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“Ugly divorce”
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I'm 35 years old and currently in the first stage of divorcing after recently deciding that my relationship of 13 years (seven years married) had to end. In the last three to four years my wife and me really grew apart and have started living separate lives. Whereas we were able to have good conversations in the past, this has been completely absent in the last years – years where personally I needed to be understood by my partner as I was facing a lot of stress due to work and an international transfer.

At the same point in time we got our first child together which obviously added to the stress levels, and changed the way we were around each other. I have tried many times to tell her that I was missing attention from her, even though I eventually (this took me 6-12 months after birth) understood that the dynamics of our relationship had changed due to the introduction of our daughter. Unfortunately things did not improve at all, and we got into more and more fights (with words only, never any physical action), which led me to take more distance from her at the end of last year.

This increased distance opened the door for me to make a mistake I had never thought I would make, I had an affair for a good three months. The affair has now ended, as we had started to seriously talk about us in the last few month. A process in which I confessed to her that I had an affair, and that my reason of initiating it was that I had already given up on our relationship.

In this period we spoke a lot about the feelings we experienced in the last few years, and tried our best to have more time just for us. (so arranging childcare to be alone together). But even though talking about everything felt good and helped to relieve built up stress, it did not help me to get back some of the feelings I had for her. In the entire period I had very sparse moments where I felt there was an opportunity to move on, versus the vast majority of the time feeling it had to end.

Two weeks ago I took the decision of completely ending our relationship as I have no more feelings for my wife, and am unable to see us having a happy and good future together for the next 40 years. As we are too distant from each other and don't really have shared interests. This decision caused a massive change in her behavior towards me, and she hasn't spoken a normal word to me since. The few times I have tried to speak about things, this immediately (give or take 30 seconds) escalated into shouting from her side, even with our young daughter present. The only thing she will tell me is: speak to my lawyer.

At present the situation at home can best be described as absolute hell, we completely ignore each other and can't even be in the same room without her starting to be hostile. Therefore I have started to move out to a room in the neighborhood, hoping that more time apart might help to settle things down, whilst still being close enough to be able to assist with anything if required. I want the best for our daughter in the future and feel we need to make good arrangements about everything in order to accommodate her as good as we can.

But I really struggle with my wife's behaviour as this makes it impossible to discuss potential arrangements in good fashion. Probably I need to give her more time to calm down, but she want to rush things and get divorced asap to get rid of me. What are my options here?

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