes at myself, and a lot of the time I’ve just been confused about how two people who loved each other ended up where we are now.

As the months have passed, though, I’ve started looking at our marriage differently. I don’t want to put all the blame on her, and I don’t want to put all of it on myself either. I’m trying to understand what happened as fairly as I can.

And one of the hardest things I’ve realized is that some of the things she used to tell me about myself were true.

One of the biggest was that I wasn’t ready to get married.

When she first told me about her immigration situation, marriage came up as a possible solution. I resisted because I knew I wasn’t ready. We kept seeing each other for about another year, and during that time I fell deeply in love with her.

Eventually the immigration issue came up again. I still wasn’t ready for marriage, but by then I loved her and I didn’t want to lose her, so I agreed to marry her.

I want to make something clear because I know mentioning immigration can immediately make people assume certain things. I can confidently say that she loved me. There was no malice in her. I don’t believe she was using me or that our relationship was fake. We loved each other.

What I understand now is that loving someone and being ready to be their husband are not the same thing.

She actually used to tell me that. Sometimes during arguments she would say that I hadn’t been ready for the marriage, and I would argue with her about it. In my mind, I loved her, I had married her and I wanted to be with her, so how could I not be ready?

Looking back, she was right. I wasn’t.

Maybe sometimes women are able to see certain emotional realities more clearly than men do. I know that’s a generalization, but at least in our relationship, I think she could see something about me that I couldn’t see in myself at the time.

I can see it now even in small things. Sometimes I genuinely enjoyed my own company more than hers. I would leave the house, get in the car and just drive around for a few hours. I’d listen to music, think, clear my head, whatever. Then I’d come home and sometimes find her already asleep.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting time alone when you’re married. But looking back at those moments as part of the bigger picture, I wonder what they felt like from her side. Maybe she wanted to spend the evening with her husband while I was somewhere else enjoying being alone. In some ways I was married, but I was still living with the habits and mentality of somebody accustomed to living entirely on his own terms.

We had also gotten legally married in secret. Neither of our families knew we were married. We were living together, but her family didn’t know that either because she comes from a conservative background.

It wasn’t supposed to remain secret forever. We were planning a traditional/religious wedding in her country, where I would properly meet her family and where our marriage would finally be celebrated with them.

She was genuinely excited about that wedding and, from what I understand, had already done a lot of the preparations. It was supposed to happen around March of this year.

Thinking about that now is difficult. At one point we were preparing for that future together, and somehow we ended up spending the last 10 months living completely separate lives.

There were other things about myself that I have to own.

I was disorganized and inconsistent, and I didn’t really have a clear plan for my life. I struggled professionally and spent too much time complaining about things instead of concentrating on what I could actually control.

Over the course of about one year while we were married, I lost four jobs.

Each situation had its own circumstances, but looking at the bigger picture, I can understand what that must have looked and felt like from her side. She was trying to build a life with someone who kept losing jobs and didn’t seem to have much stability or direction. Whatever explanations I had for each individual situation, that was the reality she was living with too.

I also never physically cheated on my wife, but I did have indiscretions with other women through text messages. Some people will consider that cheating anyway, and I understand why. I’m not interested in arguing about the label. It was inappropriate behavior for a married man, and I was wrong to do it.

My wife also used to tell me that she wanted to feel “seen” and “adored.”

I remember those words very clearly. At the time I heard them, but I didn’t really understand what she was trying to tell me. Now I think about the time I could have spent with her, the ways I could have been more present, and the stability I could have brought into our life. I also think about how often I defended myself instead of stopping to ask why the woman I loved was feeling this way.

Then there was the situation with my family, and this is where things become more complicated for me.

My wife never really felt comfortable around my parents, even before we lived with them. According to her, she felt neglected by them and believed they didn’t really like or accept her.

This was difficult for me because these were my parents and I love them. There was also a language barrier between them and my wife, which I know sometimes made communication difficult. But from what I saw, my parents tried as best as they could to welcome her into their home and make her feel comfortable.

At the same time, I can recognize now that the fact that I saw my parents making an effort doesn’t mean she necessarily experienced it the same way. She could genuinely have felt neglected or unwelcome even while my parents genuinely believed they were doing their best.

She could also be very negative about them. She would make comments about their house, their cars, the way they lived or things they did. There were occasions where I felt she behaved badly around them, and when I confronted her about it she could become defensive.

Sometimes I felt like she was driving a wedge between me and my family, and there were moments where I genuinely felt like I was being pushed to choose between my wife and my parents.

I still have some anger about that. I honestly don’t believe I would have treated her family the same way. I hadn’t met them yet, but I was preparing to meet them at our traditional wedding, and my intention was to respect them and make an effort with them because they were her family.

Eventually we moved in with my parents. This wasn’t our first choice. We decided to do it together because we wanted to save money and eventually get a place of our own.

In hindsight, it was a terrible decision, and I blame myself for it every day.

Our marriage already had cracks, she already had a difficult relationship with my parents, and then we put all of that under one roof. I know it was a decision we made together, but I still carry a lot of guilt because deep down I think I should have understood that our relationship needed its own space and stronger boundaries, not more pressure around it.

With some distance from everything, I’ve started asking myself a question I didn’t really ask enough while we were together:

What if some of the way she behaved toward my family was a reaction to the way I was behaving toward her?

If she already felt neglected by my parents and then also felt neglected by her husband, maybe those feelings fed into each other. Maybe she didn’t feel prioritized by me. Maybe she didn’t feel that I was protecting our relationship or really listening to her. Maybe I spent too much time deciding whether her complaints about my parents were fair and not enough time trying to understand why she felt the way she did.

And that brings me to one of the hardest things I’m dealing with now.

To this day, I blame myself for a lot of the fallout of our marriage because I believe I neglected her.

I think about what might have been different if I had listened more, been more present, given her more of my time and understood what she meant when she told me she wanted to feel seen and adored.

But this is also where I struggle with responsibility.

I know there are things that belong to me. I wasn’t ready for marriage. I lacked stability. I lost four jobs in roughly a year. The messages with other women were wrong. I could be emotionally absent. There were things my wife told me directly that I dismissed and now understand.

What I don’t know is how far my responsibility extends beyond that.

If my neglect created hurt and resentment in her, I can understand how that may have affected the way she reacted to me, my family and our situation. But does understanding where some of her behavior came from mean I should blame myself for that behavior too?

That’s where I get stuck.

I’m not looking for excuses for my failures, and I’m not trying to make her the villain. I’m trying to understand how to take responsibility for what I did without eventually rewriting our entire marriage as though everything that happened afterward was because of me.

I also never really had closure.

The last time I saw her was around Christmas last year. I remember telling her that I loved her.

She told me, “Love is not enough.”

At the time, those words hurt. Now I think I understand them differently.

I loved her then, and I still love her today. But love by itself didn’t make me ready for marriage. It didn’t create stability when I was losing jobs. It didn’t make me more present when she felt neglected. It didn’t undo the messages with other women or solve the problems that were developing around us.

Maybe that was what she was trying to tell me. Not that my love wasn’t real, but that a marriage requires more than the feeling of loving somebody.

And that is difficult to accept now because I still love the same woman. The difference is that today I understand things about being a husband that I didn’t understand when I still had her beside me.

I miss the ordinary parts of our life more than anything. Coming home to her. Eating together. Our trips. Our jokes. Just having her there.

I’m writing this right now and I’m crying.

Recently I saw something she posted where she talked about loving being single and not needing somebody else to make her happy, while also talking about still wanting love and wanting to feel “seen” and “adored.”

Those words hit me hard because they were the same words she used with me during our marriage, and I understand them differently today.

There’s something painful about finally understanding what somebody was trying to tell you when they’re no longer beside you to hear you say, I understand now.

At the same time, I know 10 months have passed. She has lived a life without me and I have lived one without her. We’ve both gone through things and had experiences the other person wasn’t part of. I don’t think either of us could simply go back to exactly who we were before.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t hope reconciliation might someday be possible. But I also understand that working on myself doesn’t earn me another chance. I could become more mature, stable and disciplined, and she would still have every right to decide that she doesn’t want to come back.

Maybe all I can do is what some men in my situation can only hope for:

One last dance.

I don’t mean going back to the marriage we had and pretending none of this happened. That marriage is gone.

What I mean is that maybe one day we could sit across from each other again as the people we are now, after everything we’ve experienced apart, and see whether something different could be built between us. Not trying to recreate the old marriage, but seeing whether the same two people could build a different one.

Maybe that day never comes. I understand that. Whatever I need to change about myself, I have to change whether she ever comes back or not.

But if I’m being completely truthful, I hope that one day we get that one last dance.

So I guess what I’m asking is:

How do you honestly accept the ways you failed your spouse without eventually convincing yourself that everything that went wrong was your fault?

Can someone’s hurt and resentment explain some of their behavior without necessarily excusing it?

And for anyone who realized after separation that their spouse had been trying to tell them something about themselves that they weren’t ready to hear at the time, how did you deal with finally understanding it when it was already too late?

I don’t really know what I expect from posting this. Maybe I just needed to finally put all of it into words and hear from people who have been through something similar.

I know I can’t change what happened, and I can’t change the person I was when we were together. All I can do now is try to understand it honestly, take responsibility for what was mine, learn from it and become a better man because of it.

I just wish I had become that man while she was still beside me.

Anyone else have a completely biased and corrupt Minor's Counsel? Mine gave a total BS cookie-cutter recommendation to the judge and didn't actually share any input or findings from the kids. She also didn't interview either parent, nor did she use or pay any attention to any of my 100+ pages of evidence, but she focused HARD on my ex's 2-3 pages of "evidence." She's CLEARLY colluding and working for my ex's lawyer. (Worst part is, the judge doesn't seem to notice or care.) Anyone else have a minor's counsel like that, or is it just me?