Divorce

This is my experience of my divorce.

BY the time our divorce was final, we had been married 32 years, together for 35. We have 4 kids, and there was a lot of water under the bridge.

First of all, it was the very worst time to get divorced from a financial perspective. We were at the nadir of out financial well-being. My business had failed, we had a ton of debt and I was changing careers. Melissa seemed ignorant of, or unmoved to think differently about our circumstances even with this financial reality upon us. On the other hand, she was about to get her inheritance and she wanted me to have no part of that. So there might have been method to her madness.

Cosmo, our dog of 16 years, died on January 1st of 2015. He had wondered off and we found him at the pound after looking for him all night . Sam came with me and we got all the kids to say goodbye to Cosmo by facetime shares. It was very sad. Next, my mom, who was on her last legs, died on January the 4th. It was sadness on top of sadness, but she was at the end and we were all a little relieved to be fair. Oddly, following the death of my mom, Melissa was really badly behaved, especially around the family services, she would throw a tantrum about this or that, and she only reluctantly came to the memorial. She hated not being the center of attention. I was very upset by her behavior, but I just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. .

To be fair, I should have seen divorce coming. Our communication had broken down years before. She had stopped being available for our Friday evening date nights. She had started being condescending in public – putting me down in front of my friends to get a laugh.  Not responding to texts or voice mail. She was going out on the town with her girlfriends (she said), and was spending weekends away with them too (she said)… I have no idea if she was really with her girlfriends or not.  The loudest warning came one night when we were out for dinner one night and I put my hand on Melissa’s back as she went to sit down, and she said venomously “DON’T TOUCH ME!” I was taken back by the vitriol and raised an eyebrow, but pretended everything was fine. In truth, I could feel her pulling away so it was no surprise when she told me she was going to the Bahamas with her friend Jane.

Jane is piece of work. There was a lot of distance between Melissa and I by that time, and I didn’t trust Jane.  She reportedly hated her husband Alan, but was too shit scared to leave him, and at the same time she was cheering Melissa on to leave me so she “could be happy”. I felt like I was the target of a lot of hate in those days.  A cabal of angry Mercer Island-over-privileged women out to get me. It was a truly joyless time in my life.

On February 2nd  I got this email from Melissa writing from the Bahamas.

“hi honey:

ox m.”

Melissa had broken her right shoulder and went to the Bahamas with that broken shoulder which concerned me. I dropped her off at the airport and she made a big show of hugging me and kissing me goodbye. A week or two later, I picked her and Jane up at the airport and and we dropped Jane off. there was a little tension in the air. Then we went to the Roanoke for a bite to eat.

Sitting at the bar, I was on her right side and our elbows touched while we were eating. Melissa freaked out, yelled at me and moved a seat over. I lost it and told her that I was “sick of her treating me like shit”. She said “we need to leave”

We drove home in silence.

In the living room, we sat in silence a while then Melissa said “I want to separate, I am sorry I am not the woman you thought you married. I want you to move out.”

I said “Thank  you for being straight with me. That is the most honest thing you have said to me in years.” She dropped that bomb on me and went off for two weeks of “skiing with her girlfriends” again. I had no idea if she was with her girlfriends.  She said she was. I sent her an email asking her to reconsider, she didn’t respond I sent her another. She never responded to that either. When she came back she said “too little, too late”. She was decided and determined. She felt like she had the upper hand, she was feeling emboldened and she knew she had me on my heels. Empowered by her stand, she got pushy about the end of our marriage. She made it seem like I was the source of all things bad and she started to play the victim card claiming that she had PTSD and that I had been abusive throughout our relationship. This was news to me of course, but as she put it…”you do “you” and I will do “me” “.

Melissa came down with a kidney infection that she contracted under suspicious circumstances in the Bahamas, and once again I found myself nursing her with her contempt for me front and center. Reviled and unloved, I took care of the woman who would soon be my ex- wife. It was super stressful I was trying to be as gentle and as loving as I could be, but I was so conflicted. She had stated her contempt for me out loud and here I was taking care of her. Again. Just as I had when she had contracted breast cancer. Similar circumstances where I took care of her, spent my savings on her and did so  inside of her contempt for me. The feeling was very familiar. Sad, depressed and alone, I wondered what would come next.

It started with Melissa calling for a separation  – and so we went to counseling on and off over the next couple of months not making much headway. Both of us were hurt. Neither one gave any ground. By this time,  June or so, Melissa had mostly moved out so she could stay with friends…”crashing on couches” she reported.  We were still talking and although I was focused on the failure of, and closing down of my business, and although I was very distracted I had to deal with Melissa too and tried to suppress the personal stuff so I could cope. I wasn’t really dealing with it in reality. I was giving all my money to Melissa and was struggling to make ends meet. It was a nightmare.

I was treating one of my very last patients, a dentist named Jessica, who I knew as a friend, one day, when she asked me “how’s life Neil?” I said, “you really wanna know?”

She said “Yes, I really want to know”

“Well Jessica, its a bit fucked up. My dog died, my mom died, my house flooded, my wife left me, my business failed and my kids aren’t talking to me”

“Do you know what you need Neil?”

“What’s that?” I asked

“You need the Landmark Forum!”

“Oh? Whats that?”

“Well I can’t say what it is, actually, but I can tell you that what I got out of it is a great relationship with my ex husband”

“Oh? Interesting. I would love nothing more than a great relationship with my ex-wife”

I took the Landmark Forum and there I got present to how inauthentic we had been as a married couple. I told Melissa after the Forum that I was pretending to be her husband and she was pretending to be my wife. She agreed. Even so, she called the Landmark Forum “a cult” and told me to go see a therapist. “You do you and I’ll do me” I recalled her saying over and over at different times.

We had several conversations over the next couple of months and we sparred about selling the house – neither one of us wanted to. She continued to pooh-pooh the Landmark Forum and it was an uneasy truce for us at the time.

One day I came home and found Melissa’s computer open on the kitchen table. An email program I was not familiar with was open. I glanced at the computer and saw that Melissa was in communication with several male suitors.  I sat down to read her email and was blown away. It seemed that Melissa had several men that she was arranging dates with. Her hypocrisy was evident. She had claimed the moral high ground and made it seem that I was a cad and she was the aggrieved maiden. Turned out, not so much. She insisted that she had not met anyone, and she was “only chatting”.  But with rendezvous clearly arranged on multiple occasions with several individuals,  I just didn’t buy it. So I leveled with her about the woman I had been seeing for a couple years.

That did it. She freaked out. She “kicked me out” (put my stuff out on the porch), involved Mia in the drama, and all I could was sigh, and trundle off, and made an effort over the next few weeks to be respectful of her need for space. I found places to stay. I was stressed to the max. My business was folding and closing and I had to manage all of that…the people, the equipment, the records the patients. And I was doing so while I was of no fixed abode, and  with my marriage failing. My kids were mad at me. My wife wasn’t talking to me. My landlord was mad at me. My staff was traumatized. All I had was my little dog. Never was a truer statement made than “if you want a friend, get a dog”.

Things deteriorated fast at that point. We had been seeing a therapist to discuss “whats next” and we finally went to therapy again on our 30th wedding anniversary, August 5th, where we concluded that our marriage was in fact over. We had dinner together and we toasted a good run, great kids and committed to work amicably to resolve our issues peacefully and fairly.

I came home one day to find that she had taken all the stuff she identified as hers to outfit an apartment she got. The worst thing of it is that in addition to taking the pots and pans, she took ALL the kitchen knives and didn’t even leave me with a can opener. I was pissed. I had collected kitchen knives one at a time over years. Melissa fired her next salvo. It began when she put a divorce agreement in front of me soon after that dinner. She asked to meet me and she more or less tossed the paperwork onto the table saying that she had consulted an attorney and had worked on this on the quiet. Naturally it was a very one-sided, onerous, incomplete and unacceptable document that I could not even consider. I rejected it out of hand and said that we needed to go to mediation. She resisted, and at the same time, she insisted that I respond to her proposal. I stood firm It had to be mediation. My logic was simple, we didn’t have much to split up and we needed to be in communication. Melissa said she wanted 4 things out of the divorce – all the possessions she desired from the house, no debt, a pile of cash and alimony. leaving me with the stuff she didn’t want, no cash and a pile of debt as well as the loss of half my income. It was a non-starter.

I filed for divorce and got Melissa to sign the document for an uncontested divorce. That started the clock so to speak. 90 days.

We sold the house. Now if you hear Melissa tell it, I held a gun to her head and we gave the house away. In fact we had a cash offer that after debt service, left $150,000 for us to split. Truth is, she signed the PSA without duress. But, when it came time to move out of the house, Melissa, who had come by once or twice and put boxes aside of stuff she wanted, chose to “be out of town” helping a friend move, honestly, and so she left the moving out to me entirely. I put out a shout to my friends and had about 20 people show up who packed up the house in about 8 hours. I made several trips to the dump and brought two huge truck loads to goodwill. I am sure that there is stuff that should not have gotten dumped or tossed or given away, but I am not losing sleep over it. I took the rest of the stuff to storage and asked Melissa to please go through it. She failed to do so.

Although we had “agreed” to be amicable and work as adults to get to completion, what occurred instead was that once I rejected her initial proposal, Melissa pretty much stopped communicating with me. She blocked my phone number, and didn’t respond to email questions or requests for communication. It was so very very frustrating.

First it was my efforts to get us into mediation…it took something and Melissa resisted that conversation. I made an appointment and Melissa cancelled it then she eventually made a new appointment (I believe her attorney had advised her to go) and we landed in the mediation. The attorney who worked with us indicated said she was “very upset” during the process. Melissa was convinced that I was hiding money or not being straight with her about our predicament. Absurd, but that is what she believed.

Mediation went about as I expected it to go  – we went back and forth and dealt with the issues we raised, and the lawyer wrote up an “agreement” for us to review and sign. I left it with Melissa. She never responded to the mediation agreement, and in the following months I discovered that we had overlooked an important issue…college debt service.

I sent Melissa a message speaking to that issue and of course, she ignored me. Eventually, she decided that she would sign the agreement without addressing the issue of college debt. Additionally, of course, so much time had passed, that the circumstances in the mediation agreement had changed somewhat so it was largely invalid as a document by the time she signed it. Nevertheless, I was still committed to getting to agreement. Some time passed and then Melissa sent me a note saying that I would hear from her attorney, “no big deal, just a few documents to sign”…LOL really, that’s what she said.

What came next was a process of trying to negotiate with Melissa, who was relying on her attorney to give her ammo and we got nowhere. Then Melissa, through her attorney, demanded I produce reams of documents. She did not believe that I was telling her the truth.

I produced reams of documents. The bottom line was this. Melissa wanted all the money from the sale of the house. All the possessions that she desired, all the benefits of my earnings (half my income) but she wanted NO DEBT..she said that over and over and over again. She refused to address the college debt.

Melissa had her attorney produce a demand letter that essentially said I should pay her $5000 month, give her all the money from the sale of the house, leave her debt free and that I should essentially be on the hook for both her income and the debt of the family….it was a non-starter. I tried to show Melissa that she had made literally hundreds of errors in calculation, but she insisted that she was reading things correctly.

We lost contact.

I woke up one morning with an insight into how to address the outstanding issues.

My circumstances were compounded by the lack of certainty with my earnings, the large amount of debt service and the desire to fulfill on Melissa’s desires

What I came up with was a plan that she could earn up to $5000 but only after I had earned $15,000 a month in order to make all the debt service payments. She at first did not respond, and then when she did respond she lowered the amount to $9,000. I said “this is a non-started, I will see you in court”.

At that point, Melissa, who had been complaining to the kids, ratcheted up the complaint level and Josh and Quinn started calling me to harass me into signing an agreement that they said she had put forward. The kids were not at all thoughtful or kind to me. Plus I thought it was really bad form for Melissa to involve the kids in her hysterical ranting about the divorce, which she initiated and she wanted.

With days to go before our case was due up, Melissa’s attorney contacted me and offered to negotiate with me on her behalf. I agreed. This was a lot simpler. Her attorney was unemotional. We quickly had a back and forth and with the data I shared with her, she agreed to a limit of $14,000 and to split the next $10,000 I earn. That seemed fair to me on the alimony, but I was still holding the bag on the debt. I also took $90K and gave Melissa $60K.

Bottom line, on the last day. I mean the very last day before the case was up, Melissa signed the divorce documents and within a few days, we were divorced.

We were divorced but the fallout was just beginning.

There was the storage locker. Melissa had not been willing to go into the locker and when she did she took a few boxes out of it and left the rest for me to deal with.

We had spend close to $10,000 on the storage locker since day one, and she had refused to address it. I got the help of my friend Reed to literally make one dump run after another and take everything else to Goodwill.

The darkest moment for me after the divorce was Melissa refusing to work with me to split up my wine collection. She had ZERO input into the wine collection. She had no curiosity about it. She didn’t even drink red wine. But she insisted on having half of the collection and refused to take money for her half. It was a very vindictive thing to do. The way she went about it was also deeply devious.

Add to that that my kids were mad at me because of the divorce.

Nasty process. No winners.

After the fact, kids aside, not being married to Melissa doesn’t really bother me. She and I lost our affection long ago. The 5 years leading up to her asking me for a separation in 2015 and the 4 years since mean that for at least 9 years at the time of this wrinting, she has either been a royal bitch to me in public as well as in private, or she has denied my existence at all.

Truth is I am happier not being married to her and I am sure she is happier not being married to me.