Stay strong man and may everything work out for the best.
Just do whatever you think will make you happy.
Just do whatever you think will make you happy.
Fenris,
Many of us have been exactly where you are now including me. I had, what I now affectionately refer to as, a practice wife. We got married for bad reasons and divorced for good ones and as a result are still friends. We had no kids and so we divided what little property we had between ourselves with no rancor and no attorneys and though I got stuck taking the loss for our house, it only proved the old saying to me that "Divorce is expensive because it's worth it." You're going to come out of this experience a whole lot smarter and if you use what you learned the second time around, then you might just meet somebody with whom you can genuinely share the rest of your life with. I did. With all respect and affection to my first wife, I traded up. We celebrated 20 years married this past August and I'll tell anyone who doesn't have something better to do that I love her even more now than then. Seriously. It blows my mind.
As for the suggestion that in the "good old days" people stuck it out for 50 years, those days may have been old, but they were not particularly good. The average man, prior to the 20th Century, lived to their late 40's and somewhere between 25-50% of births resulted in the mother dying (I've heard both figures. Don't know enough to know which is more accurate, but both are startling.) A marriage that lasted 50 years prior to the widespread use of antibiotics and the general acceptance of germ theory was a rarity. And all this ignores the limited choices for women and for whom marriage, even to a miserable perhaps abusive man, was preferable to the uncertainty outside of it.
You may or may not be right that the marriage is irreconcilable, but you'll never have a definitive answer to that question. That's not knowledge we get to have. You have to make the best judgement you can with the information and wisdom you have and make a decision. I can say with certainty, however, that divorce is not just the end of something but the beginning also. It's incredibly difficult and painful, but it does end. That's not nothing.
Best of luck and no matter how tempted you may be during the process, remain a gentleman and above petty rancor or spite.
See a marriage counselor.
My grandmother stuck through it, until (fortunately) my paternal father had a heart attack and died in his early 50's. He was an abusive SOB. Not everything was better in the "good old days"I'm sorry about this situation, but I couldn't quite understand what the problems are that lead you both to consider divorce.
I think that once people get married, they should stuck to it through thick and thin, because it's not any type of trouble that make it impossible for folks to stay together, but their lack of will to get through them whatever it takes and their lack of belief that they actually can. That's why today people divorce left and right, while in the good old times they made it through and after some 50 years of marriage in most cases thought it was worth it. My advice is - try your best to make it work, cause it's worth it.
and I would suggest a financial one, too. That is the #1 cause of marital friction.See a marriage counselor.
I'm not a marriage counselor but the 4 things that I see most common in divorce are money, infidelity, alcohol/drug abuse, and mental instability.
My parents have been together for 34 years now. There was times when I grew up that I wished they had gotten a divorce. Would it made them happy? Sure but so would going to marriage counseling. Not sure why they stuck it out but it was rough childhood for me.
Me and my wife have been married about 4 years now. In order to get married where we were at we had to attend premarital counseling. The chaplain there gave us some tools to help us with fighting. Yes you will fight, its normal, just like being intimate. After we were married we had a couple sessions with him. He helped us realize who was "right" in arguments, and helped me with some behavior modifications. I had to leave for Korea a year after we got married and was shutting her out about 2 months from my departure date. Knowing that I do that and trying harder to be closer to her when I left this last time it really made it easier for us to leave.
There is a movie that came out a few years ago called Fireproof. You might want to check it out. I also do recommend marriage counseling, its cheaper than a lawyer. Also some debt counseling, cause even if you get a divorce someone is still stuck paying for the house. We did Financial Peace university. It has some good and bad sides. Suzie Orman also has some good strategies.
I went through an ugly divorce in Maryland about 15 years ago. My advice is as follows:
- Take the high road - No matter how well you are getting along, one party will always wind up being considered the crazy, unreasonable one. Don't be that guy. It will only cause a death spiral.
- Go to marriage counseling - Be ready for some tough advice and be willing to follow through on that advice, even if you don't like it but it's not a deal breaker. I didn't take the advice to get out immediately and am still scarred by the whole ordeal.
- Go to financial counseling - You identified debt as a big stress on the marriage. Same advice as above as far as taking the advice of the people you pay to know more about this than you. If we had done the financial counseling it probably would have gotten my head straight about the divorce a lot earlier. It actually saved my second marriage.
- Be quick about it - If you do go through with the divorce, get through it as quickly as possible. Relations may be pleasant enough now, but things aren't going to improve any during the process. If things go bad, they will go very bad very quickly. Maryland required a year of legal separation before scheduling a divorce hearing. It was like one of those movie fights where the combatants have a knife in one hand and their other hands are tied together.
- Your lawyer is not your marriage counseler - Don't rack up billable hours using him as a shoulder to cry on.
- Do what you can yourselves - Keep your lawyer in the loop and get his blessing, but do as much as you can between the two of you as long as you are still on good enough terms. It costs less for you to hand her a car title to be signed than for his office to prepare documents and send it registered mail.
- It's a trap! - If things get ugly, cut off all communications with your spouse and do the minimal required communications through your attorney.
- Save your golf clubs now - If you have any hobbies or special interests, get anything related to those interests into storage now. You may wind up spending a ton of money on legal fees, get a judgement that property is returned to you, and still never see it again.
What he saidDon't make the lawyers rich.