- Dec 20, 2018
- 43
- 34
- 60
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Divorced
Hello. I apologize in advance for the long post. I wanted to talk about my experience in trying to save a marriage and to get your thoughts and insights.
I am a divorced fifty-something male. My spouse of nearly 25 years began conducting what I guess you would call an emotional affair online with someone in the UK (I know him only by his screen name). I had gotten concerned that she appeared to be forsaking sleep for computer time. One day I discovered that she had gotten a passport and had an air ticket to England hidden in our bedroom. I was some combination of devastated and panicked. She was showing signs of not being all-there mentally, and the physical dangers of running off to another country for something like this were obvious.
I won’t go through all the details, which would fill a book. Like any other Christian I felt that my obligation was to do everything I possibly could to try and save my marriage. I called a well-known national Christian counseling organization, which offered to set me up with a local referral. I probably should have just quit at that point, because one of these referrals offered to come to my home and stage an intervention with guaranteed results……for $6000. (when I declined he offered to cut his price to $3800). But I persisted. They gave me another referral. I could not afford that gentleman’s fees, but he referred me to a colleague who was within my price range.
So I cajoled her into going to counseling with me. It did not go well. During the sessions she would go into panic attacks (which I am pretty sure were being faked, because she had never had one before in the close to three decades I had known her). The counselor thought she should be on psych meds. He kept after her about this, and eventually convinced her to go to a doctor he knew and get a prescription.
Once she started taking them her mental condition got much worse. She was exhibiting a whole range of very strange and disturbing symptoms. I was of course the one at home with her when this was happening, the doctor and the counselor were never around. It was at this point that the counselor announced that he had taken another job and was moving out of state. He referred my spouse to another counselor he knew. He said she could go alone, which I actually thought might be best for her. Unbeknownst to me the counselor to whom she was referred had a practice specialty in women who had been abused. My spouse went for a few weeks, then quit. Then one day she just packed-up and left.
She moved to another state and filed for divorce. I was stunned to find in the legal paperwork which was provided to my attorney that she had filed an affidavit from this doctor who had prescribed the meds, describing her mental condition and stating “Adult Emotional Abuse” as the cause.
I was shocked. And furious. The word “abuse” had never come up even once during our marriage. It was not something I had done or would ever do to her. And it seemed more than a coincidence that I was being accused of this not long after she had started seeing a Christian counselor who had a specialty practice for abused women. Did this give her any ideas? I can’t prove or disprove anything, but given the timing, what would you think if you were in my shoes?
Further I was shocked that a doctor could get away with this when absolutely NO medical evidence which would support that claim existed. My attorney said that “they just write down whatever the patient is saying on the chart all the time”. And it gets introduced in court??
In hindsight her claim appears to have been part of a scheme to scam SSI disability….a scheme that ultimately failed. But now I was in a position of having to defend my good name and reputation. I dug in for a legal fight. I filed ethics charges against a slew of people, had depositions taken, etc. Ultimately that all came to naught because the professionals involved all hid behind HIPAA and patient privacy. Apparently in this country those things are now a license to slander.
The only good thing I guess is that my spouse accepted a settlement proposal five seconds after my attorney tabled it. It seems after I had her doctor subpoenaed she didn’t want any part of having to defend her lies about me in a trial. But my good name had been sullied, and pretty much all of the people who were involved in that were walking away without consequence.
Looking at these events in the rear-view mirror I am led to one harsh and inescapable conclusion. Should I have tried to save my marriage?
The answer is no.
In the end my efforts only created an opportunity for her to concoct a lie about me that turned the whole thing into a big mess, dragging many other people into it in the process. Had I simply walked out and filed for divorce when I discovered her plans to go to England, the whole onus would have been squarely on her, where it belongs. She would have had to come to court and defend her quasi-adulterous behavior. No one else would need to have been dragged in. It would have been quicker and cleaner, and over much, much sooner.
But because I chose to fight to save my marriage I gave her the opportunity to do this to me, and to be assisted in that effort by so-called “Christian” professionals who apparently cared not a whit about the fallout from any of this on my end. Needless to say the Christian counseling profession has not exactly covered itself in glory where I’m concerned. They hang a cross on the wall and then hide behind HIPAA and patient confidentiality, which allows them to walk away from any responsibility. The whole field of Christian counseling now strikes me as being pretty “scammy” (as if the guy who was selling $6000 interventions shouldn’t have given me a clue).
I fought for the marriage because my entire life I had been taught that this was the Christian thing to do. That a marriage was sacred, and you needed to fight to protect it against all odds, no matter what.
Well, maybe this makes me a lousy Christian, but I no longer believe that to be the case. I tried to do the right thing, be a good Christian, a good husband, and I had the whole thing blow-up in my face and come back to bite me, bigtime. Many friends, pastors, even counselors, commended me for doing everything I could to try and save my marriage. But I’m convinced it was a mistake. If anyone in a similar situation asks my advice I am going to have to tell them “No! Do NOT try and save your marriage! Walk out and file for the divorce TODAY. Because there is a 98.9% probability that it is going to happen anyway. And your attempt to save the marriage may open you to a whole litany of much, much worse things.”
And the odds of success are extremely small.
So….does that make me a bad Christian?
I am a divorced fifty-something male. My spouse of nearly 25 years began conducting what I guess you would call an emotional affair online with someone in the UK (I know him only by his screen name). I had gotten concerned that she appeared to be forsaking sleep for computer time. One day I discovered that she had gotten a passport and had an air ticket to England hidden in our bedroom. I was some combination of devastated and panicked. She was showing signs of not being all-there mentally, and the physical dangers of running off to another country for something like this were obvious.
I won’t go through all the details, which would fill a book. Like any other Christian I felt that my obligation was to do everything I possibly could to try and save my marriage. I called a well-known national Christian counseling organization, which offered to set me up with a local referral. I probably should have just quit at that point, because one of these referrals offered to come to my home and stage an intervention with guaranteed results……for $6000. (when I declined he offered to cut his price to $3800). But I persisted. They gave me another referral. I could not afford that gentleman’s fees, but he referred me to a colleague who was within my price range.
So I cajoled her into going to counseling with me. It did not go well. During the sessions she would go into panic attacks (which I am pretty sure were being faked, because she had never had one before in the close to three decades I had known her). The counselor thought she should be on psych meds. He kept after her about this, and eventually convinced her to go to a doctor he knew and get a prescription.
Once she started taking them her mental condition got much worse. She was exhibiting a whole range of very strange and disturbing symptoms. I was of course the one at home with her when this was happening, the doctor and the counselor were never around. It was at this point that the counselor announced that he had taken another job and was moving out of state. He referred my spouse to another counselor he knew. He said she could go alone, which I actually thought might be best for her. Unbeknownst to me the counselor to whom she was referred had a practice specialty in women who had been abused. My spouse went for a few weeks, then quit. Then one day she just packed-up and left.
She moved to another state and filed for divorce. I was stunned to find in the legal paperwork which was provided to my attorney that she had filed an affidavit from this doctor who had prescribed the meds, describing her mental condition and stating “Adult Emotional Abuse” as the cause.
I was shocked. And furious. The word “abuse” had never come up even once during our marriage. It was not something I had done or would ever do to her. And it seemed more than a coincidence that I was being accused of this not long after she had started seeing a Christian counselor who had a specialty practice for abused women. Did this give her any ideas? I can’t prove or disprove anything, but given the timing, what would you think if you were in my shoes?
Further I was shocked that a doctor could get away with this when absolutely NO medical evidence which would support that claim existed. My attorney said that “they just write down whatever the patient is saying on the chart all the time”. And it gets introduced in court??
In hindsight her claim appears to have been part of a scheme to scam SSI disability….a scheme that ultimately failed. But now I was in a position of having to defend my good name and reputation. I dug in for a legal fight. I filed ethics charges against a slew of people, had depositions taken, etc. Ultimately that all came to naught because the professionals involved all hid behind HIPAA and patient privacy. Apparently in this country those things are now a license to slander.
The only good thing I guess is that my spouse accepted a settlement proposal five seconds after my attorney tabled it. It seems after I had her doctor subpoenaed she didn’t want any part of having to defend her lies about me in a trial. But my good name had been sullied, and pretty much all of the people who were involved in that were walking away without consequence.
Looking at these events in the rear-view mirror I am led to one harsh and inescapable conclusion. Should I have tried to save my marriage?
The answer is no.
In the end my efforts only created an opportunity for her to concoct a lie about me that turned the whole thing into a big mess, dragging many other people into it in the process. Had I simply walked out and filed for divorce when I discovered her plans to go to England, the whole onus would have been squarely on her, where it belongs. She would have had to come to court and defend her quasi-adulterous behavior. No one else would need to have been dragged in. It would have been quicker and cleaner, and over much, much sooner.
But because I chose to fight to save my marriage I gave her the opportunity to do this to me, and to be assisted in that effort by so-called “Christian” professionals who apparently cared not a whit about the fallout from any of this on my end. Needless to say the Christian counseling profession has not exactly covered itself in glory where I’m concerned. They hang a cross on the wall and then hide behind HIPAA and patient confidentiality, which allows them to walk away from any responsibility. The whole field of Christian counseling now strikes me as being pretty “scammy” (as if the guy who was selling $6000 interventions shouldn’t have given me a clue).
I fought for the marriage because my entire life I had been taught that this was the Christian thing to do. That a marriage was sacred, and you needed to fight to protect it against all odds, no matter what.
Well, maybe this makes me a lousy Christian, but I no longer believe that to be the case. I tried to do the right thing, be a good Christian, a good husband, and I had the whole thing blow-up in my face and come back to bite me, bigtime. Many friends, pastors, even counselors, commended me for doing everything I could to try and save my marriage. But I’m convinced it was a mistake. If anyone in a similar situation asks my advice I am going to have to tell them “No! Do NOT try and save your marriage! Walk out and file for the divorce TODAY. Because there is a 98.9% probability that it is going to happen anyway. And your attempt to save the marriage may open you to a whole litany of much, much worse things.”
And the odds of success are extremely small.
So….does that make me a bad Christian?
