SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

been waiting for "perfect" time to leave wh. i do not want to be married to him anymore.

therapist says therer is no perfect time. have i been waiting for a perfect time and just need to go? i feel like it would hurt too much to leave now and i plan tondo more therapy to get over this … but am i just procrastinating?

Hi Gotta -

No, there's really no perfect time to leave. If you don't want to be married to him any more, I suggest just ripping the band-aid off.

It's going to hurt, no matter what. You'll need to grieve several times more. Leaving and getting used to not having him around, no longer going to be where you thought you'd be at this stage, when you file for D, when the D is final... There are a lot of emotions to unpack and process.

But it's like removing cancer or a growth from your life. Sometimes the pain of what you're going through is the only way to make it to the other side of life.

If you're done, you're done. You can still work on your exit plan.

Gotta, I feel about the same. What helped me was having a family lawyer draw up a Property Settlement Agreement (for an uncontested D) building upon the terms I was thinking of, and then I studied it for a month or so. Having that legal instrument all ready to "file" helped me prepare myself for the big D if I were to present that document to my WH - as I was seriously considering doing after D-Day 2.

I ended up asking the lawyer to change it to a Post Nuptial Agreement, including only the aspects I felt most anxiety about, and deleting some of the standard "separation" clauses the lawyer had included, since my WH was not wanting me to D him and frankly, I was scared to finalize a Divorce, myself. Not a great solution but for me it seemed the lesser of 2 evils.

You may want to give yourself a trial run on the D option by doing a PSA with a lawyer who can help you craft a "Draft" Separation Agreement, which need never be filed. Your fWH need not even know you do this...it's just a sanity check, to get your head straight.

You have been unhappy for years.

His family is a toxic nightmare and openly shun you and your kids.

He cheated.

Any one of those reasons is enough to end the marriage. All three together is more than enough to have ended it yesterday IMO.

Why do you think you need to live a life that is filled with unhappiness and pain. You can live your best life w/out guilt and regret. You tried your best. The marriage failed but not because you didn’t out forth your best effort. It failed because your husband didn’t do what was needed to happily reconcile.

You deserve better. Maybe someone needs to tell you that putting yourself and your needs first is not a bad thing. You can and should D with very little guilt. Regrets - definitely. But not guilt.

Two things I learned from my D was to put myself first in terms of a fair settlement and taking exquisite care of myself. The other thing is that I could have divorced much sooner (but with top-notch divorce counsel) because divorce would not have been a one way street. Had ex wh become a safe partner the process could have been stopped or reversed.

For me, I needed to know what top notch legal representation was and was not. The time to hear from my attorney that I should not have filed in a no fault state without a binding settlement agreement was not after that ship had sailed.

My experience is to choose wisely and take exquisite care of yourself and any children.

As an aside here to Shehawk, are you warning us to get a property settlement agreement signed by our STBX, before tipping our hands about the process of D? That's kinda how I did it.

In our state (Virginia) getting a PSA signed between the spouses and notarized means they are 6 months away from an uncontested D if there are no children involved, as I recall the lawyer saying. The delicacy of the situation is to keep the spouses on speaking terms so cooperation can happen?

[This message edited by Superesse at 8:47 PM, Sunday, January 28th]

There really is no perfect time to leave. At the same time, leaving is really difficult and scary and it takes a ton of courage.

My experience is to choose wisely and take exquisite care of yourself and any children.

This is pretty much it.

I recommend that you start interviewing attorneys and find one that you like. I am awful at interviewing attorneys so I have no advice of how to go about this process. My first attorney was a referral from a friend who said that she was great. She was not -- she was not timely in her responses, she blamed me for stuff where she should have been offering counsel, and she failed to keep me informed. My second attorney was also great on paper, but I suspect that she was a raging alcoholic who let her paralegal do virtually everything. My third attorney was great, but honestly there was nothing that distinguished her from the other two at the interview stage -- she simply did the things that she said that she would do (that's the only difference between attorney 3 vs attorneys 1 and 2).

i actually already have an attorney. $2000 retainer is paid and he was my atty the first time i tried to divorce wh in 2010-2011.

So that's progress, to start some legal consulting. I hope it comes together that you can have you paperwork drawn up promptly, and then you may feel more certain which way to proceed.

Gotta..I've read all of your threads over the years.

Yes. I believe you are procrastinating. You've done it for years.

Nothing will hurt more than continuing to be stuck with that asshole.

Gotta,

If it wasnt for the police charging my stbxwh and giving him conditions not to return here, I'm almost sure I wouldn't have started the D process.

I had started a year prior to that and had all the paperwork ready to file but I chickened out. I was scared.

It took me a few months after he was initially charged to give a full statement to police.

Had it not happened the way it did, I may not even be alive today. Lord knows stbexwh's abuse was escalating daily.

Don't spend one more day in misery. That first step is brutally difficult. The second and third steps suck too. But eventually you'll be amazed at how much better life is when you're not with the person whose making everything terrible.

leaving is really difficult and scary and it takes a ton of courage.

If it wasnt for the police charging my stbxwh and giving him conditions not to return here, I'm almost sure I wouldn't have started the D process.

My first wife asked me to move out and refused to speak to me for 6 months because she wanted to screw around with other guys. She then spent 1.5 years telling me that she wanted me back but that we couldn't live with each other. It wasn't until someone physically grabbed me by my shoulders and told me "YOU NEED TO LEAVE YOUR WIFE!!! SHE IS RUINING YOUR LIFE!!!" that I filed for divorce.

My second wife did all sorts of awful things to me. She literally decided that she wanted a divorce. I never even filed for divorce.

So... let me go back to what I said before. It takes a lot of courage. I wish that I could tell you how to have that courage but I don't have it so I can't tell you.