[shijie]

I’m going through this right now. I’ve done everything I could to try and save the marriage. My spouse is on the warpath. We have a 2 year-old daughter. I would be willing to work on myself and expect nothing in return for the rest of my life if it meant my daughter could go to the park with her mommy and daddy together. I cannot say the smallest part of how I feel. Unyielding personal torment and failure. Breaking up a family is truly lose-lose.

[mrsmee89]

I'm so sorry you're going through this. I know the feeling well. Keeping my family together was my numero uno. It drove me mad. I put myself in incredibly vulnerable positions. The thought of my kids growing up without knowing the love that brought them into this world seemed unbearable.

Looking back, while I was trying to keep my family together. She was trying to get the most out of our separation.

Once I accepted that we weren't going to be a conventional family, I was able to see things with clarity.

Accepting it is the hard part.

If you're married to someone that has experienced being in an unconventional family then this will feel a lot more normal to them, which absolutely sucks. I really feel for you man.

[WhiteWalker2021]

Sorry that you are going through this. Kids are super smart and can sense the energy very quickly. If mommy and daddy aren’t happy together, the kids will know, no matter how much you try to hide it. Also, if the parents aren’t getting along ..that isn’t a model of a good healthy relationship for the kids to experience either. Kids just need love and affection to grow into healthy and happy individuals. That love and care can exist even if the parents separated. Plus, you should choose yourself and your happiness too instead of compromising. Expecting nothing for the rest of your life isn’t a good value to pass on to your kids. Kids will like you and respect you more once they grow up if you choose yourself and your happiness! I totally understand that it’s important to give your level best to make it work and it’s an extremely tough decision to make, I am just trying to provide a different perspective. IMHO modeling healthy loving relationships is extremely important for the kids to witness as well. Wish you the best!

[bitexploder]

I have stood by a couple of friends over the years that went through really tough divorces. When you have children and the divorce is mostly forced on you it is very tough. It does funny things, as the article says. I told my friend once, with more insight than I realized at the time, something like this: “this will break you or make you something of a philosopher.” To that end I like the Stoics. A lot is out of our control. Figure out what is in your control and do your best with them (Dichotomy of control). It’s a good starting point. Sorry your family must experience this.

[tsol]

That reminds me of a Socrates quote "By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."

[bitexploder]

Hah, you know, that is probably where that originated from in my brain. I read that quote a long time ago! Thank you :)

[RNCTX]

My sympathies, I've been there. My daughter was a teenager, though, so not so bad. In a couple of years she was grown and on her own anyway.

I know it won't make you feel any better, but when you get into your late 40s (assuming you're younger due to the age of your daughter) it will dawn on you that there's nothing you could have done differently, it's not anyone's fault.

The cruel joke of life is that you don't know what to do until middle-age, and by then you have the briefest of moments to make the most of it because your physical / mental endurance is on borrowed time at that point. That sounds work-related, but the same things apply to people's social lives too. They don't recognize their compulsive behaviors and mistakes until they're old enough to know better. Some never do.

[bartvk]

I went through this, and it helped to vent (and ask advice) on r/divorce. You'll get honest answers if you ask for them. Also, I visited a therapist to guide me through the process. Regardless, I agree it's truly lose-lose right now -- it may very well change. You will make it through, because it's your daughter. Keep pressing on.

[yawnr]

I’m so sorry you’re going through this. No matter what, you can still have a great life and be a great father, though. Maybe not as tidy, but still beautiful.

[beachy]

It may sounds trite but I believe you will look back one day and realise this was just a step on the road, painful as it is now.

I suggest you hang in there until then, and do your utmost (swallowing whatever shit is necessary) to stay in good terms with your ex - for your daughter's sake.

[hyperpallium2]

> I would be willing to work on myself and expect nothing in return for the rest of my life if...

Going by children of divorced parents, doing this anyway is the best thing you can do for your child, your spouse and your self.

[lelanthran]

I've been through it, there's nothing you can do and if the mother is really out for blood she will use your child against you.

Women get rights, men get obligations.

[dang]

I appreciate that you've been through a difficult experience. HN users are welcome to share their experiences here. However, it's not ok to translate the emotion from the experience into flamewar comments. That's the problem with this one: you swerved into generic gender war rhetoric. That's harmful and not ok here.

Of course it can be very difficult not to leap from painful experience to dramatic generalization. But it's the sort of thing we all have to work on in order to have HN be the kind of community we're trying for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[dlsa]

When the child support ends a lot of power the state grants women to tear apart a mans life also evaporates. There's a possibility of a silver lining when child support ends. Divorced men need to remember that. Often times its the very start of men resuming a relationship with the children they've been blocked from seeing for all those years.

If men comtemplating suicide could realise this and see it as the light at the end of the very dark tunnel then they might keep their faith in themselves and their future.

[Damogran6]

I think that’s a truism that more people need to hear… “This, too, shall pass.”

I was struggling with identity and responsibility when the kids were young and and extremely helpful person on a forum told me that my life would not forever be “swamped husband supporting family with young kids”…or even “parents in a faily of four”…sure I’m still a father of two kids, but they’re off doing their own things and my relationship with my wife is a LOT more like the one I had as a couple, before being parents.

[watwut]

If men file for custody they get 50/50. Men who ask for full custody also statistically win more often.

You are doing disservice to both kids and men when you tell them they cant have it.

[klipt]

> If men file for custody

But that's not a random sample. Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.

If as an experiment you randomly selected a group of men and got them to file for custody, their success rate would probably be lower.

[lelanthran]

> Given the widely perceived bias against men, one would expect only the men with the strongest cases to try for custody, and you would expect them to have better outcomes than average men.

Actually, even on close-to-even odds, men don't try anyway (losing has a much larger effect if you're a man). See my response in this thread elsewhere for why I declined to fight when my estimated odds were 3/5.

[sharikous]

If it gets ugly the bias in favor of women gets stronger.

All of this is anedoctal but in my experience I saw many women willing to use false accusations of violence knowing it was a win win. They knew they wouldn't be punished even if it was proven the accusations were false. And that is a powerful tool to get custody.

And of course for younger children the custody to the mother is often enshrined into law directly.

[watwut]

And then there are men who are violent or abusive and neither cops nor courts believe the woman. Those are not rare at all.

Both situations happen.

[sharikous]

Yes unfortunately you cannot protect group A from the actions of group B hermetically without hurting group B, if group A and group B interact.

Someone will be hurt, or by the actions of a member of the second group or by the societal actions to protect the second group.

I just wish the compromise was clear and we abandoned the kind of puritanical thinking that we "ought to protect group X" no matter what. We need to talk, qualitatively and quantitatively, about all the sides of the coin.

[c_prompt]

> If men file for custody they get 50/50. Men who ask for full custody also statistically win more often.

You're pulling that statistic from where? At least from the US census bureau, here are the stats from 2002 that go all the way back to 1994 [1]: "In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994 (Table A). Overall, 27.6 percent of all children under 21 living in families had a parent not living in the home."

[1] https://valme.io/c/mens-rights/88qqs/a-tale-of-two-children-...

[michaelmior]

The statistics you cite are related, but doesn't refute the point that men who ask for full custody win more often. I don't know if that's true or not, but it can be true and also only 1/6 custodial parents being fathers can be true. It simply requires that significantly fewer men ask for full custody.

[lelanthran]

> If men file for custody they get 50/50. Men who ask for full custody also statistically win more often.

That's a nice statistic. Where did you get it?

> You are doing disservice to both kids and men when you tell them they cant have it.

Well I apologise for that, every lawyer I spoke to during my divorce (maybe ... 10?) said not to bother, the odds of a court deciding in favour of the mother were 3/5.

[sdenton4]

Not bothering to file because of a 3/5 chance of losing seems crazy. It's actually pretty hard to tell 60/40 apart from 50/50, especially if there's lots of covariates.

[lelanthran]

> Not bothering to file because of a 3/5 chance of losing seems crazy. It's actually pretty hard to tell 60/40 apart from 50/50, especially if there's lots of covariates.

It only seems like that because you're looking at the raw numbers. When you look at the actual stakes, it's quite different.

Let's say we play a coin-toss game: Each time I win the toss, I give you $1. Each time you win the toss, you give me $100.

Would you play? Think it's not fair? Okay, lets make it fair.

Each time you win, you win $1m. Each time you lose, you pay $1m. Would you play against me (I'm not rich)? Would you agree to play against Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos/etc?

It's not just the odds that matters, it's the fact t, even on even odds, in some cases you stand to lose much more than the opposing side.

[watwut]

> every lawyer I spoke to during my divorce (maybe ... 10?) said not to bother, the odds of a court deciding in favour of the mother were 3/5

That is completely absurd risk reward ratio to reject.

[lelanthran]

> That is completely absurd risk reward ratio to reject.

Not really. The impact of losing is "lose hundreds of thousands, be in debt for the next decade and have my work (and life in general) suffer", while still having to deal with having to then fight for access continuously.

The impact of winning was "losing hundreds of thousands, be in debt for a decade, and still have the risk of custody reversal in a future case".

The only winning move here is not to play[1] unless the odds are greatly in your favour - it's cheaper for the female so the female's impact in a win or a lose is substantially less.

Regardless of the risk/reward ratio, when 10 lawyers tell you not to bother, you'd be stupid to ignore their advice.

In any case, I still want to now where you got your statistics from.

[1] All I had to deal with after that was to enforce the contact. That took 3 court cases (luckily, all in my favour).

[watwut]

But women file for custody. Multiple states already have 50/50 being default custody.

Also, filing does not costs "hundreds of thousands". That is just not true. Poor people have those hearings and while it costs money, it costs significantly less.