Reply to Are you still in good terms with your ex spouse if your divorced them due to cheating?

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[quote=Anonymous]What is “good terms”?

When my kids were under 18, I bent over backwards to be kind and inclusive to exDH even though he cheated on me with many women, including hookers, and lied extensively to me about it, making up a big back story *in couples therapy* that he thought would be more palatable than the real story. I included Ex in all school and extra-curricular activities, coordinated holidays (often taking the short end of the stick), and had Ex in my home regularly to facilitate visitation with the kids. (He chose not to take any physical custody.)

From the outside, he was around so often that people who didn’t know assumed we were married, and that we had a good marriage, because we never disagreed in public.

From the inside, the kids still saw his cheater side toward me and them - cancelled or neglected obligations, lies, and some verbal abuse of me. Astute parents of my kids friends sometimes caught the coercive control element he exerted - me always dancing to placate him so that he would engage with the kids.

Now the youngest is over 18.  I will never not be polite to my Ex. He is their father. But, he gets the same level of polite that a stranger gets.  I do not ever reach out to him unless it is an emergency regarding the kids or around holiday calendar planning. He provides no financial support to the kids. He periodically reaches out to me to engage on a personal level in some way (usually because he needs something or he wants attention or sympathy), and I just have no interest in that - he has proven himself to be unsafe, unreliable, untrustworthy and self-absorbed. Nonetheless, I just politely and superficially direct him elsewhere.

So, what is good terms?  I am. Rey happy with the minimal level of polite contact we have and from the outside it probably looks like “good terms,” but, honestly, he is a terrible person and it’s OK, even wise, that I minimize my contact with him.

To be on the kind of “good terms” that means friendship and supportive contact would require him to have some understanding of the magnitude and impact of his misbehavior and to have made amends for it and  undergone some character development.  That didn’t happen, so IIWII. [/quote]

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