Coping with Divorce or Separation

Last edited Sat Aug 30, 2025, 09:05 PM - Edit history (1)

I don’t really like talking about mine. I..am not a huge fan of talking about personal stuff. DU is an obscure enough forum that even these days there is hopefully sufficient decorum that anonymous posters on sites like DU can post stuff for catharsis and move on.

Mine is still like a live wound in a way because my ex and I talk everyday. We were very much in love and still love each other, but it’s strictly platonic now (though as strong as ever). If the biggest love of your life is based just in sex and natalism I consider that rather shallow, uncivilized, barbaric and unevolved.

Our families are deluded enough to hope we will get back together since they don’t get what exactly the problem is when there is no deficit of affection, there was never even a shadow of anything like deceit or infidelity or serious conflict (unless endless political bickering about whether Harris’s silence on Lina Khan and closeness to Mark Cuban cost her the election or not counts ). A significant enough chunk of our marriage sounded like some threads on DU and as heated ;-/. But well..it’s not really rancorous or at least not from my side. I can’t help it if I have better reality prediction skills..we have almost the exact same takes on what is right and wrong.
The only legit rancor in our past relationship /marriage/now friendship comes from imo my political views being more pragmatic than his. I think he is under the impression that it’s the other way around 🙄.

Anyway, our parents don’t get that it was too painful to risk again. And whatever happens I am never getting married again. I don’t believe in marriage anymore. I hate the paperwork. I am a working woman and marriage and family are always second to work and income. Though I do consider my friends family even though I only have two close friends-everything gets diluted with more people. Love doesn’t multiply. It very much gets divided like all things that require resources. And you can’t do much for your friends without resource and a real income. I am comfortably enough off that I can afford to hold out for a non bullshit job as long as the worthless, predatory. parasitic, truly bullshit jobs out there would at least now stop sucking my time and attention away.
i cant believe how in the last 14 years i have sometimes been the only adult with a real clue in several rooms.
I had and continue to have a humble view (i sound like Uriah Heep-what i mean is that the pursuit of science is humbling and ..) of my abilities in science because it is an exacting profession and therein lies its comfort.

My ex and I split up in an odd way. We got married in 2008 and I was under the impression that we were both pretty ambivalent about the exactly one kid we could realistically ever have had. And I would never not have an income. Parents have to contribute equally to childcare one way or another without bullshit jobs coming into it.
As in my family, my ex-husband’s mom was sort of the default head of the family. Both our dads are cool and contributed to income equally, but kids sort of know by default who the head of the family is.

I am an only child and my family is pretty much dying out. My ex is one of two kids and his brother has a kid.

That was one thing my mom never wanted for me-a bullshit source of income. So if not a hard science or medicine job, whatever is the least harmful and most useful non-science professional job.

I was always pretty ambivalent about having a kid on three counts: 1) the state of the environment; 2) the ongoing search for a stable income and livelihood at the time when I briefly considered it and 3) the worrying rise of roiling tensions on this overpopulated, undereducated planet.

I realize in retrospect that one of the reasons I found factory farming so shocking common humanity aside is that it is an indicator of societal sociopathy and ignorance of science and math among other things. If you are religious you can pretend to buy convenient bs about why the scale of factory farming given everything we know about animal cognition.
I don’t really pay much attention to pets etc but factory farming and horrors like ventilation shutdown terrify me as a scientist and rationalist. Darwin was an animal rights supporter

I don’t see how a society that broken won’t nuke itself on some time scale and I am pretty pre-emptively futurist a helicopter parent enough to not want that ;-/.
And we are really overpopulated here in the Global South and migration won’t fix anything but it will result in rising extremism of all kinds.
That was something about the brutality of say ISIS I found particularly horrifying. It had a fusion of East and West brutality.

I definitely was very ambivalent about raising a kid in such a world-Neo-Nazis, ISIS, war and devastation everywhere and looking at Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan etc etc. Anyway now I am happy to try to do my small part for the planet, my friends and family and future generations. I don’t even mind investing in other peoples kids up to a point but not beyond that. I don’t like to behave like a nutter and say I will give my all. I very much find my existence as a childfree woman exciting and cool. I decided just this week to change my monthly subscription from DAIR (an AI safety group) to the Humane League entirely. And I still donate to ACE (just a small percent) in spite of finding Effective Altruism overall somewhat repellant as a philosophy. I wish someone less repulsive and unrelatable than that creepy Peter Singer was the father of animal rights. Temple Grandin any day over that man. I wish more people knew that aspect of Darwin. It’s not bs that pigs are highly intelligent and animal cognition makes what we do as a society a moral abomination. Nathan Robinson gets it.


Those are connected things. You can’t treat the planet as just a backdrop for ugly human shit.

But anyway, as ambivalent as I was and remain, maybe my ex and I could have pulled off having exactly one kid and raising it. But I don’t like imposing my views on other people.
And soon after we got married he told me that he was hard no on having a kid. I was a bit taken aback. I may have come round to it.
But my ex is very straightforward and I think he realized after the marriage that he did want to be married but not have a kid and I was still young. But I didn’t get married to have a kid.

If we had had a multi year conversation our marriage would have survive but neither of us is given to deceit. So it was a snap off the bandaid and I.. I was taken aback. I thought maybe we should discuss it more. I really wished we had discussed it before getting hitched.
But after that we started drifting apart as a couple. I wouldn’t say I resented it exactly but I felt we should talk about it. But once he knows his mind, my ex isn’t the type of person to hedge. Anyway we always split bills down the middle and we continued as roommates basically till I moved for a job.
He visited me once and we had another argument and fight and talked about divorce for the second time since Thanksgiving of either 2008/2009. Probably not 2010. I still remember that first time..John Travolta was on tv-Saturday Night Fever. Funny the things you end up remembering..very banal observation but still..

Soon after that I met another man who was amusing and interesting enough that I thought that “If I feel this intrigued by someone else, I should definitely not remain married.” Poly amory is not my thing. If it is anyone’s.

I don’t get it. On average it seems like a predominantly male idea that would in general be an imposition a creep would try to force on fairly confused or submissive women. Effective altruists and those creepy ..creepy male types in general are into all that shit.

I told my ex immediately about this new development. He was hurt, but he understood.
It wasn’t a casual flirtation etc. That was also political. I was (from my side though saying it out loud sounds histrionic) engaged in a war against the institution that had hired me seeing within a month that however cool my mentor, lab and mentors wife were, the school clearly was reprehensibly stupid and shallow and brainless and in general everything I disapprove of as a scientist and human being. I mean I disapprove of a lot but…
The man I mentioned struck me as a feminist and a political ally at a sexist conservative shithole with absolute no plus points outside the hard sciences and filled with the kinds of people it is a punishment to be around. But well ..the same bickering I mentioned meant we fought immediately and in this case the institution threw me out after I sent them a 🖕in an email.

It was all pretty painful. I try to never hurt the people I love most. But I also don’t lie to them or prolong the misery. We were both resigned to being en route to a divorce for a long time. We had been no more than roommates for a while by then. But very supportive of each others careers.

In 2010 a new annoyance came up. I asked my mentor (who is a cool person and one of the best scientists/humanists I have ever met) to renew my H1B for my postdoc. He suggested I get a greencard. I was reluctant since I disapprove of marriage greencards as a feminist. In a pinch I will borrow money from my (actual biological - ;-/ I don’t call randos parents or almost like a father or mother-no I have a father and mother and you are not my mom or dad) parents but never from a friend or partner. Your parents kinda owe you. They didn’t exactly consult you on your thoughts on being born. As feminist as he even is, it was awkward to launch into an argument like this so I reluctantly filed for one, which I thankfully abandoned before returning to the Global South. I don’t like any inconsistencies in my principles about reality, income, political positions etc.

Anyway I have to go work. I will post the rest later. It is mildly cathartic.

But my ex has been one of the best friends anyone could have and stood by me throughout this difficult period the same way I would do anything for him or my one other friend. I lost my mom in 2021 and I am still very angry and sad about the circumstances and have to initiate a complaint in my country.

I am trying to untangle my thoughts since my mother should have been with me right now and I cannot forgive the circumstances of her death or the aftermath.
I expect life to de difficult going forward but I was never stupid or a coward. And I am not the best person to mess with ;-/. I tried to be cool up to a point. I have lost my patience by now.
I don’t suffer fools let alone creeps or assholes.