S/O: Separated but not "divorced"

[Anonymous]

Yes ladies, please don’t divorce your husbands. Keep them to yourself. We divorced women don’t need them on dating market

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes ladies, please don’t divorce your husbands. Keep them to yourself. We divorced women don’t need them on dating market

Forgot to add - even with 50% of your joint assets

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I appreciate the insights in this thread. I am considering going the separation route if things with DH don’t improve in the next 1-2 years. He is in the process of being diagnosed with ADHD (and likely high functioning autism), and I certainly have my flaws, but he is a very difficult person to be married to.

His behaviors (frequent emotional outbursts at minor provocations, Jekyll/Hyde personality, selfishness re: division of labor) killed any emotional connection we once had and I’m at my limit. We have two young kids and have done counseling, etc but not much has changed.

I have no desire to remarry and he says neither does he, am a high GS fed (he’s currently unemployed/“self-employed”), and we have a second house house he can live in. If the ADHD medication route doesn’t work, I think this is the way so my kids’ lives are not blown up and I’m not paying him child support. We’re low conflict, friendly when he’s stable, and he’s a decent dad.

You are describing my STBX. I have posted here before. I was trying to wait until the kids were 18 because I could not see a universe where he would be able to care for them, and his poor treatment of me became increasingly justified in his mind by his late-in-life diagnoses of AuDHD. Anyway, he got more and more hostile and I was just trying to survive, and he basically had a long term autistic meltdown that ended in a surprise divorce filing. And now it is a true nightmare. Imagine someone with adhd and the self-righteousness but mind blindness that comes from autism, then give them money and the legal system.

Please do what you can to get every single password and login, secure your finances, make sure friends and family have house keys, and get your kids in extracurriculars that get them around healthy adult male role models and/or are very time consuming. The latter is all that is keeping my kids going.

Wow, I feel like my DH is a twin of yours and OP’s. I have stayed because I know he will become the absolute enemy if I left. I wish we had a 2nd house for him to go to.

Hes a great dad when he’s in the mood to be which is about 20% of the time but that’s utterly unpredictable. Most of the time he’s just moody and awful.
He does cook for us every day though which is something.

He lost a long term job lately (he held it for 30 years and is in his 50’s) and I don’t k win if he will ever be employed again. It’s been difficult.

Try posting on the careers forum for advice.

Does he have any expertise that can be sold here?

https://glginsights.com/

I made about $1,400 doing a few consults with this company. It is not a scam. But you need relatively industry-specific experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I so wish my STBX has accepted separation as an option. We have two houses and it could have easily worked without disrupting either of our lives. However, he is very naive and ignorant of anything beyond his bachelor days and his parents’ marriage, so he did not understand separation as a concept. He thought it literally described when you are in a marriage that isn’t great, not that it was an actual standalone concept, let alone a separate legal one. And this is a man with graduate degrees earning 7 figures.

So anyway…when our marriage got hard he went and filed for divorce without warning because that’s how he thought it worked.

Separation is a very good way to preserve assets and give them time to grow in a down market, buy time in a bad real estate market, preserve access to healthcare, give children agency over their housing situation (especially if they are tweens or young teens and in a state that does not take their preference into consideration), etc.

My STBX has no desire to date or even interact with human beings. In a situation like that, separation is a much better option than divorce. But it takes two people to agree to that and if it was that easy for a couple, maybe even separation would not be on the table.

Ooof. I'm sorry, pp. That's horrid. What an immature, selfish thing to do. I could say you're better off without him, and you near-certainly are, but I'm more focused on how utterly foolish that decision is. That's how you get a contentious divorce that drags everything out, costs entirely too much, and leaves everybody scarred. I'm so sorry someone who promised to love you took that track, and honestly shaken up by how ridiculous it is for a so-called adult to take a "let's just do the trope they use in movies" approach to a major life decision that affects multiple parties.

Accurate- it made it immediately contentious, extraordinarily expensive, and our children are already scarred just 6 months into what I can see will be a long process. There were attorneys who basically cut our initial consults short and didn't charge me because some amount of collaboration is now expected and the norm for many family law practices. exDH doesn't understand that even a temporary separation would have given us the time to work out arrangements that would benefit him financially and help us deal with things like shared assets and logistics (particularly housing) in a way that wouldn't destroy our net worth. I won't be better off financially or emotionally because I can see how difference my children are than before STBX pulled the trigger. He broke them.

Funny you should mention movies because without my presence or intervention my STBX seems to use TV or movies to model his behavior and figure out how people do things.

Anyway, I think separation, first casual and then legal, is an ideal way for everyone to catch their breath, look around, and really examine the landscape of a relationship to figure out how or if divorce makes financial and logistical sense.

My thought after reading these is that your exDH would be the type to go to Acapulco for a divorce, which I've ONLY seen on television. Ha

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes ladies, please don’t divorce your husbands. Keep them to yourself. We divorced women don’t need them on dating market

Most of those guys are relieved to be rid of their obnoxious, lazy, fat wives.