Blindsided

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There’s a reason Belle Burden’s book is resonating so much. One person’s happiness often comes at the expense of everyone else’s.

Especially if one is a selfish, ignorant jerk.

But those exist, destroying relationships to protect their fake image and ego.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The best thing you can do is give him a drama free divorce. It is best for your kids and your wallet. Litigation makes post divorce life harder. Don’t be stupid.

-divorced from an attorney

Absolutely. But we always know he is stupid.

Everyone will know the truth and the clean cut mediated divorce with commensurate split of assets, custody, child support, alimonies by, and true ups each of the next ten years.

If they live in a state that punishes adultery, those clauses affect the settlement as well.

Good riddance to the adulterer who kicked his family to the curb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How often do you think this happens?

I caught up with a grad school friend I hadn't seen or spoken to in 4 years. Married, 52, three daughters 12, 14, 17, lawyer. Husband is a lawyer too. No abuse, cheating , drugs or excessive alcohol according to her. Just a ho hum, one foot in front of the other marriage.

Husband came home from work one day last February and said:

"I'm done. I'm in love with a colleague (17 years younger) and I want a drama and trauma free divorce. Please don't make this messy for the girls. Please lets just end this. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen but I don't love you anymore."

It actually made me tear up typing this out because it's just so.... sad. She is a great person- so kind, funny, pretty and now she is.... in deep, deep depression.

I mean, that doesn't sound like a great marriage to me. Clearly there were cracks.

I know someone whose husband did the same thing but after the initial shock wore off I realized I wasn't actually that surprised - their marriage wasn't that great.

I'm sorry for your friend, that sounds awful, but if I had to list the people I'd expect something like this to happen to, it's all the ones where their marriages aren't very strong. Now, if it happened to some of my friends I would be jaw-on-the-floor shocked. But others? Sad, of course, but not all that surprised.

I think only a minority of people have GREAT marriages. Do you disagree PP?

DP. I made this observation to my friend recently. I think our current exposure to so much information is making people increasingly unsatisfied with marriages that would have been fine in any other point in human history.

I am single, and a senior citizen.

Over my lifetime it was far more common for me to leave a married couple grateful for my unmarried status, than it was for me to come away thinking how lucky a wife was to have the man she had married.

Because of how YOU felt about the man or because of how SHE felt? I couldn't care less if you don't want to be married to my husband, but I am happily so. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but while some of my friends are married to men I wouldn't want to be married to, very few of them make me wish I were single.

Maybe because you do not know what you are missing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How often do you think this happens?

I caught up with a grad school friend I hadn't seen or spoken to in 4 years. Married, 52, three daughters 12, 14, 17, lawyer. Husband is a lawyer too. No abuse, cheating , drugs or excessive alcohol according to her. Just a ho hum, one foot in front of the other marriage.

Husband came home from work one day last February and said:

"I'm done. I'm in love with a colleague (17 years younger) and I want a drama and trauma free divorce. Please don't make this messy for the girls. Please lets just end this. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen but I don't love you anymore."

It actually made me tear up typing this out because it's just so.... sad. She is a great person- so kind, funny, pretty and now she is.... in deep, deep depression.

I mean, that doesn't sound like a great marriage to me. Clearly there were cracks.

I know someone whose husband did the same thing but after the initial shock wore off I realized I wasn't actually that surprised - their marriage wasn't that great.

I'm sorry for your friend, that sounds awful, but if I had to list the people I'd expect something like this to happen to, it's all the ones where their marriages aren't very strong. Now, if it happened to some of my friends I would be jaw-on-the-floor shocked. But others? Sad, of course, but not all that surprised.

I think only a minority of people have GREAT marriages. Do you disagree PP?

DP. I made this observation to my friend recently. I think our current exposure to so much information is making people increasingly unsatisfied with marriages that would have been fine in any other point in human history.

I am single, and a senior citizen.

Over my lifetime it was far more common for me to leave a married couple grateful for my unmarried status, than it was for me to come away thinking how lucky a wife was to have the man she had married.

Because of how YOU felt about the man or because of how SHE felt? I couldn't care less if you don't want to be married to my husband, but I am happily so. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but while some of my friends are married to men I wouldn't want to be married to, very few of them make me wish I were single.

Maybe because you do not know what you are missing?

DP.

What is she missing?

Different people want different things out of life. And people tend to prioritize what they want.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a now adult woman who was once a teen girl whose Dad did exactly what OP describes, allow me to remind the “what’s the big deal” posters that the trauma my dad inflicted on our family has never gone away. The complicated family holidays, the awkwardness at family events, the impending problems with health care proxies, estate division, and relationships with grandchildren…it just keeps going. My father imploded our lives because he met a woman who worshiped him (she was also a personality disordered soon to be alcoholic but that didn’t matter as much as her care of my dad’s ego).

People act like these choices exist in a vacuum. They don’t, and the reverberation effects just keep going. The people who call this “not a big deal” are effectively saying that the women and children affected by these men don’t matter. We do.

Do you hate men so much?
Women initiate 75% of divorces in the US. They are the ones who decide to break up families.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a now adult woman who was once a teen girl whose Dad did exactly what OP describes, allow me to remind the “what’s the big deal” posters that the trauma my dad inflicted on our family has never gone away. The complicated family holidays, the awkwardness at family events, the impending problems with health care proxies, estate division, and relationships with grandchildren…it just keeps going. My father imploded our lives because he met a woman who worshiped him (she was also a personality disordered soon to be alcoholic but that didn’t matter as much as her care of my dad’s ego).

People act like these choices exist in a vacuum. They don’t, and the reverberation effects just keep going. The people who call this “not a big deal” are effectively saying that the women and children affected by these men don’t matter. We do.

Do you hate men so much?
Women initiate 75% of divorces in the US. They are the ones who decide to break up families.

It's weird, because women always leave their husbands and that's okay, but men can't. That is not fair. - Woman

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a now adult woman who was once a teen girl whose Dad did exactly what OP describes, allow me to remind the “what’s the big deal” posters that the trauma my dad inflicted on our family has never gone away. The complicated family holidays, the awkwardness at family events, the impending problems with health care proxies, estate division, and relationships with grandchildren…it just keeps going. My father imploded our lives because he met a woman who worshiped him (she was also a personality disordered soon to be alcoholic but that didn’t matter as much as her care of my dad’s ego).

People act like these choices exist in a vacuum. They don’t, and the reverberation effects just keep going. The people who call this “not a big deal” are effectively saying that the women and children affected by these men don’t matter. We do.

Life is messy. Grow up.

Lol, you’re exactly who I’m talking about. Men like my dad, and maybe you, always have and probably will continue to casually detonate other people’s lives in pursuit of their own “happiness”. But as one of my favorite teachers always said, there’s no free lunch. Everyone sees my dad for who he is. And now that I’ve had my own children, I know exactly what he was willing to give up by walking away from us. Life may be messy, but somehow I’ve managed to keep that mess out of my own children’s lives.

You can ignore how you hurt other people. But rest assured in the end, you will be seen for who you are.

[Anonymous]

The men who do this wind up happy as clams, but the women who do this always seem to end up miserable.
Like one friends dad pulled this. Now he lives in a waterfront house with his AP and enjoys her grandkids on his boat. He barely gets to see his own kids and grandkids but oh well!
Whereas another friends mom pulled this — at 40 she got implants, dyed her hair blonde and decided she could level up from her boring husband. She met a very sad end, alone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The men who do this wind up happy as clams, but the women who do this always seem to end up miserable.
Like one friends dad pulled this. Now he lives in a waterfront house with his AP and enjoys her grandkids on his boat. He barely gets to see his own kids and grandkids but oh well!
Whereas another friends mom pulled this — at 40 she got implants, dyed her hair blonde and decided she could level up from her boring husband. She met a very sad end, alone.

Yup that is what I have seen too. because men have no issue doing things in their own interests including leaving behind their kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The men who do this wind up happy as clams, but the women who do this always seem to end up miserable.
Like one friends dad pulled this. Now he lives in a waterfront house with his AP and enjoys her grandkids on his boat. He barely gets to see his own kids and grandkids but oh well!
Whereas another friends mom pulled this — at 40 she got implants, dyed her hair blonde and decided she could level up from her boring husband. She met a very sad end, alone.

Ok troll

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The best thing you can do is give him a drama free divorce. It is best for your kids and your wallet. Litigation makes post divorce life harder. Don’t be stupid.

-divorced from an attorney

Absolutely. But we always know he is stupid.

Everyone will know the truth and the clean cut mediated divorce with commensurate split of assets, custody, child support, alimonies by, and true ups each of the next ten years.

If they live in a state that punishes adultery, those clauses affect the settlement as well.

Good riddance to the adulterer who kicked his family to the curb.

I say this as a divorced person. No one cares why the couple gets divorced. People have their own lives and problems and the last thing they worry about is why Sally and Tom got divorced.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She really shouldn’t be in deep depression. There’s no point. Move on and find another man.

Precisely.

[Anonymous]

Adults who casually implode long-term family systems because they feel internally dissatisfied should be judged more critically, regardless of gender.

Also the “women initiate 75% of divorces” stat gets thrown around constantly with zero nuance. Filing paperwork is not the same thing as causing the breakdown of a marriage. A woman formally initiating a divorce after years of neglect, cheating, emotional abandonment, addiction, untreated mental health issues, refusal to participate in family life, rage, stonewalling, or chronic selfishness does not magically mean she is the primary destroyer of the family.

And yes, women absolutely can do this too. A mother abandoning her family to chase ego validation and novelty is also destructive. I would judge that too. The point is not “men bad.” The point is that adults have responsibilities to the people whose lives are intertwined with theirs.

What I find disturbing is how many people now treat marriage and children as if they’re reversible lifestyle accessories instead of profound moral obligations.

And no, I don’t agree that “nobody cares.” Maybe random acquaintances don’t. But spouses care. Children care. Adult children care. Grandchildren care. Family systems care. These decisions echo for decades in ways that are often invisible from the outside.

You can absolutely end a marriage ethically when it truly needs to end. But a lot of people are not ending marriages because they exhausted every avenue for repair. They’re ending them because modern culture increasingly tells adults that any sustained discomfort, boredom, loss of excitement, aging, sacrifice, or emotional dissatisfaction means they should go reinvent themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Do you hate men so much?
Women initiate 75% of divorces in the US. They are the ones who decide to break up families.

Are women “breaking up families,” or are women finally financially and legally able to leave marriages that are abusive, exploitative, emotionally dead, chronically unequal, or fundamentally built around the woman overfunctioning while the man coasts?

Also, a lot of men never formally leave. They just slowly disengage for years. They become emotionally absent, avoidant, selfish, rageful, addicted, checked out, or dead weight while the wife keeps dragging the entire family system forward until she finally collapses and files.

The divorce papers are often just the paperwork version of a marriage that already died years earlier.

[Anonymous]

She needs to lawyer-up and take him for as much money as possible. All while being quiet about it. And remain quiet about it.