A number of years ago I met my ex wife, who lived with me as my girlfriend. She never worked or supported herself financially. In short, she took advantage of me. I was 26 at the time and quite naive, and didn't realise how much I was being used.
My ex wife told me that she was a university student (studying to be a surgeon), and I would come home from work and she would tell me stories of what she had learnt at university. What I now understand is that she was never a student, and this was a complete lie, and I have no idea what she was doing with her time during the first years that we were together. She is a very dishonest and exploitative person and I am not the first person she has exploited - I have since learnt that there is a trail of people who have been harmed and lied to by her over the years.
After 2 years I made the mistake of getting married to her.
We were together for 4 years before we had a child together. In those 4 years my ex wife never worked, and just spent huge amounts of time and money on "studying" which never came to anything.
Once our child was a toddler, she began cheating on me, spending marital funds on an extramarital affair. She didn't apply for divorce because she had a very comfortable life with me, and enough money to be the big spender in her new relationship. I think that she has told that person that she is a successful businesswoman or doctor and lied about her age - I have often seen her introduce herself to new people as a person in various highly prestigious professions. So she was able to use my money to keep up this act.
After 2 years of the affair, I found out and instantly applied for divorce.
I have been separated from her for a year and got my decree absolute 1 month ago.
I have our child living with me so she isn't doing any childcare. As far as I can tell, she has started working 16 hour weeks, presumably in a minimum wage job. I have no idea what she does with the rest of her time. I am working 20 hour weeks and the rest of the time I am doing childcare.
I am trying to sort out the financial settlement as soon as possible.
I want to understand, does she have the right to the money I earned after separation? At what point is the cutoff taken? It seems unfair if she gets anything from what I earned after I discovered the cheating. Also, the deposit on the family home came from my premarital savings plus some of my parents' retirement savings. Does my ex wife still get half of all of that? Not a single penny has come from her.
Morally the fairest settlement would be that she would get half of the money acquired from marriage to separation (not the decree absolute), minus the money she spent on extramarital affairs, with no right to money I earned before meeting her, or money I got from my parents. Is there any relationship between the law and what is morally right?
I understand that being pregnant is a contribution in itself, but since I am doing the childcare, the traditional contribution of being a SAHM does not apply.
I am worried about losing half my assets and will be set back to my early 20s financially. This person has done almost nothing but use me for 10 years - she is not even doing any childcare. It appears there's an assumption in family law that a person who is not working, is contributing in some way. What happens when that isn't the case? There are genuinely useless and exploitative human beings out there. How can you protect yourself if you make the mistake of marrying one? And can you make it clear in the divorce process that this was a genuinely useless person?
Meanwhile, whatever I give her, she will leave the marriage far richer than she was when I met her, and far richer than she would have been if I had not worked so hard over all these years.
How can one person have the right to the fruits of another's hard work in this way? How can that be right?
My ex wife is what I would call a "non functioning adult" - I have never seen her hold down a job, or complete basic adult tasks like paying bills. She seems unable to look after herself, a child, or even a pet (she keeps acquiring new pets and then neglecting them, accidentally killing them or mistreating them - she has got through one dog and two cats in the last 2 years). In the marriage, she was like another child that I had to look after.
I suspect a severe personality disorder or mental disability, but have never been able to get her to a psychiatrist. I recently read a book on personality disorders and one of the commonest signs of some of the disorders is pretending to be a doctor, surgeon or nurse because of the prestige afforded to these professions. My ex wife has pretended to be all three of these things with me and other people. The house is full of medical textbooks on surgery from the 1970s which she got in a car boot sale but she has never read - she just keeps bookcases of these on display for visitors and she has a real medical stethoscope and a few other bits of paraphernalia. Whenever I mentioned to her that we should get rid of them because they are taking up space, are years out of date, and nobody reads them, she gets furious and I had to drop the subject! I have paid for countless preparation courses for her to actually make her dream a reality and go to university but she has gone half heartedly and stopped turning up at the classes and failed all the most basic exams. It's as though she has no interest in studying these things in reality, she just wants to take the shortcut and pretend to have studied this - I think because what she wants more than anything is people's respect and admiration.
I know that the commonest trope in divorces is to say "my ex wife is nuts" but what can you do when that is really the case?
The thing that makes my ex wife very dangerous is that she appears when you first get to know her to be a bit ditzy, perhaps scatterbrained or not very smart, and she is in many senses, but she knows how to manipulate. And because of her outward appearance of being a harmless and slightly ditzy person, people let their guard down and she ends up lying to them and taking advantage. The way I see it is that, because she didn't learn to deal with life's challenges in the normal way (study, work hard, make sensible decisions), she has learnt a completely new tactic to get through life which is by lying and deceit on a huge scale.
Has anybody else ever been in this situation? How do you get out of it? The divorce process is dragging on forever and I am losing years of my life, in addition to the years I already wasted being exploited.
My family think she's just a gold digger that got unlucky - she just wanted to exploit money out of me, and didn't count on having a child with me, which scuppered the plan. I have been reading about Anna Sorokin, the lady who pretended to be a Russian heiress to exploit money out of people - this reminded me so much of my ex wife. The crazy stuff she has done is off the scale for normal people but I find it's hard to deal with since people tend not to believe me, or to say "well there must be two sides to the story".
Sorry but there are not two sides to the story, I am dealing with a genuinely awful person who lies and cheats and steals her way through life. How do you deal with this? How do you get people to believe you?
And more crucially how can you present what is going on in the financial settlement? How can you get the dishonesty and exploitation taken into account? Or is this just completely ignored?