| I can't believe how long this grew, but everything seemed important to me to set up the story. If anybody likes to read, I'd love to hear input. My wife of nearly ten years moved out and filed for divorce six weeks ago. We met on a college field trip in 1997 and she asked me out. She was 21, a sorority girl, not really devoted to her studies, and had had several previous relationships (including being previously engaged twice, I think). I was 20, incredibly shy, a nearly 4.0 student, and had never been on a date in my life. We were definitely the odd couple, and all of our mutual friends were amazed at how well matched we ended up being, as we both pulled each other away from our extremes and towards a middle ground. We graduated in 1999, and I went on to graduate school (locally) so that I could hopefully provide a better life for the person I assumed I'd be with forever. We were engaged on Christmas 2000, bought a house in August 2003, and married October 2003. I finished school in December 2002 and took an uninspiring job that promised to eventually pay well. She has always worked in animal-related fields, though that's not what she studied in school when we met. She's never made a lot of money, but that was never as important to her as being happy and fulfilled by her job. Over the years she moved from job to job (within her field) seeking more and more happiness, and eventually started her own business, but didn't have enough clients to make much money. Meanwhile, my job started paying more and more, and to accommodate her lower income, I worked more and more overtime to pay our bills. For no good reason other than that we didn't have a compelling reason to do so, when we got married we never merged our finances. The only part of our finances that was common to us both was that I made her an authorized user on my credit card, which she used for all of our groceries and household expenses and for whatever personal expenses of hers she couldn't afford to cover. I paid that bill every month, on top of the mortgage, property taxes, insurance -- all the big stuff. She paid the gas and electric bills and whatever living expenses she didn't put on my card. Once a year or so, I would ask her if she was staying on top of her personal expenses, because she had told me that she had been in consumer credit counseling in college before we met. Commonly, I would find out that the balance on her credit card had grown to a few thousand dollars, and on several occasions I paid it off for her so that she would be payment-free. I also paid off the last couple thousand on her car so that she wouldn't be burdened by it. The last time that happened was in 2009, when I paid about $3,000 to pay off her credit card. Since then, she always insisted that she didn't have any debt. Until very recently, anyway. But I'll save that for later. In late 2009 or early 2010 she informed me that she was seeing a counselor for depression and asked me to go with her. This scared me, because she had not previously given me any indications that she was unhappy or depressed about anything. I wasn't ready for counseling, and she didn't press me on it because we had a long talk and I agreed to be much more attentive to her and to work less (which seemed contradictory to me, because it was my work that was funding both of our lives, and she knew that.....). Anyway, she praised me for being so much better afterwards. We had just gotten a new puppy that she wanted badly, because her older dog was starting to show signs of health problems and she was afraid of losing her and not having another dog to help her through the grief. So things felt very happy to me in 2010 with the new puppy, and into 2011. Also, in June 2010 she started working a new job (an hour away), though not as a regular employee, but as a subcontractor und er her own business name. She worked in the office some but also drove all over the place seeing clients in their homes, with no compensation for travel time or expenses. She absolutely loved this job (and still does to this day), but the net income that it provided to the household was virtually non-existant once you factored in all of the gas and other travel-related expenses she was charging on my credit card to make it happen. But she absolutely loves the job, and my job provided just enough monthly income to allow her the freedom to do that, and I was still getting a lot of overtime, which is paid out quarterly. Those overtime checks covered home improvements, vet bills, and allowed me to pay a lot of extra on the house. So in early 2011 she was the better part of a year into the job she loves, and in April 2011 I paid off the house (a modest one, but paid off in less than 8 years, and a HUGE relief to me, since it meant I could work less overtime). We celebrated. But the very next month we had to euthanize her old dog, who she had received as a puppy the year we graduated college together. That was a sad time. And then a month later my work picked up again and I had to work a ton of overtime. In September 2011 I started experiencing extreme exhaustion -- falling asleep at work, on the couch, even while driving. It was scary. But I thought I was just working too much, so I kept going to bed earlier and earlier, but nothing helped. Meanwhile, she usually didn't get home from work until at least 7:00, and often after 9:00 on nights that she was tending to clients in their homes after they got home from work. So combine that with me going to bed early, and we didn't see a lot of each ot her during the week. On weekends we'd have dinner out together, and often have a movie night on the couch, which would always start with cuddling, but before the end of the movie I was snoring. She always laughed at me for falling asleep, and she laughed about stories of getting caught snoring at my desk at work. This went on through much of 2012, even though work slowed down a lot around the middle of 2012. But a couple months later it dawned on me that I was still exhausted, irritable when I was awake, no sex drive, etc., even though I wasn't working as much. It was around this time that my wife also mentioned that she thought she heard me stop breathing at night. So I made an appointment with my doctor for right after the holidays, and in January 2013 was diagnosed by my doctor as having probable sleep apnea. A month later I had an overnight sleep study and was diagnosed with the severest form of sleep apnea (anything over 30 "apneas" per hour is considered severe, mine was measured at 103). By the end of February I was being treated for the apnea with a BiPAP machine, was sleeping much better, working much less, eating better, exercising, and losing weight (I had gained 40 pounds during the 16 months that I was untreated). I turned my entire life around, was seeking ways to spend more time with my wife, and we started planning a 10-year anniversary vacation for the fall. Then, in the middle of this "high" of optimism, I was packing on a Friday night for a short weekend trip and I could tell she was upset by something. When I pressed her on it, she admitted that when I returned from the trip the following Monday, she wouldn't be there, because her family and friends were coming to move her in with her parents while I was gone. Needless to say, I cancelled my trip and we stayed up until 2:30 in the morning talking. I can't remember a lot of the conversation because I was an emotional wreck, but the bottom line was that she was cl aiming that she had been giving me "signs" of unhappiness for a year or more, and that while things were much better this year, it was too late, that she was no longer in love with me, and she said she did not want to go to counseling. She was very emotional too, and she made it clear that counseling was just something she couldn't put herself through emotionally, because she had taken a lot of time to come to this decision and she insisted that both her head and her heart were 100% in agreement on it. Since she moved out I've discovered things that have my head spinning, and I'm going to counseling every week to try to get through it. She still refuses counseling and when I told her that my attorney advised that we could ask the court to order counseling, she got angry and insisted that she just wants the divorce finalized as soon as possible so she can move on with her life. That's been the number one emotion since she's moved out -- anger. Though she has nothing to be angry about. She is the most stubborn person I've ever met, and she's using the anger to deflect any attempts to reach the guilt that I know she feels about how she pulled the wool over my eyes. In fact, I think she's trying to get me to show anger, because seeing me angry makes it easier for her to justify it to herself. I fell for that a couple of times before I figured out what she was doing. She knows that I've always hated my job, but endured it for 10 years so that she would have the freedom to do whatever she wanted to do, with no worries about what the job paid. She also knows that I hate debt and always asked her to share her debt with me. I now know that not only has she accumulated $13,000 in debt on the credit card I knew about, she has four OTHER credit cards that I didn't know about with who knows what on them (I'm waiting for her to disclose that information now). She also owes $15,000 on her car that she bought without telling me, not long after I paid off her previous car so that she wouldn't have a payment. Under state law, she stands to get half of all the assets, including the house that I paid for in its entirety, and I stand to get half of her debt, even though it's exclusively in her name and she intentionally hid it from me. I know she doesn't feel good about this, because it's the one topic that has made the anger disappear from her face and she's had no angry response to -- just guilt about the aftermath for me. Even though she always lik es to profess independence, and that her debt is "not unusual", and that "she's fine", I know she's going to claim poverty when it comes time to divide things and seek to take everything she can from me. I would hope that would weigh heavy on her conscience, but I'm not sure I really understand how she works and what she's capable of being comfortable with. She claims that she's been showing me "signs" for at least a year, though she won't identify any of these "signs", and she admits that she planned on just leaving while I was gone because she knew I didn't see it coming and didn't want to be there to see the impact. In reality, the last couple of years, DESPITE my lack of sleep and lack of energy to do anything, was full of nothing but positive signs from her. In October 2011 we had a great vacation at our favorite vacation spot. We were shopping for home improvements and in 2012 alone we spent over $15,000 of my overtime on home improvements PLUS nearly $4,000 for a surgery for her dog (which she hugged and kissed me for and promised to "work it off"). Investments in our future, I thought, but she wasn't planning on us having a future? I've got Valentine's and birthday cards from the last couple years with handwritten messages about how she loves me more every year, she appreciates how hard I work for her, etc. Not mor e than a month before she moved out we were talking about our next home upgrades, and we had sex at her invitation around the same time. After she moved out I brought up the sex on the phone and she said "I like sex. I would have had sex with you every night". Nice. So it didn't mean anything more to her, but she knows that it was much more of an emotional thing for me, and very affirming to me that she was in love with me. She was my first date and my first and only EVERYTHING, afterall, so it always meant something more to me than just a recreational activity. Another thing I'm thinking back on is our finances. Every once in a while, perhaps once a year, I would have a rather weak quarter of overtime, and I'd look over my credit card bill and try to figure out where we could make some cuts, because our monthly bill the last couple years was $3,150. That's more than I was bringing home every month from my regular pay, so without a good quarter of overtime I would struggle to keep up. I would identify a couple of places where I thought she was spending way more than necessary (shopping at three different grocery stores every week, including the local organic store where everything is triple the price it should be), and her response was, almost without exception, to be offended. The most recent of these occurrences was a couple months before she moved out, when I was in the middle of getting healthy and looking for ways to be able to get by, financially, with working less. I've always believed that she recognized how hard I worke d to relieve her of any of those financial burdens, and the fact that she could get angry about asking her to watch her spending is pretty discouraging to me. Has she never respected what I did for her? Does her apparent lack of respect for the value of a dollar when it comes to debt also mean that she doesn't respect the value of the dollars that I've worked so hard to provide? I've purposely NEVER asked her to even consider sacrificing career happiness just to try to get a better-paying job. In fact, the last several years I didn't even KNOW how much she made. I knew it was probably a sore subject for her, and I didn't want her to think that it mattered to me, as long as she was happy. She always did the taxes, and I just signed where she pointed to. If we owed money, she told me how much to write the check for. If we got a refund -- well, I never saw any of the refund checks. So I thought a once-a-year reminder to help me out on the expenses by being more frugal would be viewed as a very reasonable appeal. Almost without exception, every female friend who I've told the story to has been of the opinion that a wife could not just pretend everything was fine and then file for divorce unless there was somebody else. Admittedly, I had barely even given that a thought in the 16 years we were together. I trusted her implicitly, even though she came home late many nights (she had a plausible reason, seeing clients in their homes after normal business hours, then having an hour+ drive back home herself). She's denied it (sympathetically, not angrily) the few times I've asked her about it, but I really wouldn't expect her to admit it. Even though it'd almost be better for me to know, rather than have to wonder about it, I would assume that if there was somebody else her family and friends probably don't know and she wouldn't want that to get out. So I doubt I would ever get the truth out of her for that reason. But the opportunity was certainly there. And the lack of concern for the importance of marriage was apparently there. And she was dishonest about her finances. So what would have stopped her from cheating? Is that why she wants the divorce to happen immediately? So she can stop hiding the other person? For most of the past six weeks I've believed that she was refusing counseling because she felt vulnerable to being broken down and changing her mind about feelings she worked really hard to keep to herself, but maybe it has nothing to do with that and she just wants to be able to introduce "that new guy she just met" to her family sooner rather than later. If it's not clear, I have a lot of things bouncing around my head. But above all, I have the feeling of not being able to live without her, for all that she did for my own self-esteem and happiness. Starting all the way back in 1997 when she asked me out after having never even been spoken to by a woman before, to the rewarding feeling of having someone to provide for these last ten years, and the happiness that I felt by seeing her happy. I'm not ready to give in. | |||
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