Dear Suddenly Single,
I have spent the last year discovering that the man I divorced is not the man I married. Or perhaps he is, and I’m only seeing him clearly now.
After thirty years of marriage, my husband told me he wanted a divorce. There wasn’t another woman, at least not that I know of. He said he simply wasn’t happy anymore and wanted us both to have the chance to start over while we were still healthy enough to enjoy life.
I was devastated, but I wasn’t vindictive. We sat at our kitchen table and cried together. He reached across the table, took my hand, and said, “We’ve had a good life. I don’t want us to destroy each other now. We’ll be fair. I promise.” I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? He’d been my husband for three decades. We’d raised children together. We had always prided ourselves on being reasonable people.
Then the lawyers became involved.
Almost overnight, the man who promised we’d “do the right thing” disappeared. Suddenly he claimed the business I’d helped him build was almost worthless. He argued that the renovations we’d made to the house were paid for almost entirely by him, despite the fact that I was running our entire family alone during this time while he worked building a business.
He wanted credit for every dollar he’d ever earned but somehow wanted to forget the years I either stayed home or worked part-time so someone could stay home with the children.
He objected to the amount of spousal support my lawyer recommended because, according to his lawyer, I was “perfectly capable of becoming self-sufficient.” He has completely dismissed the fact that I am not qualified for any well-paid jobs because I spend much of my prime years as a full-time wife and mother. Does he expect me to be flipping burgers at age sixty-one?
I’ve spent the last twenty-five years putting his career and our family ahead of my own. Every compromise we made together has somehow become evidence against me.
The worst part isn’t even the money. It’s the lies. Watching someone you’ve loved for thirty years rewrite your family history is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Apparently, I didn’t sacrifice or contribute to the building of our life. I was just…there. When I challenged him, he replied, “This is the process and my lawyer says this is how its done.”
I feel like the whole thing is breaking me.
My friends keep telling me not to let it consume me, but they’re not the ones reading affidavits that are practically fiction. I no longer recognize this man. Tell me honestly – was he always this terrible or does divorce bring out the very worst in people?
— Married to a Stranger
Dear Married,
Sometimes the greatest shock of divorce isn’t the divorce itself – it’s discovering that the person you’ve trusted for decades is capable of behaving in ways you never thought possible.
I’ve heard versions of your story more times than I can count. A husband announces that he wants to part amicably. He says all the right things:
“We’ll be fair.”
“We’ve had a good life.”
“I don’t want money to come between us.”
Then the legal process begins, and suddenly the same man who once described everything as “ours” begins talking about “my pension,” “my business,” “my retirement,” and “my future.” It’s enough to make anyone wonder whether the loving man they lived with for thirty years ever really existed.
What happens to people when fear, money and lawyers all arrive at the same table?
Divorce has a way of reducing people to their worst selves. The future feels uncertain, retirement suddenly looks more expensive than expected, and everyone starts worrying about whether they’ll have enough.
I’ve seen men who never argued over twenty dollars suddenly spend thousands in legal fees trying to avoid paying their former wives a fraction of that amount. If someone had described that behaviour to them ten years earlier, they would have laughed.
But then it all changed.
Watching an ex-husband rewrite a marriage just to strengthen his legal position is indeed traumatic. There’s something uniquely painful about reading an affidavit that suggests the years you spent raising children, supporting his career, putting aside your own ambitions, managing a household and making countless invisible sacrifices somehow don’t count because they weren’t accompanied by a paycheque.
Women of our generation know exactly what invisible work looks like because so many of us did it. We left jobs when children arrived because someone had to. We worked part-time because the family needed flexibility more than it needed another promotion. We carried the mental load of the family, remembering doctor’s appointments, parent-teacher interviews, birthdays, school forms, Christmas shopping and extended family. Much of that work never appears on a bank statement, but families are built on it just the same.
The law, fortunately, has become much better at recognizing those contributions than it once was. The difficulty is that legal documents don’t always read like acknowledgements of a shared life. They read like arguments. Every sentence is crafted to advance one person’s position, often by minimizing the other person’s.
Lawyers write these affidavits with that goal, so no wonder they are so painful to read.
You cannot allow every sentence in those documents to become part of your own internal story. If you do, you’ll suffer twice—once from the divorce itself and again from believing a version of your life that simply isn’t true.
Your reality is that your ex-husband is trying to protect his own financial future at your expense. Human beings are capable of being both generous and selfish; you are seeing the selfish side now. Most of us simply hope we never meet this version of someone we loved.
When your husband told you the divorce would be fair, I suspect he meant it. At that moment, sitting across the kitchen table from the woman he’d shared most of his adult life with, he probably couldn’t imagine himself behaving any differently.
Then the practical realities arrived. Lawyers began explaining legal strategies. Friends started telling him what he’d “better not give away.” Fear crept in. Before long, he was making decisions that probably seemed perfectly reasonable to him because he’d gradually become accustomed to them.
None of this absolves him, but I hope it helps you understand the situation. You weren’t foolish when you believed him—you trusted the evidence of thirty years together.
For now, stop trying to appeal to the man who promised fairness. That conversation is over. Now is the time for your lawyer to do the negotiating. You must detach yourself as much as humanly possible. Rely on facts and insist on getting everything you’re legally and morally entitled to after three decades of building a life together.
One day this process will end. You’ll sign the papers, walk out of the office, and discover that the legal battle is finally behind you. The years you spent loving your family were not erased. Your contribution wasn’t made smaller. You know what you gave to that marriage, and so do the children who grew up inside it. And in the end, that’s all that matters.
— Suddenly Single
