'AITA for waiting to divorce my wife until it was a good time for me?' + UPDATE
"AITA for waiting to divorce my wife until it was a good time for me?"
My ex wife and I were married for over 20 years and have 2 children together (22M and 20F). For most of my marraige, things were pretty balanced. We both shared housework and childcare responsibilities.
We were each stay at home parents for over a year after each child, her with our son and me with our son and daughter. We always had agreements on how we wanted to divide work and generally had decent communication.
This changed when my oldest went to high school. My wife got a new job that was both very demanding on her time and was 50% travel. This meant that I had to handle everything about 2 weeks per month and when she was home she wasn't holding up her side of the work with agreements.
I did my best to be acommodating and we worked through redistributing chores/house work a few times to make it fit her schedule better, but a lot of the work just kept falling to me.
When the pandemic happened, things got worse, but I tried to just suck it up because I knew the lockdowns were temporary. Finally, when things opened back up things continued to decline and I asked to go to counseling. She missed a lot of our meetings and just didn't commit to it. At this point I decided that I wanted a divorce.
Unfortunately, it was a really tough time for the family. My son was getting ready for college in person after his freshman year being remote which was both financial and logistical challenge.
At the same time my daughter was also having some issues with depression and I had become her main support person with my wife gone half the time. I made a decision to wait until my daughter was in a better mental state and our family was in a financialy stable place before I filed for divorce.
I did my best to continue to contribute and was essentailly a single parent for three years. On a few occassions I brought up counseling again, but my wife said "things were good" and wouldn't go.
We pretty much didn't have sex for that period of time and there was one summer where she essentially moved to North Carolina for 6 weeks for work (she came home on some weekends).
Last year after my daughter started sophomore year of college and she was in a better place mentally and emotionally, I sold off some of my stock investments to create a trust for my kids to ensure college was covered then I filed for divorce.
At first my wife was really pissed, then she left to live in North Carolina again. When she came back 4 weeks later, she said she wanted to work through it, but I told her I had made the decison to leave years ago and wasn't interested.
We eventually worked through mediation and got an amicable divorce. My kids live with me now and support me, but all of my in-laws and even most of my family outside of my sister think I'm AH.
They believe I should have forced the issue more when we started counseling and either divorced or made it clearer to my wife how important counseling was to me. They've called me selfish and some of my in-laws are refusing to interact with my kids when they're at my house (for example my daughter facetimed her grandmother once this summer and she hung up once she saw that my daughter was at my house).
They also created a bit of a scene at my son's graduation in the spring, refusing to acknowleding me and demanding that my son choose to celebrate with them or me rather than having dinner together as a group.
I encouraged my son to go with them and we had our own celebration later, but something happened at the dinner and my son has lived with me and been almost no contact with them since.
I honestly feel like I did what was best for my kids, but I now it feels like their mom's family is punishing them and I feel like a terrible father. I admit that it might have been more mature to address the issue head on with my relationship with my ex, but I felt that it was about more than just the two of us.
Frankly, I feel like my lack of backbone years ago has made this divorce worse for my kids, but I also believe that if I had to do it again, I would still prioritize my kids over my own feelings and make the same choice. AITA?
EDIT: Holy crap this blew up. First off, thanks for folks who provided feedback and comments. I really felt like shit and both the positive and negative comments helped me get a little perspective on things. I've seen a few comments come up multiple times, so I figure it's worth answering them here before I move on.
This is an account I created to ask an embarassing dating question earlier this year. I created it because my main username is recognizable and I reused it now because I don't really want to air my issues associated with a known username.
When my wife took the job, we were doing well financially, but the job still came with a big raise. I was making about $200k and the job she took gave her a raise from about $80k to $140k.
That was enough that we could go from saving enough to have an emergency fund to having enough to pay for our kid's college outright. We both work in tech, but she works for a defense contractor and some of the work needs to be done onsite and only one of the offices related to her work is near where we live.
When we originally discussed the job, her plan was to work in the high travel role for some time then try to transfer to a lower travel role based near us. She got promoted a few times and staying near our home wasn't an option unless she took a bit pay and title cut.
When we divorced I was making about $280k and she made a little over $300k. Some folks were also confused by my stock comment. I'm a software engineer for a big tech company and about 20-30% of my salary comes in the form of RSUs (restricted stock units). I'm not an investor by any means, and I was just selling off stock mostly to cover my daughter's college and pay off what debt my son had.
I know a lot of people are jumping right to an affair, but I really doubt it. In school, my wife and I were the obnoxious kids who reminded the teacher about homework and she's a massive introvert.
Her working late in a hotel room is much more likely than her sleeping around or keeping some secret family. There's a chance I'm wrong here, but I think this is more a situation where Reddit sometimes thinks all divorces end with infidelity.
When I say we had an amicable divorce, I mean that more in the legal sense than the emotional sense. Unconested might be a better term. The only significan asset we had that wasn't easily split was our home.
My wife loves the house and I frankly wanted something different, so she bought out my portion of it. Our kids are adults, so there's no custody. Our assets are mostly divisible, so no issues there. Our salaries were comparable, so there was no alimony.
We each had a car. Overall, it was pretty straightforward to divide things evenly and neither of us wanted to draw things out. We didn't end the marraige as friends by any means, but from a legal standpoint it was amicable because we decided on arrangement with a mediator and only involved lawyers briefly to actually draft the final paperwork for the judge to sign off on.
Here were the top rated comments from readers in response to the OP's initial post:
NTA, you did your best for your kids.
Of course the in-laws are gonna bark and piss and moan because their golden angel got blindsided by a divorce...a separation she cemented when she told you "NO, I'M NOT GOING THE COUNSELING WITH YOU..."
Your in-laws sound not only insufferable, but incapable of accountability. It may be too much effort to explain to her AH family that you tried for YEARS to fix the marriage, but she was too busy...somewhere else...
NTA for doing what's right for your children. It sucks the in-laws are being shitty to them, but hopefully they'll develop new relationships and bonds with other people who aren't incapable of empathy or rational conversations surrounding major life events.
NTA oh no you wanted your daughter and family to be in a stable place before you left someone who didn't try at all the horror. /s If they want to be petty they can be I understand feeling guilty but you can't take on responsibility for the actions of others when you tried your best.
Staying for an extra 3 years gave everyone the best outcome and its not like you didn't push for reconciliation your wife dropped the ball massively and just went "eh". Your kids support you and their opinions are really the only ones that count.
Four months later, the OP returned with an update.
Things are going much better overall since the post. I got a lot of support, but also a lot of criticism which I took to heart. I have been putting in some work to mend fences and help get things to a more reasonable state. I don't expect my ex or her family to be friends with me, but I at least want to be on good terms.
My relationship with my parents and family is much better and this Christmas was pretty much back to normal. My family is very conservative especially when it comes to marriage, but they finally understand how bad it had become and have reluctantly accepted.
My relationship with my ex and more importantly her relationship with our kids has also improved. She has apparently been going to therapy on her own and while she hasn't gone into details she does seem to be a lot less angry about what happened.
We decided to have Thanksgiving together so we could all talk through things with the kids. It was a bit messy and there were a lot of tears, but we also got to a place where we all understand each other a bit more.
We all agree that I shouldn't have waited so long to go through with the divorce, but my ex and kids also say they understand why I did it. My ex wife and I even had a conversation about dating, which was weird but surprisingly kind of nice.
My ex in-laws still think I'm a horrible person and most refuse to talk to me, but they have started treating my kids well. My kids went to the in-laws place for Christmas eve and told me went "OK".
We talked about it on Christmas and while they didn't give many details they did say they planned to do something on New Year's Eve with my ex and the in-laws, so I'm happy about that. Sorry this isn't a juicy update with anything crazy, but I was bored during the holiday down time and thought I would login and post some details.
One thing I've learned from this, and I hope others learn to, even if your heart's in the right place, it's probably better to divorce when the marriage is over rather than putting up a facade for years. I don't regret getting a divorce, but I do wish I hadn't waited 3 years when I knew it was over.
Here were the top rated comments from readers in response to the OP's update:
You shouldn't be bothered by what your ex-IL think about you. People who blame children (even almost adults) for the things their father did are not very good at judging people. They are even the real AH here.
It's always a good sign when one partner in a relationship says "I feel like our marriage is falling apart and think we should go to counselling to fix things" and the other says "nah, things are good". If things were good, why is your husband saying that to you???
Yeah but "he should have forced the issue"... you know, because coercing people into counseling that they don't think they need is always the best idea.
What did the in-laws expect treating OP and the kids badly would actually accomplish? The answer is they did not think that far ahead.
It's very telling that the ex-ILs have been hostile to the children over this. OP didn't delay the divorce because he was making it convenient for himself. He delayed the divorce so it would happen at a better time for the children.
He chose the children's welfare over consideration of his ex. That's why the ex-ILs resent the children. They're the type of people who hate the idea of someone putting children's needs above the parent's convenience.