Hi. I have been lurking here for a while and have finally decided to add my story to the thousands of others.
I was raised by my parents and my culture to be a responsible, chivalrous family man and to be faithful to my promises. I loved my wife dearly and sacrificed my dreams to be with her and to provide for her and our children. She is the first woman I ever slept with. I am not a perfect man, nor was I a perfect husband, but I did my best.
During our marriage, she could not hold down a job, spent more money than we had, whined endlessly about how unhappy she was and how hard her life was, occasionally went into histrionic rages, lied in bed for half the day contemplating how to spend more money, and, after the children came, verbally abused me daily for not helping out enough and for not making enough money.
When she left me after 9 years, she told me she did not love me, never had, and that she had stayed with me past the first year only to have children. At my son’s second birthday party in front of my mother and I, she laughed with her family about moving out of the house and taking the kids. To settle the divorce, I had to completely re-mortgage our paid-off house to pay her out and to pay off the credit card debt she had run up. I went from having way more wealth than most Americans my age, to having about $10000. Within ten months, she spent all of her divorce settlement, which had been the remainder of our life savings. I learned that during our marriage, she had tried to seduce my best friend. I went from seeing my kids every evening, getting up with them in the morning, and taking them to school, to a standard every-other-weekend and dinner-on-Wednesdays arrangement.
After the marriage, she tried to get me back. All the way back to marriage. Four times. Once while she was engaged to another man. She tried to move the kids far away from me three different times. I managed to stop her with only a few thousand dollars paid to my lawyer, but still, the threat of hardly ever seeing my kids was the scariest thing I have ever faced. And of course, she could not hold down a job and contributed nothing financially to the raising of our children.
The love of my life tried to cheat on me with my best friend, admitted to using me for my DNA, had so little integrity that she proposed marriage to me while engaged to another man, was abusive, had no problem taking children hundreds of miles away from their father, and burned a hole in my wallet while putting nothing back in.
I have been divorced for over 10 years, and I have an OK life now. I see my kids way more than I used to, and I take them to school again. I come home and do what I want. I am in the best physical shape of my post-college life. I have saved up more wealth than I had at the time of the divorce, and I spend my money on whatever I want to (less the state-ordered amount of course). Had I never married, I would have a few hundred thousand dollars more than I do now (and that counts even if I had been a single dad through adoption or surrogacy). The best thing my wife ever did for me was leave.
The women I dated after my wife did not convince me they were any better. I stopped dating women over two years ago. I cannot imagine a woman or situation that would lead me to sacrificing anything or marrying again. For men, marriage is a horrible risk and a bad deal, both during and after. I know some couples who I believe are actually happy with each other, but in general, for a man, marriage is like playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber. I seriously doubt I will be in a relationship with a woman ever again. It is not worth the expense, the annoyance, nor the risks.
Akhilleus 2 years, 9 months ago.
