Puppy...it is only because I have seen so much divorce in my own life, plus now seen so many divorces at my work...that I know that it will be much harder than you think it will. It always is. Your emotions will run deeper than you think they will. Yes, even worse (or on par with) the emotions during her affair and afterwards. I know it doesn't make sense intellectually, which is why so many people ignore this advice and try to go through it with no counseling or support group. Because intellectually, it seems like "well this is just the end of the process, we've already gone through the hard parts". But that just isn't true. The hardest parts are yet to come, and no it has nothing to do with your particular sitch.
The attorney I work for has been doing this for over 20 years, and she actually specializes in mediation and collaboraton, she will not do litigation because of the painful situations involved. And she also specializes in uncontested, amicable divorces. And yet STILL, she tells every client who comes in her office door to get a divorce coach or an IC who specializes in divorce. Even if two people are just happy to be done with each other, there are emotions that come into play which they never expected.
When I got divorced, I thought he and I would both be happy to have the details figured out and done so we could both move on. I couldn't have been farther from the truth. It hurt worse than I could have imagined ... for reasons which can't really be described until you are in the middle of the process.
So no Puppy....its not you and your sitch....its EVERYONE and EVERYONE'S sitch.
For clients who refuse to get outside counseling, they end up with literally about twice the size of the bill from my boss as those who get counseling.
Please believe me.
Some people who do get the counseling do so well that they think "oh maybe that was a waste of time and money, I could have gotten through without it"....but they can only say this because they DID get the counseling.
At a minimum, get your kids lined up for their own specialized counseling to help them through the transition.
Divorce is no less painful than death, and people understand that death requires grieving and counseling of some kind to get through.
To be honest, I probably wouldn't get counseling for death, either. I've tried several counselors, and they all stunk. I can't afford a good one, and the free ones offered thru our EAP have been horrible.
I do think books and a good support group would help, tho.
Puppy, I think you do indeed have the worse behind you. Not much else can hurt you as bad as finding out and enduring infidelity. You are not in a situation where you are going to be one of those dads that only gets the kids every other weekend.
Guys typically recover financially fairly well following a divorce. Since your marriage is of a much longer duration, you may not come out as rosey as I did, however, 5 years from now you will be doing just great (unless the Mayan end of the world forecast occurs on Dec 21, 2012).
You may be right about the litigation of a divorce being more difficult to endure, however, in my case that was not so. My divorce best friend had told me early on following the bomb that it would get much worse once a D was started. He was wrong for my case. But then again, I was the one that filed because of her exposing the kids to her affair.
I don't know of her Kerry, but that is mostly because when we take a mediated case, there is only the one mediator from our office involved. And when we take a collaborative case, we are only working with another collaboratively trained lawyer, and Sharon must not be one of them or she would have stated so in her bio. But she looks great on paper! I hope you had a good experience overall...
Puppy, at least check into it for your kids, ok? Even just an EAP counselor or see if their school counselor can help.
The good thing for my county was that they had "Kids Turn" required classes for parents and optional for the kids. We had both our kids attend and I think it helped them understand and cope more with the divorce.
Perhaps you should both get moved into apartments with signed leases, make sure your cars work, and then declare bankruptcy and let the bank foreclose on the house.
Actually, we're strongly considering that.
Are you seriously considering this Puppy? If so you need to speak to a L about it. From what I understand (from my L) my H and I make too much money to do so since the laws changed in 2005. Even my H alone makes to much to do so, so it's not an option for us. Not that I would want it to be anyway, but well you know. None of this is what I want
Me 54 DS19 and DS17 Married 06/1989 Divorced 01/2011
This is just one guy's advice and I'm in no way a professional. My sitch was similar. We were married 15 years and she was a SAHM for 12 of those. We had no appreciable assets or liabilities. Still, my goal was to help her on the road to being independent. I'm a college graduate, a former military officer and I work in a reasonably high paying job. She never finished college and has only ever worked in retail. So, whenever I started thinking the financial cost to me was too great, I remembered that in 5 years I'm going to be much better off and she will either have lots of cats or will need to remarry.
First, if there are lawyers that you don't want her retaining, hire them first. This advice was from a guy specifically about a handful of lawyers in his city who had gained a reputation for accusing the husband of being sexually inappropriate with their children or at least threatening that charge to gain a more advantageous settlement for their client. Thus, the advice was to spend the money on a professional consultation about your divorce and then you have entered into a client relationship with them and ethically they can't then represent your wife. He did say that this strategy was becoming more well known and as a result, some lawyers were charging more that just an hourly rate for this kind of consultation. Only you can decide if this is necessary.
Secondly, while I was trying to do everything I could to help my wife and because I still love her and never wanted a divorce, I didn't want to get screwed over either. So, I shot for something like a 55/45 split of the income based on a shared parenting 50/50 and from the very first time I spoke about money, I already had figures in mind that were more than fair and I repeated myself everytime "$2500/mo in MX for 5 years and about $500/mo in CS".
The formula I used for figuring MX was like this. ME Gross pay - MX - Taxes - (CS * (1 + effective tax rate) = NET HER Gross pay + MX - Taxes + CS = NET
So, for me it was like this: ME Gross - $7800 MX - $2500 Taxes - $1166 = (.22 * (7800-2500)) CS - $486 = (1.22 * $398) = $3736
It ended up being a 47/53 split of NET proceeds and 44/56 split gross, but, my biggest concern was getting something reasonable that didn't extend past 5 years. I also knew that I was going to be buying a house and starting a new job that paid a little better. So, now, it's more like a 40/60 split and she can certainly go find a full-time job making better money.
