'My wife is considering divorcing me and I'm going to protect myself. AITA?' UPDATED
"My wife is considering divorcing me. I am angry and upset and I am going to protect myself. AITA?"
My wife has been the breadwinner for years. I am a SAHP. That said, I will definitely come out on top if we divorce. Today she left her phone out and open, and a message came in about how she would be so happy once she loses “the dead weight”
I opened the messages and was met with so many talking about how she wanted out, that I’m not sexy anymore, and that we never have sex. I admit sex had been lacking because frankly, it’s hard to want to recently, what with having to literally pick up after her more than our two-year-old...
(I swear once the divorce happens, she will be living in a certified rats nest if her car is any indication. Rotten food, Knats everywhere, f-g ew. She's a disgusting hoarder.) But I didn’t know she had gone this far.
She has been pushing me to get a job and I had been applying, because the kids will be old enough for school, soon, and maybe a couple of years at daycare would help them get adjusted.
Turns out, she’s concerned that she may have to pay alimony on top of child support, (men can get alimony in my state, and our prenup has it included) because said she only wants visitation, (also in the messages she talked about what to tell the kids so they wouldn’t think she didn’t want them around.)
So I am no longer looking for a job. I am going to see an attorney tomorrow with screenshots of everything, and voice recordings of the voice messages, I’m not sure if she’s cheating yet, but I hope to wait it out until she does, because our prenup has some really harsh clauses about cheating.
I will not say a word and I will continue gathering evidence and waiting until she hands me the papers. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she finds out all the information I have. I wonder how bad it will sting :)
Before we provide you with OP's major lengthy update, let's take a look at some of the top responses:
excellentarm7 writes:
Good luck OP!! I am a woman that would have qualified for alimony due to him cheating but didn’t go for it bc I was too broken at the time. Huge mistake on my part!
Good for you for being smart about your approach, continue doing what you’re doing and collecting evidence in the meantime to support your case. I TRULY wish you the best, I hope you get every single penny you deserve and honestly it sounds like your children will also be better off without her too. Rooting for you!!
sweetmercy writes:
Y'all sitting in here cheering him on when you know NOTHING about the reality of the situation. There's zero evidence he's concerned with anything other than petty revenge.
That right there is enough to tell me he's a shit parent, whether or not he's stayed at home. Lots of lazy ass people will allow their spouse to do all the work while claiming to be a SAHP. He's actively choosing to refuse to look for work, meaning he will be unable to provide for his children.
He's banking on alimony, which isn't guaranteed to anyone, and is never going to be in an amount that will provide for children unless his wife is an a list celebrity or independently wealthy.
The courts are very familiar with tactics like this and they do not cast a favorable eye on the people who partake in such manipulative b.s. The odds of him getting a judge who will side with him on custody or alimony when he's refusing to look for work are pretty f-g slim. As well they should be.
Op shows no concern for the impact this is going to have on his children, emotionally or financially. No concern for what a protracted divorce will do to them. The only thing he cares about is petty one-upsmanship. It's gross, really. And here y'all are, encouraging him.
You have no idea what his wife's side of this is. I guarantee you, he's not the sweet, innocent lamb completely taken unaware that he's attempting to portray himself as. If his pompous and self congratulating comments are acting to go by, it's likely she has a lot of good reasons to want a divorce.
Sometimes dead weight really IS dead weight, and you have no evidence that she's not right to want to get out.
humblepresence writes:
Im sorry you’re going thru this, and Im sorry the trolls are out for you. You aren’t crazy. These comments have a lot of gaslighting going on. You can know you aren’t crazy by taking out genders or just switching them.
If you were the woman and SAHM, you would be lauded for being loyal to your family and in your marriage. Your partner would be called an adult child and you would be called a single parent.
People would also tell you how easy your life would be if you didnt have to take care of an adult and they would congratulate you on your foresight of screenshots and lawyer prepping.
So middle finger to the haters, kuddos to you, and hopefully you listen when they tell you to take this off. Your post is not detailed— but your answers are. Here’s what I learned from reading.
She’s the breadwinner. She’s unable to safely carry more kids. You’re a straight male. You have at least 2 kids. You both know what gender is/isnt “preferred”. She knows how nasty her habits and her car are/is. She’s actively speaking these issues with who knows how many people, do you know which of them read reddit?
I will say the same thing to you that I read people say to women in this exact same situation- Get your lawyers, get your proof, keep doing as you have been (being a SAHP), remove this until the papers are signed.
The fact that the only thing these people CAN agree on is your chances of being found out is a HUGE red flag that I am also waving.
Good luck, most of us recognize the vitriol for what it is- pain and you lashing out. It doesn’t count cuz of the anonymity and you aren’t trying to scream this to her face to make her hurt like you are hurting, says a lot about you- so good on you. Get you and your kids into therapy ASAP.
traditional7 writes:
I am frustrated with the negative comment about him being stay-at-home dad. That IS A FULL TIME JOB INCLUDING CLEANING AND COOKING.
Ensuring the kids are being taken care of. He HAS MADE SACRIFICES, so to call him a deadbeat dad is ridiculous. He clearly loves (or loved) his wife enough to make those sacrifices only to be rewarded like this?
If he didnt love his kids, he would have left long time ago (which he didnt!). He doesn't have to endure this kind of betrayal and he HAS THE RIGHT to put his mental wellness before his wife, especially if his wife is the cause of it.
First, you DONT have the FULL story, so please keep your judgement to yourself.
And now, OP's update. It has info about his history with his wife, and details about their kids:
I wish I could show you some of the messages with what she said about her kids. But I’ll save them for the divorce. And posting them on Facebook. And sending them to her parents.
And anyone else who I think deserves to know what kind of person she is. After the divorce. If you saw the messages about my 5 year old child, I wonder how you would defend that. She despises her kids. And don’t worry. She’s getting her divorce.
I do in fact keep in shape, I turn her down because she’s filthy, and if you wanna come wrangle 4 kids and constantly pick up after my hoarder of a wife then sure, and don’t worry, I am meeting a lawyer today, and my exit strategy may be changing.
And honestly, the more people say this, the more I think I’ll post the pictures I have been taking of the nasty stuff she does all over Facebook, so they can’t call me lazy there too.
She’s disgusting. I swear our house would be unsafe for the kids if I wasn’t cleaning up after her constantly. Would you like to have examples of what I mean or is that enough information? The things I have to do, would make some people gag, because of her terrible hygiene.
Maybe I would want to have sex if she wasn’t so disgusting. And I never insulted you? If anything coming out the gate with “I think OP is a narcissist” can be considered an insult, and not a good look for you.
And you’re right, I should just not care about her yelling in my face and do things anyway, thanks so much you’re so much help.
Also, I've tried to work on things in the past. I wanted to go to counseling. I wanted to improve her relationship with her kids, not have her abandon them. I wanted her to start picking up after herself, and stop being so damn gross, I didn’t want her to decide she was going to blindside me, and my kids, and kick us out.
Before I saw those messages all I knew was that my wife was distant with our kids. I always kinda had the thought there that maybe it was the gender thing, but I could never prove it of course.
She just ALWAYS talked about having one gender of kid, then none of our kids are that, she wanted to keep trying for one of her preferred gender, but her doctor had to tell her she couldn’t do so safely, that’s when the distance got more noticeable. The older two notice.
They want her love and approval so bad, and to be fair, she never negatively reacted, never screamed at them or told them to stop bothering her, but she clearly kept them at arms length.
When I read the messages parts of things clicked together, but just how much she HATES that our kids aren’t her preferred gender I didn’t know. Just vitriol about how much she didn’t know if she could stand to be in the room with them much longer. When her friend was talking about deadweight, she didn’t just mean me.
It crushed any chance of her not getting exactly what she wanted. Except I will be specifying that I want supervised visits because I want an agent there to make sure the kids are safe, (not because I think she will hit them, but because I’m not exaggerating when I say living with her, without a cleanup crew behind her sounds unlivable, and dangerous for children.).
Don’t worry, we are getting a divorce. And she will get what she wants, I will NEVER ask her to see her kids, because she made it clear she doesn’t love them. The absolutely VILE shit she said about our children would make your stomach churn.
She’s a slob, along with a terrible mother, and the reason we don’t have sex is because I have to take care of her like a child and that is a f-g boner killer, and I do have a job, as a stay at home dad...
which she asked me to do, and now that I’ve been out of the workforce for years, and I don’t have have the career she does, she wants to throw me and my kids away. Hell, if I wasn’t cleaning up behind her constantly, this house wouldn’t be fit to live in.
But for me, I don’t really believe in divorce (for myself,) and the stuff with the kids, I only ever suspected what was going on, and thought maybe she just wasn’t as good with them. It was reading the way she spoke about them, these four kids who think the fucking world of her, that absolutely broke my f-g heart.
Sure I was mad at everything else, but that was like a killer blow for me. And seeing that despite her insistence that she is also someone who sticks it out, or believes in counseling or therapy, she wasn’t even going to try to work with me.
My kids will be going into therapy ASAP, I’m actually going to be calling the office I go to, (they have children’s therapy specialists).
I’m “mad” at her for the way she discussed our children. And yes, I’m upset about the things she said to her friends where SHE was the one who wanted me to be a SAHP.
She said if I didn’t it was because I didn’t love her, now she’s telling people I’m deadweight? Yes that hurts. And yeah, she can work through the divorce because she’s had this job for a long long time and has an insane about of PTO built up because she never takes it because the kids are “too stressful”.
And you can think I’m a leech or lazy or dead weight or whatever else, but starting yesterday I’ve been taking photos of all the nasty shit she does that I have to clean up, and I will be taking those into court so they can understand that the sheer amount of work I had to do because of her nasty ass.
And because of comments like this. I think I may look into posting them on Facebook once everything’s said and done, that way people in my real life don’t treat me the way I have been here.
I didn’t want to do that, because I know it would be humiliating for her, but I’m not going to have my reputation destroyed and do nothing about it. My youngest two love her. They idolize her. Wanna be just like her when they grow up, the older two are desperate to be close to her.
They both can tell she’s at arms length, and it hurts them I can tell, but they try so hard, everything they do is to try to impress her and be close to her, and she’s normally not negatively reacting to them, but she’s neutral, like she doesn’t even care.
Readers continued to weigh in on OP's update:
jameajmea7 writes:
For all the stay at home Dads; research shows that women find their stay at home partners less attractive. Apparently there's some evolutionary reason for it.
waterearthfire writes:
I feel like I’m alone in this idea but why can no one seem to be cordial in divorcing? I feel like prenups should come with a clause of “if tactics were used to try and f-k over the other, the one committing the tactics will be penalized by…”
I understand you’re hurt. I understand you need to protect yourself, but don’t be an ass about it. I hate all these “f them over as much as possible!” comments. It’s immature honestly. The only concerns you should have is that you get what you deserve (within reason!
Trying to purposefully fuck someone over isn’t reasonable!) and protect your kids. Everything else is just you lashing out because you’re mad. And as they say “hurt people hurt people.” But you can do better and go to therapy or whatever you need to get through this with a level head.
The fact that she doesn’t want but visitation rights and seems like she wants out of everything in her life doesn’t sound like just cheating to me. It sounds like a mental breakdown or depression. I’ve battled depression my whole life and it feels exactly like that.
An overpowering feeling of needing to escape, all means necessary and no longer wanting to live the life you live, be it be changing your life drastically in the attempt to feel better or by ending your life completely.
So while cheating may also be occurring, if you have any love for her at all, I would try to check in on her mentally. She could very well be just an awful human who is cheating and wants to dump her family. I don’t know her.
But if this seems like it’s not the woman you married, I’d seriously check in with her and try couples’ counseling. She may just really need support right now before she goes off the deep end.
She sounds extremely stressed too if she’s the sole earner in the family. She might be triggered. And while I understand if cheating is a firm like crossing and no coming back kind of act, it might be also healing for you to find out the reason why if she is actually cheating.
Some people with mental health issues cheat when they normally wouldn’t if they weren’t having mental health issues.
The reasons can be varied like serotonin chasing (i suggest looking it up if you don’t know what that means), feeling like her life is uncontrollably spiraling and she needs a sense of control, or since she’s not getting se%at home...
(again, not your fault but a possible additional reason to the mental decline) the only way she feels loved at the moment is through someone loving on her physically.
None of this would be your fault unless you really haven’t been all that attentive to her needs as a partner in life. But either way, cheating—while not okay—isn’t always so “she/he’s an awful human being doing this solely to hurt you and fuck you over.” Many times it’s a result/symptom of bad mental health and/or is a sort of plea for help.
Again, you have every right to consider it a total dealbreaker. But I do ask you to be kind still. Work through the pain and feelings you have and don’t bring them to the divorce. Make sure your kids are taken care of first and foremost and try to not act in anger towards your wife.
As a kid of a messy and angry divorce at a young age I can tell you that it messed me up so much. Of course I agree with my parents divorcing.
Parents should never stay together just for the kids since it shows them untrue love and a dysfunctional example of love that they then might fall into since that’s what their role models did. But parents should NEVER be angry towards each other in front of the kids.
The kids shouldn’t be the collateral damage in your divorce. And while it’s okay to explain in the future if it’s true like “Mommy and daddy aren’t together because mommy chose to love someone else over daddy,” any anger frustration or negative emotion should be hidden from the children.
Don’t make them talk between you two. Don’t let them see the hurt and the pain and the lashing out. Because it may be nice for you but it will mess up your kids. And that is an asshole move.
Also, I believe this for ALL divorces, regardless of which person is the SAHP or cheating or whatever. It’s not an extra sympathetic to the women opinion. I truly believe women who try to f over their husbands in divorce are equally scummy people.