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I'm very skeptical of the it was a total surprise line too ( which some women say as well)....
Indeed! My first wife and I had serious problems for years. I begged that we try marriage counseling. I did everything I could think of doing to strengthen our marriage. Finally, after both of our kids finished high school and moved out, I told her I'd be filing for divorce in one year if she didn't make some kind of effort or explain to me why she couldn't. Nothing changed.
At about the 10 month point she wanted a new car. I suggested that she wait a couple months until after the divorce, if that's where we were headed, as she'd have plenty of her own cash at that point. I removed her name from the credit cards I used and removed my name from those she used. (None had balances.) And then I quietly filed for divorce.
A year later my new girlfriend (later wife) worked with one of my ex's drinking buddies who got all the gossip at their weekly girls night out. My ex's stories seemed to change weekly, but one of my favorites was that the divorce came as "a total shock. We had a great marriage!" A week later the story would be that I'd been cheating on her for years. (I never did, as much as I was tempted.)
No, it's not just the men who are "surprised". It's usually the men only because it's usually the women who file.
So...is a guy who is this oblivious capable of learning from this experience so that he can invest himself in a healthy relationship? Are they trainable? Or is this a major red flag? Or was it maybe just their particular combination of personalities that contributed to the disconnect in the first place and if they make a better match the second time around, the relationship might work better for them?
Well, put it to you this way: If the guy in question is one of the ex-husbands I was talking about, he's too much of a dumbass for me to want to deal with him.
However, I'm sure there must be some men who learned from their experience and realized that if a woman says something like what I mentioned in my other post, they need to listen and they need to act on what they hear. It really depends on whether they are willing to admit they messed up, which depends on how large their ego is.
So if a guy says he was blind-sided and that's it, I'd be skeptical of him.
But if he says he was blind-sided but in retrospect, he could see where the signs were, then there would be hope.
My default is to assume they are dumbasses, though, like they're just oblivious or maybe even in denial.
Unfortunately, the long and drawn out path to divorce doesn't happen to us all. My ex hand an affair, and within a 6 week time frame, we were done. The catalyst was having a child, and he 'checked out' about 3 mths after our son and he was with her when baby was 5 mths.
When I confronted him with the affair, his words were, "We're over, we've been over and you know this."
Ummm... No, I didn't... We bought a house, bought a new vehicle after that, had a baby 10 months later, and as far as I knew, we were a family making our way? WTF?
Indeed! My first wife and I had serious problems for years. I begged that we try marriage counseling. I did everything I could think of doing to strengthen our marriage. Finally, after both of our kids finished high school and moved out, I told her I'd be filing for divorce in one year if she didn't make some kind of effort or explain to me why she couldn't. Nothing changed.
At about the 10 month point she wanted a new car. I suggested that she wait a couple months until after the divorce, if that's where we were headed, as she'd have plenty of her own cash at that point. I removed her name from the credit cards I used and removed my name from those she used. (None had balances.) And then I quietly filed for divorce.
A year later my new girlfriend (later wife) worked with one of my ex's drinking buddies who got all the gossip at their weekly girls night out. My ex's stories seemed to change weekly, but one of my favorites was that the divorce came as "a total shock. We had a great marriage!" A week later the story would be that I'd been cheating on her for years. (I never did, as much as I was tempted.)
No, it's not just the men who are "surprised". It's usually the men only because it's usually the women who file.
Your ex is, IIRC, from another country. Was that a factor? In her culture, is the companionate, 'best buddies' type of marriage prevalent? Or did she maybe assume that you would not want to hear about her feelings much?
I guess you considered the childfree thing foundational to your relationship, but I wonder if to her it was more something that was acceptable, not essential. And then, one day, no longer acceptable .
But I do not know why you were not aware, or apprised, of her point of view, and the ways that it changed.
...men may tend to see marriage as an end result, something checked off the life list, and not as an ongoing co-creation. Do you think so?
My ex and I are both immigrants, originally from the same country. I came to the US decades ago, as a young child. She came here as a graduate student. Our culture, though nominally European, is very paternalistic and rife with contradictions on gender-roles. Women are expected to build their own careers and to work outside of the home, but are taught to expect little from their husbands, who in essence find themselves in very cushy positions. Marriage is regarded as a rite of passage and often an arrangement of convenience, bespeaking little (if anything) of the two partners are best-friends.
I do consider the child-free stance foundational to my outlook on life. As Nila surmises, for my ex, not having kids was simply a matter of convenience. Pregnancy was icky and rearing young children was burdensome. She regarded herself as a child (despite being only 1 year younger than me) and felt that the staid family life was stifling and boring. Then at the "critical age", everything turned by 180 degrees. She never confided in me regarding her change of heart, because she realized that non-reproduction was for me a non-negotiable creed. So she tacitly (and probably with great private trauma) withdrew from the marriage, sorting her thoughts, until she was ready to make pronouncement of the inevitable.
Anyway, my point here isn't to publicly bewail my heart-piercing situation or to seek sympathy, but to explain that divorce can indeed come suddenly and without harbingers, even amongst reasonable people. One does not have to be an obtuse fool to fail to see "the obvious". Sometimes the obvious is completely opaque.
Oh my gosh, not only is it possible, it is extremely common! It happens a lot in non-martial relationships, too. Getting blindsided by a breakup is one of the most common forms of heartbreak there is.
As someone with experience in family law, maybe I can add a little extra perspective. Remember, most divorces involve a division of property. The last thing the person contemplating divorce wants is for their spouse get wind of what they are planning and begin hiding or disposing of assets. A person planning to divorce has a strong incentives to keep their spouse in the dark until the last minute.
In the dark about the divorce but not in he dark about being unhappy.
I find a lot of people blow their partner's feelings off till it is too late.
Then they act like they were blindsided.
Op, stay away from the "sudden disappearance" people. Likely they were too self-absorbed to pay proper attention to what was going on in their relationships.
She never confided in me regarding her change of heart, because she realized that non-reproduction was for me a non-negotiable creed. So she tacitly (and probably with great private trauma) withdrew from the marriage, sorting her thoughts, until she was ready to make pronouncement of the inevitable.
I found the empathy you show here very moving.
And that (to arc back towards the OPs questions) is something I listen hard for, when a person talks about their divorce. Do they have empathy and compassion for their ex?
Heck, I listen for that when they talk about the guy who cut them off in traffic .
In many cases men are blindsided, because they take a woman's silence as, everything is alright, when really she just stopped wasting her breath talking and decided to take action. Her complaints were looked at as nagging, and when she finally stopped "nagging" and just said everything was fine, he took it to mean, oh finally she is ok, and everything is back to normal. Not noticing that she is not only silent, but she just doesn't want to be around him anymore, do things with him, or even talk to him, as long as she is doing the basics around the house, he is cool, and he thinks everything is fine. So when she hits him with divorce papers, he really is shocked. Because in his mind, her not talking about the problems anymore meant everything was ok.
What happens when the man realizes the relationship is in trouble, admits to his spouse there is trouble (one of the main issues in regards to communication between them, but he is trying to work things out within himself to better work things out between the two of them, when she then decides I've had enough (I know he is depressed but I have needs that are not being met and his depression is not my problem). I know I can't sit here and use my depression as an excuse, but my wife saw the signs and because I didn't readily acknowledge them she feels she did everything possible to save the marriage and that I just checked out. When you have suffered a bout of depression and it sends you to the hospital you never want to experience that again. Yes I knew things were spiraling out of control and I did try to do something about it but she DID NOT want to do couple's therapy and she also felt that we should be able to properly communicate after 24 years of marriage, and since I can't its due to the fact that I don't really care or are interested in changing for the better. So in the end I'm divorcing because of me and my lack of action to correct the situation. Her affair? She still won't admit to the relationship, but then says things like "I have needs. "I'm a sexual person. You saying there is an affair going on is going to become a self fulfilling prophecy, and Who I'm f**king is none of your business. My conscience is clear in that I did everything I could to save this marriage." All actual quotes from my wife.
In many cases men are blindsided, because they take a woman's silence as, everything is alright, when really she just stopped wasting her breath talking and decided to take action. Her complaints were looked at as nagging, and when she finally stopped "nagging" and just said everything was fine, he took it to mean, oh finally she is ok, and everything is back to normal. Not noticing that she is not only silent, but she just doesn't want to be around him anymore, do things with him, or even talk to him, as long as she is doing the basics around the house, he is cool, and he thinks everything is fine. So when she hits him with divorce papers, he really is shocked. Because in his mind, her not talking about the problems anymore meant everything was ok.
Wow.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
My ex and I are both immigrants, originally from the same country. I came to the US decades ago, as a young child. She came here as a graduate student. Our culture, though nominally European, is very paternalistic and rife with contradictions on gender-roles. Women are expected to build their own careers and to work outside of the home, but are taught to expect little from their husbands, who in essence find themselves in very cushy positions. Marriage is regarded as a rite of passage and often an arrangement of convenience, bespeaking little (if anything) of the two partners are best-friends.
I do consider the child-free stance foundational to my outlook on life. As Nila surmises, for my ex, not having kids was simply a matter of convenience. Pregnancy was icky and rearing young children was burdensome. She regarded herself as a child (despite being only 1 year younger than me) and felt that the staid family life was stifling and boring. Then at the "critical age", everything turned by 180 degrees. She never confided in me regarding her change of heart, because she realized that non-reproduction was for me a non-negotiable creed. So she tacitly (and probably with great private trauma) withdrew from the marriage, sorting her thoughts, until she was ready to make pronouncement of the inevitable.
Anyway, my point here isn't to publicly bewail my heart-piercing situation or to seek sympathy, but to explain that divorce can indeed come suddenly and without harbingers, even amongst reasonable people. One does not have to be an obtuse fool to fail to see "the obvious". Sometimes the obvious is completely opaque.
Are you Russian?
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It's usually the men only because it's usually the women who file.
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