Thursday, December 13, 2007

She loves you, NOT

One of these guys has a happy future ahead of him


Courtesy of John Sedgewick:

Like every husband who suddenly turns into an ex, Martin Paul, a pleasant, unassuming 51-year-old, knows exactly where he was when it happened. He was sitting on the back porch of his pricey hilltop house in the Boston suburbs one sunny Saturday morning, relaxing over coffee.

Paul is a professional collector, primarily of coins, but of other rare objects as well: Sonny Liston’s ring belt; a submarine that appeared in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. It wasn’t easy to build up his collecting business, but he had finally got it humming, and he was pulling down close to seven figures a year. Plus, the oldest of his three sons had suffered a frightening brain injury, but after two years of treatment, he had finally recovered enough to go to college. For the first time in a very long while, life was good.

And so, that Saturday, he wanted to tell his wife he was thinking about finally easing off a little. They’d started going on expensive vacations in Europe and Hawaii, and he figured she’d be pleased at the prospect of taking more trips together, or at least at the prospect of seeing him around the house a little more, and not buried in his basement office. He had met her in graduate school over a quarter century ago, and they’d had their ups and downs, but he was still crazy about her. And he thought that, with a little more time together, she’d be crazy about him again too.

But no. She scarcely listened to any talk of retirement, or of vacations, or of anything he had to say. She had plans of her own.

“I want a divorce,” she said.

Paul was so stunned that he thought he must have misheard her. But her face told him otherwise. “She looked like the enemy,” he says. He started to think about everything he’d built: the thriving business, the wonderful family, the nice life in the suburbs. And he thought of her, and how much he still loved her. And then, right in front of her, he started to cry.

That night, he found a bottle of whiskey, and he didn’t stop drinking it until he nearly passed out.

Things turned shitty very fast. His wife took out a temporary restraining order, accusing him of attempting to kidnap their youngest son. The claim was never proved in court. Then, with the aid of some high-priced lawyers, she extracted from him a whopping $50,000 a month—a full 75 percent of his monthly income. Barred from the house, he was not allowed regular access to the office he used to generate that income. (On the few times he was permitted inside, his wife did not let him use the bathroom. She insisted that he go outside in the woods.) “My lawyer kept telling her lawyers, ‘You’re killing the Golden Goose,’ ” recalls Paul. “But they didn’t care.”

Crushed by the payments, and unable to work, he soon faced such a severe cash-flow crisis that he had to declare bankruptcy. His wife still did not relent. She charged that Paul had been abusive toward one of their sons. Paul says the charge is absurd, but it did its work, limiting his visitation rights.

Paul was sleepless and nerve wracked; his spirits plunged. He still missed his old life with his family. He missed the sound of it—the bustle of all the activity, the life. “I can’t stand the silence,” he says. “I miss hearing my wife breathe as she lay in bed beside me.” In his desperation, he twice overdosed on prescription medication, but managed to call 911 each time before the drugs took full effect, and medics rushed him to the hospital in time. “I don’t want to die,” he says wearily. “I want to live. But I can’t live with this torture.” He did manage to keep a few mementos of his former life. Pictures, mostly. But also the kids’ baby shoes. “I was always the emotional one,” he says. “But that’s all I have—the shoes, a few pictures. That’s all. I used to be jovial, happy. But not now. I’m a broken man.”


Long before his wife came along, a frame-store owner named Jordan Appel, 55, had built a fine house for himself atop West Newton Hill in one of the fancier Boston suburbs. He loved bringing in a wife and then adding two children. “It felt so wonderful to say ‘my wife’ and ‘my children’ and feel part of a community.” He volunteered for the preschool’s yard sale; his wife took up with a lover. Sometimes she slept with him in Appel’s own house; in time, she decided to divorce Appel. As these things go, he was obliged to leave the house, and, as it happened, the community too. Money was so tight that he ended up sleeping in a storage room above his frame shop two towns away. His ex-wife works part-time on the strength of Appel’s child custody and alimony payments, and spends time with her boyfriend in Appel’s former house. She lives rather well, and he has to make $100,000 a year to support her and the children, which amounts to 70-hour workweeks. One day, he went back to his house and discovered many of his belongings out on the sidewalk with the trash. “My body feels like it’s dissolving in anger,” he says. “I’m in an absolute rage every single day.”



This settles some issues:

1. Cupcake is only looking out for herself. Not for you. You're replaceable, and will be upgraded ASAP. And she WILL use YOUR kids and YOUR government to get what she wants regardless of what it does to you. That, my friends, is a mercenary.

2. She doesn't care about your shit. Which is why she wants it in the divorce. She doesn't want it herself, mind you, she just DOESN'T want you to have it.

3. Fathers really do care about their kids. That's what drives them to provide a home and security for them. It's a male version of "nesting". Kicking him out of his nest is akin to destroying him.

Now, given these 3 statements, who in their right mind would get married?

4 comments:

Pete Patriarch said...

Very powerful stuff. Anecdotes like this are the best way to get the message across to foolish men who think that men's activism is akin to hating women, beautiful women at the prime of their youth, genetic celebrities.

Shit. People are so fucking dumb.

Sociopathic Revelation said...

Once in a while, on forums like POF I read that women are left with little or nothing after being divorced, and how their ex-husbands are doing fine and dandy. It makes me wonder about it . . .

They could be lying. After all, it's easy to paint one's self in a good light and be the victim.

The good majority of divorces are jumpstarted by women, and then they bitch that CS payments aren't enough and how they have to fight to support themselves with a decent job. Perhaps they should have thought about that before they bailed. Of course, now that they are single moms, they are resentful of men that won't give them the time of day (i.e. support them financially).

The percentage of depressed men, men who use alcohol to assuage their pain, and the legit suicide attempts are far higher than women's as a given rule. And women are making out worse than men after divorce? Whatever.

With all the talk about their children, it's painfully obvious that they exploit fathers as a walking paycheck FOR MOM. I question the idea that they are doing everything for the children; I've seen divorced moms party as hard as any 20 year old slut in college. Where is all of the money going for? A warm meal for Johnny and clean clothes for school, or to fund her overboard hedonism and excesses?

Anonymous said...

May we find a day when decent men aren't driven to suicide by a corrupt divorce system.

May the marriage strike catch on like fire on jet fuel.

May it burn the matriarchy down like the Hindenburg.

MarkyMark said...

VJ,

Whenever I see articles like this, I wonder how ANY guy could even think of marrying. Why?! This article and others like it are published in MSM organs such as big city newspapers, so there are lots of people reading them, many of whom are men. The writing is not only on the wall; it's a big ass billboard that'd hit you upside the head if you looked at it-duh!

MarkyMark