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This is stupid. You're just modeling poor relationship skills to your children. You're making your kids uncomfortable watching you. You don't even have to be in obvious fights. Kids aren't nearly as dumb as you think they are. Even if you are simply chilly toward each other, or put on a fake happy smile, they can tell things aren't right.
Don't you think your kids would be better off in the long run if you just go ahead and get divorced, and find happier relationships?
I think divorced parents should try to live reasonably close to each other so the kids can easily see either parent. You shouldn't bad mouth each other and use your kids as surrogates in your disputes. You should try to cooperate in raising the kids even if you are no longer together. But staying in a bad relationship "for the sake of the kids" does no one any favors.
You do realize that plenty of divorces are amicable or at least not extremely combative? There's a reason why collaborative divorce is taking off in popularity.
I also wonder if she got married knowing she wanted an open marriage and he didn't?
Things would be so much better if people communicated with each other and didn't put themselves in situations they know they won't like.
I'm not implying that's what this woman did - we have almost no info about that - I'm just saying it in general.
Jesus Christ. Print a bit more of her update, please. You know, the part where she doesn't only go on about the fucking, and talks on and on about how her (hopefully older than toddler) kids successfully handled the breakup of their family. I mean, fuck.
Sounds like your parents were the sucky pieces of shits (and the people they married), not necessarily the divorce. Would they still have been pieces of shits that would've fucked you up minus the divorce? Quiet possibly.
My parents ripped each other to shreds when I was 5&6. Then they promised they'd never get divorced, took their rage and fighting underground, and when I was 9 announced they were sorry, but getting divorced after all. Dad left, I was 'the man of the house', and buh-bye security, stability and childhood.
Parents ought to suck it up for the kids, figure out their shit in whatever way they can and remember they are parents. Dan and others suggesting divorce is best probably had parents who didn't, in my experience.
My parents divorced, and I was massively better off. My father was an asshole and both my mother and I were better off with a minimal presence of him in our lives. In fact, I credit *my* fuckedupness with my mother dying when I was 13 and my having to move in with my asshole father and his lunatic wife.
saying that someone in a loving relationship should simply forgive, without any expectations for what that forgiveness means is really unfair (I think).
Hindsight and logic tells me my folks were incompatible and never would have made it anyway. But the damage was done in childhood, and logic and rational thought doesn't undo that damage. Thousands of $'s in shrinks later, and I'll still never get back the self-confidence and security I had with Dad in the house and an intact family.
PLUS- children of divorce are far more likely to divorce themselves, because the model *they* were shown was- "If the going gets rough, get divorced", not "work it out, despite the difficulty".
Kids vary. Parents vary. Siblings can take a divorce easily for one and devastatingly for another. There likely will not be an optimum time when your kids won't be hurt, or will embrace the idea of your personal fulfillment over their stability.
I do believe that people with kids have a requirement to try and work out their mess rather than leave to start over. (Married people take on this obligation when they say vows--assuming there was ever a good time to hold on to through the inevitable bad--and it's amplified by children, since the state of your marriage actually does impact the small people living in it.) But you can't be in a marriage by yourself for years on end: WOS tried for four years while her husband refused to forgive her, and I do agree with Dan there--if you can't ever forgive your spouse, then it isn't going to work.
Staying in a miserable marriage for the sake of your kids doesn't sound healthy to me, though I'm sure plenty of people continue to be miserable, make bad choices, and fuck up their kids' lives well after a divorce. Divorce itself isn't the problem in those scenarios. Some people just shouldn't have kids.
I'm reminded of a letter, can't remember where, from a woman whose husband had cheated on her. And he'd broken off the affair and they'd been to counseling and he didn't want a divorce, but after months of trying she found that she couldn't trust him. It was destroyed, and she couldn't will it back into being. I don't know whether his attempts to rebuild that trust were extensive or laughable, and in a way it didn't matter: she had realized over the counseling that there was no magic "If he does this one thing then I can trust him again" button. Sometimes in a long and intimate trusting relationship (romantic or not) something devastating happens and you can't forgive, you can't trust again, and in that case the relationship is forever changed.
But the thing is that the people who do that would've been shitty parents even if they stayed married. Having a ring on a finger doesn't make someone a decent human being. Living in the same house doesn't mean the relationship is healthy.
Kids care a lot more about stability than they do about any parent's personal sense of fulfillment. There's a special dope slap reserved for parents who express surprise that their kid is acting all stressed even though mom and pop are going to be happier doing their own thing.
But then, what are kids compared to the SEX OF THE CENTURY?
Oh yeah, also a slut.
Hopefully dad got the kids.
"Open" "Marriages" are HELL on kids.......
But then there's the whole realm of not being in love any more, or of wanting something different, and that's much harder: To say to a kid "I'm choosing my happiness over your stability." Sometimes that's the right choice, but it should never be an easy one, and you should never expect your kid to say "That's okay mom/pop, so long as you're happy I don't really care what happens to the foundations of my life."
That's also where you get into what someone upthread mentions: higher chance of divorce for those kids when they grow up, because they didn't have a model of making things work when it got tough.
She comes off as cavalier (most people who initiate the opening and then step out of bounds tend to run that risk) and he'd rather be right than kind. The only consolation for their children in her sudden ascension into glory is that she's probably paying much less attention to them.
My boyfriend's parents stayed together for the kids until they were off to college. It totally messed with their heads, like everything had been a lie all along.
@33 says she's the letter writer. Here's her post:
Are there any neuroscience commenters here who might also know a little? All that I know is that my therapist felt it was a really bad sign that i had trauma at that specific age.
You must really hate kids on top of their parents to trap them as well in a loveless, hateful marriage.
@2,36,etc: You had way bigger problems than the divorce, there, sonny jim. Too many variables which are all known to negatively impact teens for you to accurately claim IT WAS THE DIVORCE THAT FUCKED ME UP!
Lol, you're confusing your evo-psych drek with actual science.
Truly it's brilliant! I mean the neuroscience and psychology PhDs and grad students I know couldn't do it but psh they've just had years and years of training, they're not an INTERNET COMMENTER!
Asshole parents (divorced or together) raise an asshole kid. Thoughtful parents (divorced or together) raising kids that came out okay. Maybe the divorce isn't so causative as it is a stage on which the parents' inner nature is laid bare.
My parents gave us the "we are totally incompatible, we're constantly screaming at each other, but we'll stay together until we die no matter what, no matter how much our children plead with us to get a divorce, because that's what we said we'd do when we got married, and a divorce in a Catholic community would just make us look so bad" model.
So they stayed together till the end, having learned to stand each other, but it was never a loving relationship (at least not after my birth - I'm the youngest).
And you know what ? None of their children stayed married for the sake of children/appearances/whatever. None of us learned from them to "work it out despite the difficulties", because we all knew from our childhood that there's no sense in flogging a dead horse, since we all suffered from our parents staying together. (Who do you take your anger out on when you can't take it out on the one who causes it? On the children you have with that person. See also comment 21: " Living in the same house doesn't mean the relationship is healthy".)
We didn't learn and copy their model; quite the contrary, we understood from really early on in life that it was the wrong thing to do. It didn't stop us from trying to save our relationships, but it made us realize that you can only do so much. And that, in my opinion, is a valuable life-skill, even if my parents never realized that this is what they were teaching us.
Generally speaking, I don't think children are so stupid that they just "learn the model" they are being shown. They can also learn from their parents' mistakes. Maybe the fact that more children of divorce do divorce themselves merely indicates that they learned how to identify an intolerable situation and leave when the time is right.
@ 33 - You were right to leave. Four years of hell for a condom!?! If your ex-husband also had flings during those two years, it would be interesting to ask his partners if HE ever used a condom.
"It's wrong to tell people to divorce when they still have kids, divorces are horrible shredding experiences on kids. My parents got divorced and it was horrible!"
Putting aside the idea your anecdotal evidence - why do you assume that your experience with divorcing parents would have somehow been better if they'd stayed together? Maybe it would have, but also maybe it wouldn't have. You can't compare your parents shitty divorce and inability to make a divorce not bad for their kids to other parents that stay together provide a good family for their kids. You've got to compare it to the hypothetical, probably awful experience you WOULD have had if your parents stayed.
And guess what, you don't know. But there's a damn good chance it woulda fucking sucked.
So, I taught my kids that loving someone means taking shit, I guess. I taught them that life is unstable and sometimes scary, that you never know when things are suddenly going to go sideways.
But then, just when things were bad enough that I felt I really did have to leave him, I found alanon and while he kept drinking, I had better ways to deal with the chaos. So I guess I taught them, then, that we can choose our approach to things, that our serenity and happiness are within our own control. We had three years of peace in the home, even with him drinking.
And then he sobered up, started to find some peace of his own. So then what we taught them was that redemption is possible, that people can heal, can forgive, can get better. That people can choose a better path, that it takes courage and hard work but it can be done.
I have no idea if my kids would have been better off if I'd have left. Their dad was always good to them, even in the worst days - loving and supportive though often absent - but they experienced a lot that they shouldn't have had to. If I'd have left, though, it would not have been a bed of roses, either - I have no way of knowing what would have happened, but it's unlikely divorce would have left them untouched and unscarred.
Parents just have to keep in mind that their actions will affect not just themselves, and then do the best they can with what they've got - what else?
I'm trying to err on Delirian's side with respect for empathy. While its obvious that it was the compounding of different variables (I mean, we got kids committing SUICIDE because they were bullied for being/appearing to be gay so its not like we already don't know that fucks up kids!), we must be assured that this individual assesses their experiences in a particularly biased fashion. An individual will, most likely, tie their emotional trauma to the most simplistic or acceptable answer that individual can find. So... Just don't be too mean, I guess...
Lastly, condolences to Out.
I understand why people think a divorce might be better for the children when the parents hate each other. I get this, I read the arguments. But as I said, I don't really buy it. How are you going to get parents who hate each other to have an amicable divorce that cares for the kids? How do you prevent it from exploding and destroying everything around it? It isn't simple, and when we talk about divorce we need to talk about all the ugly consequences.
And as far as posters being mean, well, this is Slog. Commenters like @Helix and @undead_ayn_rand get off on it. There is nothing that can be said to them, so I don't.
And I'm asking you, how are you going to prevent all this without a divorce? Kids get bullied all the time without ever moving, or have to move without their parents divorcing. Living in a home with parents who hate each other is often like having everything explode over and over again. Since you are interested in the science behind it, fighting might not seem that scary to you now, but to a small child it is much scarier because the child doesn't know that it's just fighting. For all they know, this fighting might end in everyone's death.
" Clearly, in my case there were multiple factors. But the trigger that allowed the perfect storm to occur was the divorce."
Uh-huh. This is the same logic that my parents used to explain how having children destroyed their lives. Or how me doing something completely unrelated led to an insane fight several days later. The point is, it is extremely stupid and immature to attribute anything at all to one trigger. Life is difficult, it's not a movie where something tiny happens and leads to a "perfect storm".
Bye.
I mean, it's all well and good that shiny new guy is all shiny and new a year in, while small stresses accumulated during twenty years with the ex. (There's nothing special about the condom thing. It was just one specific thing he could point to to justify his feelings about other issues.) I do know that a relationship doesn't sour like this based on just one side of things, and that accumulated stresses can easily sour things with Mr. Sexgod too if she doesn't figure our what her half of the problem was.
@2 i am sorry you had to endure things the way you had, but i am not finding any of your arguments compelling, a divorce in a loveless and abusive marriage is always preferable and better than to stay-in in that morbid relationship. With or without divorce, the damage you sustained was already there and you were going to suffer. Do not extrapolate on an exogenous factor (the divorce), whereas the endogenous factor remained unanswered for the sake of playing the victim.
Personally, I find fucking without a condom quite a transgression. And knowing someone for years is not an adequate placeholder for "he's been tested negative for STIs the day before".
That notwithstanding: if your husband can't forgive you a transgression like that for 4 years, you are definitely better off without him.
But what makes me quite unsympathetic to you, is how the well-being of your children seems to range quite low on your importance scale. And why did you leave your husband only when you had a new partner in your sights?
I think probably because she's human. People who write to Dan don't have to meet a gold standard for wisdom, strength and honour to qualify for advice. #33 has been honest about what happened and doesn't appear to be asking for our sympathy.
I, too, would be horrified if my partner fucked someone else without a condom. I'd see it as a betrayal on a number of levels. But Dan is still right - the forgiveness has to happen somehow or the marriage is over. The worse the betrayal, the more true that is.
It also sounds like the husband wasn't the one wanting an open marriage, so perhaps this couple shouldn't have gone for it. That raises another question about how much one should do to try and save one's marriage. Is it always pointless to step outside your comfort zone?
This makes total sense from a particular point of view. It's not about being easier - it's that walking through fire or taking a bullet makes you a martyr, makes you right, and makes you superior. Forgiving someone means letting go of your status as a victim and giving up that power over them.
Which doesn't mean the other person isn't also a callous asshole as well. Sadly it's perfectly easy for both parties to be wrong in this kinda situation.
First, most of the time when couples fight, the things they actually say are placeholders for actual grievances. It's just that they don't feel valid bringing up their real issues, so they inflate other grievances that they feel like they can hold the moral high ground on.
(E.G: If WOS's ex signed off on opening the marriage, he may not feel he has a moral leg to stand on if he's upset about how that turned out. The condom thing is a place where she's clearly in the wrong, so he'll use that rather than talk about what's really bothering him. Unfortunately, since nobody's dealing with the real issues, nothing gets done about them.)
Second, that it's very possible that she and the new guy haven't had any major fights in the year that they've been together. It's easy to be the happy couple when you've never had a serious fight. It's how you work things out after a rough patch that shows if you'll make it as a couple.
His (her?) comments drove me to think about my fucked up family too much. Do I get to play the victim card too???
The husband never wanted the open marriage, but after 14 years of sex that never lasted longer than 4 seconds, I was starting to forget what REAL sex actually felt like. I'm sorry if that makes me a selfish, horrible mom.
I think both side of this debate (pro and con divorce) need to acknowledge that in a bad situation, there often isn't really an unambiguously right thing to do. I know that my life sucked because my dad didn't leave my mom, and I know that my older sister may have been worse off if he had left, or it might not have, and my life might have sucked either way. In the end, the problem was not the divorce or lack thereof. I almost never is.
I think @44 has it with "Maybe the divorce isn't so causative as it is a stage on which the parents' inner nature is laid bare." But the nastiest they could be was not exposed to their children while they were married, only with the new strains of the divorce. Not every unhappy marriage is accompanied by endless screaming matches that happily end with separation: some of them are pretty functional for the children caught between resentful adults who with divorce become warring or absent adults.
Husband wasn't not forgiving over the condom.
He was not forgiving the fact that his Piece of Shit Slut Spouse cheated, but worse, rubbed his nose in it by making him agree to it before hand.
"Open" is CHEATING.
And "open"; like all Adultery, and all other flavors of extra-marital sex; IS HELL ON KIDS.
Tacking cute names on shitty abusive behavior doesn't mitigate the damage it does to the kids.
"monogamish" = CHILD ABUSE
Sure, it's statistic. But there's a limit to how much special snowflakeness should be invoked to explain "Sure X is hard on most kids, but in my kid it's just going to be a valuable character-building experience." A la A Boy Named Sue, whose father was going to abandon him in infancy, but first made sure to give him a character-building name.
I am curious about something, though. How old were you when your parent divorced? About 10 or 11? I read somewhere that that was the age children had the worst time dealing with divorce. I had a friend when I was that age whose parents divorced and that kid was never really right again - he was always angry and edgy after that, was later into drugs, dropped out of school even though he was bright and upper middle class, used to get into fights all the time. I haven't seen him since 1991 and I now presume he's dead (I'm FB friends with his sister but she never mentions him ever - I'm kinda afraid to ask.)
Ask Amy today is from the new wife of a cheating spouse. Even though they're soul mates, even though he was miserable in his marriage when they started their affair, even though he waited to divorce his wife until the youngest left for college, his wife still made difficulties over the divorce! His children wouldn't forgive him for cheating on and hurting their mother! This was very surprising to dad and younger piece on the side.
I am the child of a particularly volatile and unpleasant marriage...one that lasted waaay to long. I was incredibly grateful they finally divorced. Was having divorce "traumatic"? Not any more so than living in an unhappy and entirely dysfunctional home - one where my parents modelled a notion of love and marriage that led me to a series of terrible relationship choices.
And, no, the divorce didn't entirely end the dysfunction of my more broken parent. It was a relief for those of us who escaped being trapped with her 24/7, but her own misery followed her, and my youngest sibling, who was more or less stuck with her (and misused as an emotional crutch).
There's a bunch of research out there about how bad divorce is, and the folks try to provide lots of longitudinal outcomes demonstrating the long term bad effects, all supposedly tied exclusively to divorce. The trouble is: you can't tease out those effects well from divorce versus just coming from a busted, toxic relationship. The only studies which find "staying together for the kids" is better are those in low-conflict (ie, not toxic, not fighting and not emotionally abusive) relationships.
I very much agree with that reading of the data. And some people stay in toxic marriages because the other parent would likely get custody and they feel they can ameliorate the damage more by staying until the kids are adults, a la 63. A situation where there is no good answer and trying to find the least-bad solution is the best you can do without time travel.
Anecdotally, I do encounter a surprising number of divorcing parents from those unhappy-but-not-toxic marriages, surprised that their kids are not high-fiving them over how awesome mom/dad's new potential for emotional fulfillment is.
Best comment here. Each situation is nuanced and individual.
@WOS - thanks for the follow-ups. I was definitely getting the vibe husband had agreed to open marriage, but kind of under duress - like he didn't really like it. I wonder if you'll answer another speculation/guess on my part? Does "homeschool" == 'religiousity'?
Somehow I don't think the condom issue has squat to do with STIs and everything to do with 'another man impregnated my wife (property)' with the added insult of 'because I can't satisfy her' Straight out of some guy's cuck fantasies, but obviously not some.
Glad you're doing well; hopefully your ex handles co-parenting well (maturely) with you.
My point was that the statistics do not necessarily reveal the truth behind them, which can be, as I said (using my family as an example, not because we are special snowflakes, but precisely because we aren't), that the children of divorce may tend to get a divorce themselves more than the average population, but that's not necessarily because they "learned the divorce model". To me, it seems obvious that they learned to detect and avoid ugly situations which are never going to get better. This is a good thing.
Detecting them before they marry, and before they have kids together, would be the optimal outcome here. And sometimes situations do get better: you work on them together, or you stick it out and the external stressor (in sickness, in poverty, etc) gradually transforms and you make it back to good times. So no, I don't see it as them learning and employing a valuable lesson. I see it as broken families, and all the pain that often entails, following broken families.
As for what I meant re statistics, I fully admit it's usually good to avoid treating individuals as though they will be the sum of the statistical rules that apply to them: girls should not universally be assumed to learn one way and boys another just because the peaks on bell graphs are a little offset. At the same time, if you know something is going to statistically work against your kid--say you're a teenager expecting a baby you intend to keep--it's a good idea to be very clear on everything that might statistically work FOR your kid and try to do well on all the ones that are within your power to affect. Which is why Dan tends to come down on trying like hell to make your marriage work out for the sake of the kids, because they are usually negatively impacted by divorce.
Some people are just not made to be parents. Unfortunately, even when they do realize it, if everyone around them keeps repeating that "it's different when the kids are your own", the social pressure is strong and they end up having kids, only to discover that they were right: they shouldn't have had them. But it's too late, they went and ruined the life of everyone involved; theirs, their spouse's and their children. (And some people are just not meant for the married life, as well, and you can't necessarily know that until you do get married.)
That's why they invented divorce. When life is hell and you can't fix it, it's better to put an end to the unbearable situation.
And yes, the kids may be the ones who are the most affected by a divorce. But I look around me and I see mostly (not all) balanced children of divorce. Rather than "staying together for the sake of the children", the parents should have enough maturity to try and be better at divorce than they were at married life... for the sake of the children.
The comments on that article all congratulate Dan for putting that deceitful woman in her place. Interesting that when it's the woman who wanted an open relationship and not the man, it's because she's a cheating harlot who doesn't care about her children.
Interesting that when it's the woman who wanted an open relationship and not the man, and--unlike the man in the letter you reference--did not disclose that in advance, and also did not seem the least bit concerned about her children, it's because she's a cheating harlot who doesn't care about her children.
She also didn't just violate the terms of their agreement. If she had sex with her husband after this encounter and didn't tell him about the condoles sex, she also vitiated his consent. Not the the level of rape or sexual assault, but it was still a violation of his ability to consent to an ongoing sexual relationship with her.
That's much, much harder for most men to forgive than an emotional affair or a one night stand where a condom was used.
He may have been rude to her or bullied her, but she played Russian Roulette with his body and didn't care about his consent in having sex with her.
She tries to excuse her actions by implying he drove her to it because of being lousy in bed. Whatever he may have done to make her want to seek other lovers, it does not in any way, shape or form justify her risking his health.
Her responses to this show me that she hasn't learned anything from this.
Yes, husband may have been an a#hole unable to forgive her. But it's hard to forgive someone and move on if they are so completely caviler about the offense.
All these years later, outside of the heat of the moment, she still doesn't really get it. What do you think she was like to the husband in the immediate aftermath?
The husband isn't the one who doomed the relationship. Seems like she did a bang up job of pushing it's corpse into the icy sea and then complaining that he doesn't want to jump in and rescue it AND he's at fault for driving her to kill it.
That said, the general tone of both the letter and the followup put me off. I get the impression that the letter writer was the one who basically forced an open relationship on a spouse who really didn't want it in the first place, justifying it with promises that everything would be fine and she would take good and sensitive care of him; that she then proceeded to break the very rule that made the situation at least theoretically safe and acceptable to her husband; and that the "punishment" she refers to is the slamming shut of the relationship (and keeping it closed) itself.
There is a substantial, material difference between "He can't forgive you/he is punishing you" and "No, that rule was important enough that breaking it means you don't get to simply apologize and get the privilege back."
Personally, I want to know what the rule was that she broke, and exactly what he was doing to "punish" her. If his accepting an open relationship was contingent on her keeping him safe in some fashion, and she chose to do something that broke his feeling of safety, he is not in the wrong for saying, "No, we tried it your way based on your assurances that this would never happen. Well, it happened -- which is to say, you CHOSE to do it, knowing perfectly well what that meant to me. The consequence is that I'm not willing to believe you on that score again."
And while I agree that the two of them probably should not be together, due to fundamental incompatibility, I have doubts that the guy is actually the abusive bastard she paints.
But it can be good for others.
My parents divorced when I was 10. I remember my mother telling me and I remember exactly what went through my head. I thought to myself that I needed to act upset because I knew that was what everyone expected. I knew I couldn't express how relieved and happy I was.
At 10 I hated coming home. I dreaded my father getting home from work. He wasn't mean to us kids at all, but when he walked through the door the entire mood of the house turned dark. About once a week my parents would end up in a screaming match with each other, and I remember hiding in my room covering my ears so I would hear what they were shouting at each other.
Life was one giant ball of ongoing tension and despair until they split up. It wasn't the most amicable divorce, but it wasn't the most contentious either. There were some very hard times afterwards, but even at the worst it was better than before. And I feel the adversity of that time made me a stronger and more independent person.
I had several friends who's parents divorced as well over the years. Most of them turned out fine as well.
So my heart goes out to those who did not fare well when their parents divorced. But they don't represent all of us. For some of is it was an improved situation.
Nobody's perfect. Everybody fucks up from time to time, as Dan pointed out in his original response to you. Doesn't make you horrible or selfish, just makes you a normal human being like all of us.
I think Dan was correct in his response. It's just unfortunate that it all happened at all.
Also, the LW stated in the follow up "If the husband knew he could never forgive me, why did he choose to be a dick for years rather than leave me?"
Well, perhaps he wanted to and tried to and honestly thought he could eventually forgive, but just ultimately couldn't get there. Also, perhaps she didn't work hard enough on her end to try to earn his trust back.
No dramatic swooning required.
*** *** ***
After 14 years of bad sex WOS must certainly have been punishing her husband. I’m imagining the home as being a hotbed of mutual passive-aggression. The shiny new relationship with amazing sex is not just about orgasms, it’s also about being heard and valued.
I’ve been in relationships where I was becoming the partner I didn’t want to be, turning on the tears as a routine component of discussion. (This was not a behaviour I had ever seen modelled except by children of parents with poor skills and I absolutely did *not* admire myself for being clever and manipulative. I hated myself for participating in a relationship dynamic where tears and tantrums were necessary to get a partner’s attention.) Being in a relationship where saying “stop that, it hurts” results in the other person stopping it and not in an argument over whether you actually like it *will make you a better person.*
If I can put my energies into creative solutions, I will be a better person than if I have to put them into emotional manipulation or suppressing my wants or siphoning them off into bitterness.
It doesn’t sound like WOS and her ex were a good match generally. It sounds as though the kids have the opportunity to see good communication being modelled. It’s done. If we’re going to yell at WOS to get in her time machine and go back and not get divorced, we might as well be yelling at her to trial various possible outcomes so that she can learn before marriage that the sex will be unbearable and not marry the father of her children. (Actually I see various commenters yelling at her for exactly that. Interesting. Do you guys actually have time machines for rent?)
One way to manage without getting divorced might have been to completely take sex out of the equation. WOS could have announced that no, she wasn’t going to stop seeing other lovers and no, she was never going to have sex with her husband again so he should get his head around that. But with the sole-breadwinner family model they were using that would have been really hard on her husband. “I see — I get to pay the bills and you get to have a close relationship with the kids, and I don’t even get sex out of the deal. Why do I put up with this exactly?”
Something was going to change and the kids were not going to remain homeschooled even if the parents stayed together.
I've been with my husband for almost 20 years. About six years ago he agreed to open up our marriage. After a couple of years he slammed the door shut again after I broke a rule. For the past four years he has been punishing me and has not been able to let it go.
Timeline: ~14 years married, monogamous. The couple decided together to open their marriage. Two years of an open marriage, followed by the husband reneging on his agreement. The wife plays along for four years, all the while being punished for breaking a rule in their newly monogamous relationship.
Oh, and by the way, it's legal to dissolve a marriage. Even for a woman! I know, it's so hard to comprehend that women want to end their marriages and are legally allowed to do so even though we all know that men should get to be sexually satisfied and be vindictive dicks (and rape their spouses because how can it be rape if it's within a marriage?! lolololol) Not to mention all the concern over "did the husband get to have a girlfriend?!?!"
I'm no conservative, but put too much stress, disruption, and anxiety into a child's life, too early on, and it WILL fuck up that kid for life--make him or her permanently plagued with worry.
I'm really disturbed by the letter writer. In a family, good bedroom fun is equally important to happy kids, not more.
Which is not to say it is the divorce per se--very likely a whole lot of things that go with a) marriage and b) long-lasting marriage correlate to giving children a good start in life. For example, people with a higher education are more likely to stay married, and successfully getting through higher education is a pretty clear correlate to the sort of "bear down through this short-term difficulty for a payoff in the future" behavior that correlates to success even if you never go to college. And to getting through the inevitable "for worse, in sickness, for poorer" times that will at some point crop up in a marriage.
Anecdatum: If you survey all the kids in some group at a top selective university (class, club, etc), most will have parents who are still together. At a much higher rate than the overall population.
The best thing parents can do for their children is love each other.
I can't help but suspect that LW's ongoing punishment and husband's inability to 'let it go' amounted to her no longer being off the chain to fuck other guys, and being told 'no' when she repeatedly brought it up, with the bareback incident given as the reason. Am I completely off base, LW?
In any case, congratulations, LW. You did yourself (and your ex-husband) a huge favor. Not sure about the kids, but probably them, too. That is a sincere. There is pretty much no such thing as a tragic divorce. Good marriages do not end in divorce. And divorce (and what leads up to it), even at its best, can be ugly and unflattering for everyone involved. It tends not bring out the best in people.
I never quite understand the letters from people who explain that a huge problem present when they tied the knot did not suddenly vanish into thin air.
When you don't follow the rules agreed upon for an open relationship, you can expect to see your pass to play revoked, especially if the rules were in place to reassure a partner who didn't want the relationship to be open in the first place. And I think most of us would agree that "no barebacking" is a pretty serious rule to break. It was a shitty thing to do, and I can't help but wonder if she did it on purpose to try to push things to some sort of crisis.