Reply to If you were a stepparent who divorced, did you feel used by your spouse and stepkid(s)?

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Reply to "If you were a stepparent who divorced, did you feel used by your spouse and stepkid(s)?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote] Anyone who marries a divorced man with a living ex wife and children is crazy.

Investing in children who are not your own is fundamentally at odds with human nature[/quote]

Kind of wondering what the reaction would be if you reversed the genders here and said “you’d have to be crazy to marry a single mom, it’s fundamentally at odds with human nature”...[/quote]

Ha! Seriously.

Somehow, it's ok for a man to marry a woman with kids - but when a woman wants to do it it like she's entering the gates of hell. Okay, well, that last bit may be a little bit true, but its not like people who meet and find that they are compatible in all other regards, should just walk away from each other.

I know. My DH has two. I don't expect that he won't spend any money on them - but (given the dynamics of the situation I entered  into) I also expected that they would launch and that we would move on from there, building OUR life together. I don't feel used, mostly because I am pretty firm in the boundaries that he and I set together. I am not his kids' mother, nor am I their maid, nor am I their ATM.

While the kids were with us, we kept our finances separate, and shared household expenses. He paid for everything that the kids needed above food and shelter. We agreed on how much he would contribute to college, he communicated that, and the rest was on the kids and their mom.

Now, we are working together to pay off the house we live in, save for another, investing for retirement, and looking at what the next 40-50 years look like for us.

And, before people jump all over him for being a POS dad for moving his life forward, you have no idea of the lengths his ex went to alienate him from his kids. He did his level best to teach them the skills and qualities they would need to survive in this world and will always be there for them, if they want a relationship that isn't transactional. 
[/quote]

None of that sounds bad to me.  It's completely reasonable to expect children to fully pay for their own expenses after college.  [/quote]

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