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Hello R friends,

Since you seem to be more level-headed than I am at this time, I have another odd question for today, so thank you for letting me bounce it off of you!

So in my mind, I want to shut the door on the "first marriage" and have a start fresh with WS. I am not handling the grey area very well. For a couple of weeks, I have been contemplating that we divorce so he can work on himself and I can focus on me. After we are in better spots, we can see if can reinvent our relationship. We may not even need to get married and just stay as partners. I know it seems strange, but I just want to chew off my leg that is caught in the trap and move on, so I can stop focusing on the trap.

Here are some of my (quite possibly insane) reasons:

Reasons for:
- If we divorce then try to R, I don't have anything to lose. Let me try to explain, right now I am hanging in there for the kids. Having kids in the mix, puts this pressure on me to make it work. Since I am thinking we would R after D, we can figure out the finances, custody while we are in this mind set verses a really bad mind set. I would have a safety net already in place.
- In my mind, it is the appropriate consequence for cheating on your marriage. He decided to cheat on me and our marriage, so technically, I feel he already broke our contract and our marriage is currently null and void. I would feel like I took some action and protected myself verses keeping it quiet and suffering.
- If he wasn't here, it wouldn't be a daily reminder of the pain he created. I wouldn't see his hands and think where they have been. I wouldn't see his wedding ring and cry. When he leaves for work wonder what time his meeting with the OW is today. He is planning to change his job, but it is still going to take some time. I don't want to R, while they are working together. This gives me a break from the daily reminder that they are together during the day. If I can't even start R until 2014, why go through this everyday?
- Bouncing off the above point, maybe I would heal faster. I would have taken action, taken time away, and if we R, I will know that it was my choice to do it. I wouldn't have any pressure to make it work.
- If we part, then I can tell my family and friends. My mom, dad, brother, and best friend know the story, but I still feel alone. I can't tell my mom and dad everything and my best friend just found out she was pregnant and they had been trying for a long time, so I am now the Debbie Downer of our conversations. "Oh, the baby is the size of a pomegranate, that's great! Did I tell you that he texted her standing right next to me!?!?"
- I can be honest and tell other people what he did and what she did. I don't have to act like I am holding it together every place we go. And if you have seen my earlier post, maybe she will move...
- Along the same lines, maybe I would feel sympathetic for him. Right now, I see him as getting his cake and eating it too while I am the one that is supposed to "suck it up" and keep trudging forward. Maybe I would view him differently if he took the heat, maybe I would even defend him?!?
- Hope for the best, but plan for the worst....Just maybe, after some time apart, he becomes the man I deserve, I will be a better partner, and he will sweep me off my feet. I will feel in love again and we will rebuild our family. If not, I am already settled into the "worst"

Cons.
- Our kids. This is HUGE - How would this impact them? Their parents' are together, aren't together, and trying to get back together and then possible don't stay together. Pinball machine.
- I could stay at our home, but he would need a second place to live, so our kids will have two homes.
- Glue is gone. Anyone could change their minds at any point and there isn't anything that forces us to stay together.
- Divorce could be really messy and change all of our plans for R.

I told WS spouse my idea, he thinks D will take any chance of R away because we are adding more stress, appointments, & discussion topics and that we will be overloaded and get into a darker place. Maybe I am naive, but I am thinking we could draw up and agreement for the divorce and then another document that would be active a year out from the divorce if there are additional custody or finance changes depending what we decide.

On as side note, we are in IC and MC. He has been transparent and remorseful and I think he realizes that he does have a lot to work on. He has been telling me everything and answers my questions. The A was short-lived and I think I have all the details I need to know and probably some I didn't want to know. Now I get to hear the stories about how well he did to keep it work-related when she needed to be in his office for 5 minutes today to hammer out details of such-and-such. I do think he's over it, but it is hard when they truly have to pair-up on certain items and knowing it won't probably change until January 1, 2014.

Has anyone thought about doing this or has done this? Am I just crazy? Could it work? Is there a happy medium?

What about a post nup agreement? We did that and I think of it as a "divorce" minus the paperwork. It protects me.

I'm struggling with the unfairness of him getting his cake and eating it too as well. I think we all just want to see them being punished so they realize what they put on the line. But I too have small kids.

What about separating for a while? Take off your ring and live like you are in fact divorced. Then you can just tell your kids that their daddy is in time out and has to live by himself.

Nothing to joke about, I know. But I am feeling the same way. I just took my ring off after 10 months, and it was liberating. Not because it felt rebellious, but it symbolized a broken promise and a horrible tragedy, so why remind myself of it every day? It was like a huge weight was lifted off my finger. I feel like I'm not obligated to make the old life work anymore. I am free to begin anew, with or without him.

I thought about this too at some point, but felt like divorce (we're legal partners, so a bit different) was, in a sense, my last piece of leverage. That sounds bad when put in those words, but what I mean is that if I took him back after all that and it turned out he wasn't really remorseful or we weren't actually in R anyway, he'd lost nothing and I'd lost all dignity, faith in myself and self respect. If we got back together after divorcing, he would see that I wasn't really serious or that the situation wasn't really serious.

ETA: I thought to myself, so, what happens the next time? The threat/possibility of divorce will have lost a lot of the impact.

I'm sure it's worked for other people, perhaps under different circumstances. But it's a risky game I wasn't interested in betting on. At any rate, I got a lot of legal stuff in order and a post infidelity nup, if you will.

[This message edited by carnelian at 6:48 PM, August 5th (Monday)]

I am looking into PostNups now....what sort of items did you include?

I do like the timeout idea and the kids would totally understand that!

I haven't worn my ring since dday and have no interest at this time putting it back on. Who know if that will change

I don't remember all the details, but spousal support was one and the biggest one (to me) was making sure I 1) got to go back to school and 2) it would all be paid for, no matter what.

Enormous weight off my back, truly.

XH and I are divorced and in R. I didn't plan it that way, nor did I EVER expect us to get back together, but it can happen like that. I have to caution you though, that you can't unring that bell. If you have every intention of R, then why bother getting divorced? My H ran amok after our divorce, so in addition to getting past the A, I now have to make peace with the OW's that are technically none of my business. Very slippery slope that. What would a divorce with the intention to R look like? Do you both date other people and each other? And like you said, that leaves the door wide open for someone to decide single life is good or meet someone else.

I don't know, my personal feeling is that I wish we hadn't gotten divorced. DD6 asked me the other day why I never wear my wedding ring. I told her because mommy and daddy are divorced (I didn't mention that I had thrown my ring in the garbage 3 years ago). She said, well then why do you live together? I said,well, because we're trying to work things out. She was confused. he also still sleeps on the couch, so the situation is incredibly awkward.

I vote for the idea of a separation. Even do a legal separation if you want to, but there's no such thing as a temporary divorce. The post-nup idea is interesting too.

[This message edited by webmistress at 9:41 PM, August 5th (Monday)]

I am also in R after D (if you ignore my second D-Day a few weeks ago). I agree with webmistress - there's no way I would have gone through it if I knew I wanted R. At the time I filed, I had absolutely zero hope. I will say that D did help kind of put a stopping point on some of my pain, though it came back when we started talking again. It was like we just took a break for a little while and it all came flooding back like I never got away from it.

I understand what you're saying about them working together and not being able to R until that changes - TOTALLY understand it. But that's why I think it would make sense to separate until then instead of going through with a D. It's expensive and you have no idea how much can go on with the excuse "But you divorced me." It just makes me shudder to even think about it.

Personally, I'd do it in my mind, but not legally. Too confusing/harmful for the kids.

It's not a crazy idea at all and your reasoning is perfectly sound in my opinion.

I know the feeling of needing to get out of it. The woman I was married to was fucking-around on her husband - me. So, I was now married to a woman that fucks-around on her husband. And, every day since D-day, I continued to be married to a woman that fucks around on her husband.

I absolutely had to cut that out of my life. I could NOT accept that.

After I filed for divorce, she then opened her eyes to reality somewhat and wanted to reconcile. She did not want to divorce. I told her that no matter what, no matter what it costs, no matter the Hell that the divorce process is, and no matter that the kids will have to know - I was getting divorced, period.

We are divorced and I do feel relieved of that "trap". Does it bother me that now that we are divorced that she can legitimately do whatever she wants with whomever she wants? No! She was doing it while we were married! She had a whole separate and secret child-free and responsibility-free "married" life going on behind my back.

She still wants to reconcile but she needs to do a tremendous amount of tough work figuring out why the hell she threw a happy family away.

XBH and I are in R after D. He wanted the D, and he was the one to approach me about R. He regrets moving so hastily toward D; I think it was the best thing that could have happened for me in terms of getting my shit together.

We don't have kids though.

It just seems like such the path to mutually assured destruction. I mean, yeah, he fired nuclear warheads at you. But when you return fire, nothing will be left. I can't envision an amicable divorce that then results in reconciliation. The thing that kept me from divorcing in the beginning, period, is my kids. I wasn't going to make that move until I KNEW it was my final choice.

This shit is hard. What you are feeling, the death of your marriage, is real. The grief is unbearable at times. If reconciliation is something you are interested in, I would focus on that, instead of ending your marriage first. It can be reborn. Many of us have done it. It ain't easy. Lawd knows! But it's possible.

D as a step toward R.

This is an interesting concept which I also have had since DDay#3.

I think that anyone choosing D, should do so under the assumption that there will not be any R.

Some of the posts above clearly indicate that R can still happen after D. My first thoughts were that D would wake my WW up to that fact that she really could lose everything she had with me as her husband.

But you have to be willing to deal with the consequences that after D is final, the WS may have no interest in R. How will that make you feel? Will you feel that you really gave R a chance?

I don't think it sounds crazy, and in fact is an idea I have considered and I am still considering.

I think it would be easier for me to handle. I did something in response.

Moreover, I think if we both knew that we were free to walk out the door at any time we would less inclined to take each other for granted. There is no more state sponsored safety net for behavior that risks the relationship.

I could handle it, I really could. As for her, I don't know why it should matter. She has already shown there is nothing special about the marriage contract.

To me, it would require genuine commitment.

The downside is that if there is a repeat A you can bet you will hear that you were not even married. But, would you really care? I don't plan on spending a lot of time doing a post mortem if there is Dday 2.

On the other hand, I raised this with several people, including people on the board, and I have yet to hear, "great idea!"

I don't know what this one lead to in reality.