By The Divorced Good Guy
When you get married, you never think it will end. Why would you get married if you ever envision it dying prematurely? And then it happens (to 50 percent of us). The dream rots away, and you and the one you love(d) are now fragments of a relationship. If you are lucky, you can make it into some sort of family mosaic in picking up the pieces.
However, through the years, I have witnessed a number or couples successfully get divorced and then miraculously get back together. And on top of that, they’ve made it work for the long haul. I commend them, but I will never be in their ranks. Recently, my ex-wife has reached out and proposed that we work towards reconciling after three years of divorce.
Here is why it won’t work out like it did for our friends:
1. I will never get back with my ex-wife, because it is too risky to put the kids through the drama. At this stage in the kids’ lives, they are delicate. One is barely a teenager and the other is a pre-teen. They have been able to get into a routine between our two homes that works well for everybody. Everybody is good.
2. Lies. Men like, women lie. Money doesn’t. I had my share of suspicions with my ex-wife all the way down to the relationship infidelity. I knew finding out she was cheating would drive me over the edge so I didn’t look. Eventually, I found out the hard way that she was cheating in a another way – financially. Under my nose, she had taken all the money we accrued together and got off scott free. I contested, but because we were married, it was perfectly legal to steal from “us.” Go figure.
3. The trust. There is none. You realize trust is more essential than love after you go through the merry-go-round a few times. This quintessential mistrust has unfortunately found its toxins into my newer, subsequent relationships. I try my best, but my ex-wife has really caused me to side-eye everybody – even people I really like. On top of that, there is a certain viciousness that comes out in divorces. I had no idea. I really saw her fangs, so to speak. I never want to see them again. You can’t come back once you have shown the willful capacity for evil.
4. Her unwillingness to do counseling has been a very contentious piece in all of this. Most times, men are the ones against professional counseling, but I was the one that pushed it while we were still married. She went to one or two sessions and then completely quit. I continued alone. She didn’t want to do it and that is problematic, especially if we were to try again.
5. At the day’s end, we are actually working out now as co-parents. We are raising our kids marvelously. That is our job now. We have to guide our boy and girl to be mentally and physically healthy so they can be valuable contributors to society. Every now and then, our little girl will express how she would like her mommy and daddy to be back together. I gently let her know that we are still a family; this is the new “new.”
As I stated before, I think another break up would devastate the children. It was hard the first time around. I cannot even think about putting them through that. The kids are the silver lining and I’ll never tarnish that.
