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My Marriage & Divorce Testimony


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I'll do this in two posts. IN this post, I'll just mention that what happened to the OP is similar to what happened to me after 20 years, with three teen and pre-teen daughters. This story is absurdly common. Over 70% of divorces are started by the wife. 

But this common story is laid out right here in this article from Fred Reed that was published a relatively short time after my divorce:
Universal Divorce: A Male Perspective on a Bad Idea

If you were to believe those brawny viragos at NOW, you might think that universal divorce was a force for liberation of women, and just a splendid thing for kids. You know the line: marriage is the vilest form of chattel slavery, men molest their kids when they’re not beating them like drums, and such like. (Actually, I can’t think of a better authority on children than 12,000 squalling lesbians who don’t have any. Can you?)

Well, let me offer a revisionist view of divorce, from a male point of view:

After a few years under one roof, Willy Bill and Cupcake no longer get along well. Part of it is Willy Bill’s fault, and he knows it. Part of it is Cupcake’s fault, but she doesn’t know it. She expected marriage to fulfill her fantasies and make her happy. It didn’t, because married people are just married people, and life ain’t all ham hocks and home fries. This too is Willy Bill’s fault. Life, that is.

Since Cupcake wasn’t happy being single, and wasn’t happy being married, she now figures she’ll be happy divorced. She’s going to have a dynamite social life, not like living with what’s-his-name. She’ll have a fascinating job and a swell place. Joe Perfect will appear on a white horse and life will be roses again. She forgets that it never was, and anyway there just isn’t that much Prozac. The divorce occurs.

Which devastates the kids. She says it’s better for them to have one parent than to have parents who don’t get along. This is the Enabling Fantasy of divorce. Ten years later the kids will still be trying to get mommy and daddy back together.

Next, Cupcake learns that the business world is not importunate in its desire for women of thirty-six with no resume. Day care is expensive. As kids get older, their toys cost more. What’s-his-name may have been inadequate as a fantasy mechanic, but he did have a sizable paycheck.

Joe Perfect doesn’t show up, which is hardly surprising. Cupcake isn’t Suzy Prom Queen any longer. Most guys shy away from women who always have kids in tow. They have either had kids, and don’t want more, or else never wanted them in the first place. As men get older, marriage becomes less important to them.

Cupcake finds that the men she might date, typically two to eight years older than she is, are a sorry lot. The good ones have been taken. The leftovers are either gay, or confirmed bachelors, or three-time losers looking for their fourth divorce, or such awful dweebs that nobody wanted them in the first place. Or they’ve been burned in one marriage and aren’t about to make that mistake again.

In the divorce, either she got the friends or she didn’t. When a couple split, the friends seem to think they can continue to be friends with only one of the former couple. If he got them, she’s horribly lonely. If he didn’t, she finds that married couples, which most of them were, don’t want single people around. Four’s company; three’s a triangle. If she’s attractive, it’s worse.

Then come the long empty weekends when nobody calls. Depression arrives. She has a hard time growing a new social life because the kids are always there. Depression is two to four times more common in women than men, depending on whose figures you like, and she’s got reasons to be depressed. No retirement, for example. She gets a prescription for lithium. Try finding a single woman past forty who isn’t on Prozac, lithium, Depacote, Zoloft, or Welbutrin, all the M&Ms of the irremediably unhappy.

You can’t divorce a car payment. Cupcake finds that she has to have a full-time job, and maybe some part-time jobs too. Days only have twenty-four hours. She doesn’t have time to be a full-time mother and have an adult’s social life. Often motherhood draws the short straw. She starts leaving young kids alone for long periods while she goes out. By no means all divorced mothers do this, but more do than the newspapers tell you. Latch-keyism becomes inevitable. The kids, unsupervised, feeling neglected, angry because Daddy left, begin to get into trouble.

Not infrequently mommy comes to resent her offspring. They’re always there, always whining and fighting and wanting this and that. They make her life miserable, which doesn’t happen with two parents, and there’s no respite in sight. At best she becomes irritable and seems cold. At worst she slaps the hell out of them.

Then, dear God, puberty hits. Other things being equal, women are better parents than men for small children. A man would go crazy. For older kids, no. At adolescence they begin asserting themselves and testing Cupcake. A fifteen-year-old girl makes Attila the Hun look like a milk-fed pansy in lace shorts. With mammals like that, Cupcake will soon reflect, no wonder the dinosaurs died out. The kids walk over her, becoming contemptuous. She comes close to hating them for it.

A man would say, “No. You aren’t going to run away with a feeble-minded dope-dealer who plays bass guitar. Because I say so. We’ve finished talking about it.” It would stick. Women don’t do this as well.

Relations with the ex run from none to good. Like as not, she hates him because the divorce didn’t make her happy. Frequently she gets back at him through the kids. An angry man smacks someone. A woman’s aggression is passive: She withholds sex or, after the divorce, the kids, while earnestly pretending she’s doing something else. He gets no influence in raising the tads, doesn’t get the report cards or school pictures, isn’t consulted.

At best, he gets called only when the kids get into trouble and she can’t handle it. Daddy becomes The Heavy. Five years later when they figure it out, they will be grateful. But that’s five years off.

And there’s nothing he can do about it: “joint custody” or not, if she doesn’t comply, his choice is to put up with it, or sue mommy, which is not the high road to a kid’s heart. He puts up with it.

Don’t you love it? I mean, what a deal. The kids hate the divorce like poison, Willy Bill misses his kids horribly, and Cupcake gets to grow old by herself in a bleak apartment with a cat named Fluffy.

If that’s not social advance, I don’t know what is.

Edited by Still Alive
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Part 2:

In my case, we were not Christians when we met, but had a mishmash of Christian values. It was 1977 and we had never had sex, but went to third base regularly for a few years and never lived together. 

In 1980 I became a Christian, and she "followed". We then had our first child. We were quite involved in Church. The problem came when she started taking a course called "Learning to live, Learning to love" that was developed by a serious spousal abuser that nad repented. 

In a nutshell, it basically turned every man into an abuser, and I started getting the brunt of it. The "comical" part is that I initially believed it. I mean, after all, all have sinned, right? So I went to the "male abuser" class. We used a textbook to help us see how we were abusing our wives, etc. I thought it was great learning, and my wife was going to the "wife version" which I thought would be a great way to improve our marriage. 

But two things happened: First, the textbook I was using was VERY hard on men and even turned "giving her flowers" into a step in the cycle of abuse. But I'm a man. I can take it. Anything to be a better husband, and we can all improve. And I figured she was using the book for women to improve her side.  Then I found out that the women's class was using the SAME BOOK. The only reason for their class was to see where their husband was abusing them!

The second thing: This was when "repressed memories" was a thing. And my wife was claiming she had discovered repressed memories that her grandfather sexually abused her. And then in class I said I only remembered one time my parents ever spanked me, and they never argued. The teacher took me aside and said I needed to get through my "repressed memories" to discover the root of me being an "abuser".

I was very concerned and called my mother. She said that she only spanked me one time in my entire childhood and, you guessed it, it was the one time I remembered. She also said she and dad NEVER fought in front of us. They would always take it to the bedroom, out of earshot. i.e. NO REPRESSED MEMORIES.

I also learned that as far as this course was concerned, if you were a married male and not Jesus, you were therefore abusing your wife! Meanwhile, the "clues" they offered to help you see how you may be abusing (the clues were questions like "Does the family seem to walk on eggs when around you?") actually pointed to my WIFE being the abuser. 

Long story short, that is what it was. Anyway, one day, out of the blue, I get served papers. I'm kicked out. Not a divorce. A legal separation. I cried non-stop for three days. I desperately try to work it out with her in meetings with counselors and church elders to no avail. One of the elders told me point blank that since she will not tell anyone what I did wrong, nor will she say what I can do to rectify the situation, that it was clear that for her this was already a divorce. 

When it was finally clear she'd have none of it, I prayed to God to, if we are not getting back together, and if one does not love the other, would He free the other. 

I noticed, one week later, that I had zero feeling for he. BTW, the test, for me, was to imagine her having sex with another man, and it brought no feeling at all. 

Two weeks later, I went to my high school 25 year reunion. There I started talking to a woman I knew in school, but never dated. She had flown into Seattle for the reunion from her home in South Dakota. Her husband had just dumped her and her friends told her it might do her good to get out. 

Well, that was summer of 1997 and she and I have been in absolute marital bliss almost 20 years now. And our love constantly increases beyond what we both thought was the limit of how strongly one could love a person. 

My ex wife came from parents who fought constatly. My current wife came from strong Catholic parents who loved each other in the vein of The Gift of the Maggie. I'm not a fighter either.

My first marriage was full of fighting, often with my then wife coming unglued because my fighting style is Mr. Spock. My current wife doesn't fight. We discuss, though we did have a couple of emotional challenges at first when we had to deal with my ex.

My ex ended up with boyfriends and, according to my girls, they fight a lot. She seems to be happy with that, though. Or something.

I've forgiven her and moved on. But the poi

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Today marks the 2 year anniversary of my divorce.

I still love my ex-spouse and she broke my heart.

Healing has taken place but the scar still remains. As my Christian counselor said, "Christian's will disappoint & hurt you, given enough time, they will do things that they shouldn't do"

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