The Beginning of Our Life Together
By the age of around 30, I was a reasonably successful professional, working for a small but fast growing computer software company. I had discovered that I had a talent for trouble-shooting and problem solving, and that talent was serving me well. My salary was growing steadily, I had gained a measure or respect in the professional circle I was in, and the only thing that seemed to be missing was a family.
I met Brenda (I've changed her name here) when she came to work at the company as our receptionist. Even though many co-workers used to recommend that we date each other, I can't honestly say we were instantly in love the day we met. It was more like we started off as friends, and then over time we began to flirt and slowly the relationship grew to the point where we were actively dating. Brenda was struggling along on her receptionist salary, while I had already bought a condo, so fairly early on in the relationship she moved in with me and I began to use my financial resources to help her improve her own standard of living. After we lived together for about a year, I decided to propose to her. Now at this point I have to relate one little story, just for the sake of giving you some background into the true nature or our relationship, because I think it was a very significant indicator or what was to come, even though I didn't see it for what it was at the time.
I knew Brenda loved diamonds, and would be very particular about her wedding ring, so I decided not to give her a ring when I proposed, but rather a necklace. (I know, you women are rolling your eyes right now, but hear me out before you decide I was acting stupidly...) I bought the necklace simply so that I would have something to give her as the token, knowing fully well that she would want to be involved in the picking out of her ring. So anyway, I made reservations at a very expensive, very romantic restaurant in town for Valentines Day evening. I started the evening with roses but Brenda seemed to be put out that her gift for Valentines Day wasn't something more than roses. I didn't tell her which restaurant we were going to, and so as we were driving there she was sort of complaining about not getting jewelry. I remember her saying "Dinner and flowers are nice, but women want jewelry for Valentines Day." I was starting to lose some of my enthusiasm for the night as she complained, but I tried to keep the mood positive. During dinner, between the main course and desert, I was sitting there with the small jewelry box in my pocket, still taking flak from her for letting her down in the gift department. Finally, she said "I guess I'll just never get any jewelry from you" and I responded with something like "Don't bet on it" as I offered up the jewelry box and somehow blurted out the "Will you marry me?" question. I remember that night as being a tangle of conflicting emotions. My expectations of how the proposal would go were shattered, instead of giving her the gift in a feeling of love and connectedness, I felt like I sort of threw it at her to shut her up. Looking back on things, I am totally amazed at how poor my vision was of the reality of things. As it turns out, Brenda's attitude that night would prove to be a precursor to how a great deal of our life together would be.
The 10 Years of Marriage
For 10 years, Brenda and I fooled the world (and me) into believing we had a great marriage. We moved out of the condo into a nice, reasonably sized new home. I worked hard, growing my career and my salary during the day, and working hard to create a good home by night. We traveled more than a lot of our friends, both drove nice vehicles and brought two wonderful little girls into the world together. But I have to admit to myself that there were plenty of times when I was more than a little disappointed with that state or our relationship, and I realize now that Brenda was as well..
Brenda was a bit of the "ugly duckling" as a child, plagued by crooked teeth, bad eyesight and such, and a good deal of our time together was spent fixing her up. She wanted breast implants as the final "addition" and so we got her breast implants. As her teeth got straightened, her breasts got larger, her wardrobe got to be updated and her jewelry inventory grew, she seemed to only want more and more "stuff" as she strived to be a rich, beautiful person. I remember every single jewelry purchase we made together, and I cannot remember a single one that I felt good about. I remember in fact a near temper tantrum from her in Hawaii, just outside the door of a jewelry store after I initially refused to let her buy a new necklace. I gave in, she was happy as a clam to be sporting the new necklace and I remember feeling completely sour every single time I saw her showing it off to someone.
Brenda moved through a couple of jobs during our time together, at one point winding up in a great opportunity where she headed up a small new exotic car dealership. I was thrilled to watch her use her natural charm and enthusiasm in this new job. I felt I was her biggest fan as she was interviewed several times on TV news shows and such. She seemed to be in her element, working with expensive cars and clients who had money to burn. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of the end for us.
The owner of the dealership was the first man (at least as far as I know) to attempt to get her involved in an affair. He told her that he would leave his wife for Brenda, that he had plenty of money sequestered away to take care of her and more, but she simply didn't find him manly enough and so she refused his advances. But I believe that the seeds of an idea had already been planted. Brenda found that she reveled in the sexual attention of men. Being the ugly duckling who now felt she had blossomed into the swan, I think she felt trapped in our marriage. She thrived on the attention of men, and she had some sexual adventures she wanted to live out that she somehow couldn't seem to share with me. Our sex life had struggled for years, I had a tremendous sexual appetite and Brenda always had some excuse for not being in synch with me. She used to say it was her birth control pills that were keeping her from wanting to have sex with me. At other times she blamed it on her having a low sex drive. I used to listen to common theories that women "blossom" sexually later than men, and so I hung in and waited.
But shortly after she denied the advances of the owner of the the business she worked for, she met another man that would become her first extramarital affair. He was a young millionaire who came by his money suddenly and without working for it. She had an affair with him for about six months or so, and during that time I had no idea she was cheating on me, but our sex life all but stopped. She ended that affair with me still totally unaware of it, and I only learned of that one after I discovered that she was having a second one with a man she met at the gym.
I have struggled to find the words to describe the feelings I felt when I first found out about the affairs, and to this day I don't think I do a very good job of making people understand how I felt and sometimes still feel. To live for so long, sexually frustrated, wanting to be sexually adventurous with someone, wanting to have that part of our relationship be fun, exciting, fulfilling and more, only to discover that the person you want to be with that way can only find sexual fulfillment with other men is just about as humiliating as anything I can imagine. To know that your wife left you basically so that she could go be wild and adventurous with other men is pretty much the ultimate rejection for a man. To know that the other men came into her life with little or no work, and got the sexual attention you craved for so many years leaves you feeling like there must be something desperately wrong with yourself. Sitting together in marriage counseling once, Brenda told the counselor that she would "rather have sex with her vibrator than with me." Hearing that was like having my heart and soul torn out. I felt like I must be inadequate, unattractive, boring, repulsive and more.
For me also, being removed from the role of a full-time dad was something I almost could not bear. I absolutely love being a father, and found that an enormous amount of my personal satisfaction in life came from having a family. I think that's one reason I worked so hard to do everything I could to protect our girls through (and after) the divorce. I still try very hard not to involve them in the nuts and bolts of what goes on between their mother and I. While I know I'm not perfect, and there have been things I've said once or twice that I wish I could take back, I do think I've done a pretty good job of not putting them in the middle of a fight, or making them take sides. I've managed to maintain a close relationship with them, I have them with me a great deal of the time and I think that they are dealing with things pretty well overall.
The Breakup
I moved out fairly early on after things went sour. At one point, Brenda agreed to try to work things out and we were given the name of a local marriage counselor to visit with. We went to only about two sessions together, and early on the counselor told us that he felt that he needed to see us individually for a while. He told me pretty early on that he didn't need to see me much for a while, but that Brenda need to see him regularly for a while so he could help her work out her self-esteem issues. He explained to me that her own deep seated feelings of being an ugly child resulted in her having low self-esteem, and whenever she got sexual attention from a new man, that attention made her feel good about herself.
During this time, she left the job at the dealership, and while we were fooling ourselves into believing the marriage could be saved, I took a loan out of my retirement fund and we purchased a small business that Brenda would run. I felt pretty hopeless about the marriage even as I did that, I don't think I was kidding myself into thinking Brenda had any real interest in saving the marriage and I told myself I was basically buying her a business so she would have some way to make a living after we divorced. As part of buying the business, Brenda had to go away for two weeks to a training class, and while there, she had what I would categorize as an emotional affair with another man at the class for those two weeks. I finally gave up on her and made my final decision to divorce her.
The Divorce Process
I completed the divorce myself, Utah has a pretty easy to follow web-based process, and while it took a lot of work, a lot of time and numerous trips to the courthouse, I ultimately saved a lot of money in legal fees by going this route. (I've talked to two different people who each spent upwards of $25,000 in legal fees during their divorces, divorces that didn't even have children involved. I completed the entire thing for just slightly over $100.) I am not going to say that a "do it yourself" divorce is for everyone, I do think that it's possible to dissolve a marriage without having a large legal fight. As I first decided to divorce Brenda, I looked in the phone book for a lawyer to consult, because at first I had no other ideas of how a divorce could be done other than to hire lawyers and fight it out in court. I found a female lawyer because I figured that if I had to have a lawyer, I wanted a woman who would be my ally, who would side with me and help me maintain a strong positive relationship with my children through it all. My initial consultation with her was all it took for me to decide I was going to find a different route. She listened to the basics of our troubles, but focused quickly on the assets. She basically wanted to know how much I made, how much Brenda made, how much the house was worth and such. Then, after gathering all that information, she basically gave me a rundown on how she expected it to go. Brenda would get the house, the business she was running, half my retirement and roughly half my take home pay in child support. She also predicted that I'd be paying some alimony as well and that I could expect to be able to have visitation on the order of two weekends a month with my kids. I left her office stunned and devastated.
Once I got over my initial shock, I decided that there had to be a better way to resolve things. I started doing a little research and discovered the online "do it yourself" divorce process that Utah had. I started working through the process, feeling like I at least couldn't do any worse of a job of sorting out the money issues that the lawyer had as part of her prediction. A child support figure is calculated during the process based on a prediction of the number of days per year that the children are at each home and the respective incomes of both parties. I felt that the number the system came up with was fair. I never wanted to try to absolve myself of the financial responsibility for my children, but I did want to be treated fairly. While there were times when Brenda and I disagreed on issues, for the most part we were able to hammer out most things ourselves. One issue that was a bit difficult came up as we tried to assign a value to the business. Brenda insisted that since we hadn't owned it long, there was no value in it. I was using basic business valuation tools that I found to come up with a value to assign to it, so I had a specific dollar amount that I felt it should be assigned as we divided up the assets. This one issue nearly kept us from completing the divorce without lawyers. Brenda wanted half of my retirement account and the business free and clear. I felt the business had a value roughly equal to the retirement account and so felt that I'd happily walk away completely from the business, but I'd take my 401(k) with me.
We battled back and forth on this one but were not making any progress on it, so I started looking around for a way to solve the issue without having to return to the lawyer. Brenda's materialistic personality came our in full force when it came time to discuss anything to do with the division of assets, and she was convinced that she was as responsible for our material success as I was, even though I had always made a great deal more money than she. I began to feel that if I let her, she'd help herself to everything I had worked so hard to gain, and while I didn't think I was overly materialistic, I found that I was starting to feel like I was also entitled to take some of our combined assets with me as I left. That's when I made contact with a divorce mediator. We had an initial meeting with the mediators, and after describing how the mediation process worked, they asked us for a brief rundown of the major issues that were stumbling blocks to the conclusion of the divorce. Brenda told them how she felt about the business valuation and how she felt she should get half the retirement fund. While being careful not to mediate before they were compensated for their efforts, the mediators explained the process that they would follow in order to reach a fair, unbiased position on the matter. They explained that a standard, professional business valuation would be done on the business, and the results of that valuation would be what they would use in the negotiation. I think it was at that point that Brenda finally understood that her position was wrong, and she began to back off of her position that the business should not have any value as an asset. So, we managed to sidestep what may have become a major stumbling block, simply by getting a third party to offer an explanation of how things would be done in a neutral, unbiased way. Now, one thing I also want to say is that I was careful to try to keep the argument about the business an impersonal one. I didn't attack Brenda for her position, I simply argued my position that the business should have a value. By not making it a personal attack, she wasn't placed in a position where she had to "win" in order to keep her own dignity on the issue.
In the end, I did walk away from the business, Brenda kept the family home although we agreed that I could take a portion of the equity in it, I agreed to give her a lump sum out of the retirement account and basically the big money issues were resolved. She kept all her jewelry and still wears those trophies with pride (including a diamond tennis bracelet given to her as a sort of bribe/gift by the first man who was trying to seduce her). Overall, I think we were able to minimize the selfish battles over money and property and as a result the divorce was done with no costly legal intervention.
Since The Divorce Has Been Final
In the few years that have passed since our marriage went south, Brenda and I have managed to maintain a fairly amicable relationship. We seem able to share our parenting duties with a minimum of fuss. At times, people close to me think I give too much, make it too easy for her to "pawn the kids off on me", but I disagree. I understand that taking the kids on short notice, or more of the time than I am scheduled to have them makes it easy for Brenda to date and be the single party girl she so desperately wants to be, but I think that how she lives her life should ultimately have no affect on me, and that the times I have my girls are the times I can be a positive influence in their lives. Admittedly, many times my own social life has suffered because I have allowed Brenda to be the one without the kids most Friday and Saturday nights, but I cherish the time I have with them and understand that there is plenty of "alone" time for me, and plenty of time to work on finding a relationship of my own with someone I am truly compatible with.
As a result of us owning that first business together, we have since taken the unprecedented move of becoming business partners in another venture, something that I still have mixed emotions about to this day. On the one hand, I am convinced that if I didn't help prop her up financially in this way, my children would ultimately suffer. On the other hand, I don't have much personal or professional respect for her anymore, and constantly find myself fighting the urge to just chuck the whole business in the dumpster and walk away and let her sink or swim completely on her own. If you asked for my advice, I'd have to recommend against going into business with an ex spouse.
I now realize was that it wasn't anything wrong with me that caused our breakup, it was the fact that I was with a person who didn't fully love herself in the first place and while she couldn't love herself, there was no way she could love me. Her search for self-worth took her into the arms of many different men, as she fooled herself into believing that their sexual interest in her was proof of her attractiveness. I understand now that her own feelings of inadequacy were what drove her to have affairs, to put the needs of her family second, to throw away what she had in hopes of finding something that would fill her emotional void. I think that her selfish, materialistic personality is not a good match for mine, and as I see her now, still trying to convince the world that she is a successful, rich, wonderful person, I am glad that I'm no longer the person propping her up. It certainly doesn't make any of it any easier to take, but it at least does offer me more hope for the future. I don't feel quite so much like I was somehow lacking as a man.
I've spent a lot of time trying to learn how to get through a divorce, trying to understand and process all the different emotions that are associated with the breakup of a marriage. For me personally, I still find myself working through the anger and through whatever it is I feel when I find her getting involved with yet another man. I think it's rejection I feel, over and over as she adds more and more men to her life. Maybe it's still some humiliation that comes from her taking the only thing I felt was missing in our relationship, her sexuality, and giving it willingly to other men. I do feel that the future holds good things for me though, and I'm committed to feeling totally healthy again someday!
One thing that has helped me through this time has been working on this site. I find myself counseling friends who are having rocky times in their marriages, trying to help them find ways to save them rather than telling them to line up the lawyers and just end it. I don't recommend divorce, not until you've tried everything you can do to save your marriage, and sometimes I'm haunted by worries that I ended mine without giving it every last chance. At the time, I felt that I had done all I could do, and that my wife wasn't interested in saving the marriage at all, so there is quite possibly nothing else I could have done. But there are also times when I do look back and wonder if I did do everything I could have. I'll never know for sure, which is why I'm working to help others try to avoid divorce until that certainty is reached. But I also think that once the decision is made, I want to help people with the process, help them understand how important it is to keep the children's emotional well being the absolute highest priority, and then how to get beyond the divorce and gain a renewed sense of peace and happiness in their life. That's the purpose of this site. Hopefully, I'll help someone with my efforts here.
