Well, i am not going to tell you i told you so….
My money is still on cracking down on her instead of “playing nice and trying to work/talk things out”.
In my experience, combative/argumentative women do not appreciate if you try to accommodate them. They will see your attempts to rescue the relationship as weakness or proof that they were right all along, double down on their demands and lose even more respect.
I understand that you are running out of time. Paying 50% of whatever you make a lifetime for an ex is unacceptable.
I also understand that you are out of options now. Even if you tried to play hardball with her and it works out for now, that doesn’t mean it will work over the rest of your life. She could just be biding her time and you have no idea how her behavior will change after she reached the critical 10 year mark. In my experience a combative woman will pull everything she can get away with to get things her way.
I think you are at a point at which you can only trust her to do what she thinks is best for her. You need to do whats right for you and what protects your financial security in the second half of your life.
Make no mistake, you are not going to change your wife. She will not change, she might become compliant out of fear to lose what she has but she will still be the same woman that will **** test you for weakness.
I´d set your plan in motion. Tell her you love her but you can’t go on like that due to her fighting you over every little shiat and therefore disrespecting you as a husband and decisionmaker, “you clearly do not trust me to lead this marriage and this is why i lost trust in our marriage” or something like that. Tell her you would be more then happy to keep her in your life and see where it goes.
You will win both ways. If she loves you she will come around, arrange herself with the new situation and cling onto that relationship. If she doesn’t love you, she is just here for the financial benefits and needs to walk anyway.
The hardest part would be not seeing your kid every day or even most days. That said, you cant let her know how hard it would hit you or she will even use the kid as leverage to get what she wants.
Forget all the guys telling you to “man up” and “take responsibility”. Neither of them is going to put a bullet through their own head if you get divorce rayped after 10 years and end up broke for life. Half of them most likely have not even been married or in a relationship for more than a couple of years. If your trust in your wife or in marriage is lost, there might be a valid reason for that.
Trust your guts, do whats best for you, women do it all the time.
The road to damnation is plastered with the big hearts of men that tried to “do the right thing” and work things out at the cost
of everything and their souls.
