What are we doing wrong?

[Lucid1]

Hi all,

 

Wow. Just found this site awhile back and have been reading all over. Lots of interesting/intelligent people here and lots of advice. Some background: Dated 7 years in college, married13, we were soulmates, true love, all that, and I really believed it. I think she did too, in the beginning, anyway. We made a heck of a team too, accomplished a lot, like foster parenting and adopting a son at birth. Then, blam, one year and divorced. It started when she said she was unhappy and wanted to see a marriage counselor. Ok, so I went. The first day she told the counselor she didn’t know if she wanted to be married to me anymore. My jaw hit the floor. From that day on she began to cut out physical contact, then moved into the other bedroom. Not once did she let down this ice wall she put up, it just got thicker and thicker. She hired a lawyer, filed the papers, I capitulated on the division of property, and suddenly I’m getting handed papers by some rent a cop. No abuse, no alcohol, no money problems, no fighting, we got along fine, no cheating, no drugs, it was like she was reprogrammed and suddenly I was not in the picture. (Don’t think there was another man, doesn’t seem to be now anyway, or else she’s really keeping it hidden. Our son is 7 now and she would have to be hiding it from him too.) Her personality also changed that year, she started doing things like spending money when she wouldn’t have before and a bunch of other behaviors changed. Midlife crisis? Psycho? Who knows. The thing is she knows how hard this is on our son and how it will be long term for him yet that didn’t seem to bother her. I just don’tunderstand how she could switch off our marriage like a light switch.

 

It left me depressed like I never imagined, thinking suicidal thoughts and totally wiped out. I took off work three months and am just now beginning to decompress from the anger and grief. I have a long, long way to go.

 

So I can relate to a lot that’s on this forum.

 

I know no one can put this back together, but I have some venting to do about our society. We ended up going to three therapists, licensed marriage counselors all, and not once did any of them say, “You know, you have something valuable here; 13 years of marriage, a wonderful son, no major problems, let’s see if we can save this marriage and make it a better one.”

Not-freaking-once did that happen.

What kind of therapy is that? What kind of creep hangs out a shingle, charges for advice, then doesn’t give you any hope or guidance? (I think, and my ex even agrees, that if we’d found someone who could help us we might have saved our marriage.)

 

It’s symptomatic of the divorce problem in our society. We have a fifty percent divorce rate. That’s incredible. If we had a fifty percent failure rate in, say, our cars, we’d be screaming at the car manufacturers. If our hospitals lost fifty percent of their patients in surgery we’d be screaming. Yet for some reason we tolerate a fifty percent failure rate in the most common and most important legal and moral contract we use. WTF? I don’t know the answer, but I’m amazed to see that there is no call in our society for some kind of better odds. Why not quality education and serious counseling about marriage in our schools BEFORE marriage? Or maybe some creative alternatives, like fixed-year marriage contracts that expire unless renewed? Something has to be better than what we’re doing. Divorce puts a cost on our society that is absolutely devastating. Half of our kids come from broken homes, and what does that teach then about commitment, cooperation, love, maturity? Check this out:

 

"The U.S. Department of Healthand Human Services explains in its new and exhaustive report, Family Structure and Children's Health in the UnitedStates: Findings from the National Health Interview Survey, 2001-2007,that children living with their own married biological or adoptive mothers and fathers were generally healthier and happier, had better access to healthcare, less likely to suffer mild or severe emotional problems, did better in school, were protected from physical, emotional and sexual abuse and almost never live in poverty, compared with children in any other family form. In fact, in all the ways we know how to measure child well-being, having a married mother and father is consistently shown to be the ideal family form across all important measures."

 

And even with this information in front of us I don’t see any serious efforts to improve the divorce failure rate. Even the marriage counselors I encountered seemed worthless.

In the last year I’ve read dozens of psychology books ranging all over the place from Buddhism to the latest bestsellers trying to understand and maybe stop my divorce. There’s a LOT of good information out there that, if properly applied, might go a long ways to reducing the divorce rate. (Apparently none of our therapists did much reading.)

One of the things I learned from all that self-education is that it's not necessarily the people in the marriage that are the most important factor in success or failure. People are always going to be different, to be mis-matched, to be human. It's the way they handle the relationship between themselves that makes or breaks a marriage. That is what needs to be taught somewhere, somehow.

 

Maybe I’ll hang out a shingle myself.

 

So, that’s my rant. Thanks for the chance to do it. Good luck to us all.

 

 

"We stand today at acrossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let's hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice."

Woody Allen

Edited July 25, 2011 by Lucid1
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