How long have other people stayed together just for the children?

[Howmuchlonger123]

I think we really are just together now for the children, married 14 years, dc 9 and 10. No relationship between us except parenting, no sex, no affection, separate bedrooms, little conversation except the necessary. No conflict. Just doing life for the dc. How long have people kept going like this? 4 years so far. How long do we keep going?

The closest analogy I can think of to a functional marriage is a co-parenting arrangement.

I would have been more of a mess if my parents broke up. Surely our parents are not our only role models. We can see around us what is a healthy and not so healthy relationship and slowly come to the realisation, when we compare our families with those of our friends, that our family is not always the norm.

How many people do you know will say that their parents are ecstatically in love with their long term spouses. From the outside, it will still look pretty functional. Nobody knows what goes on in a marriage except the two persons in it. Even if the marriage does not bring great joy to its participants and ends up as a co-parenting relationship, I say it is still perfectly adequate for the children of that marriage and certainly preferable to a divorce.

I don't think I'd want "adequate" for the two most precious people on the planet to me? I'd want them to know I put them first and would never settle for "adequate" for them? Not in a car seat. Or a school. And certainly not in the atmosphere they live in?

ok, of all those things that you have mentioned, the only one you should be worrying about is about being poor. Having said that, you don't have to leave tomorrow, but you can start to prepare your exit little by little, by getting a job or a better one, start saving, start reducing your expenses while you are there to get used to living with less, and leave when you are ready.

It may be that you leave within a few months time, or in years but as long as you have that goal and work towards it, you will eventually be fine.

IME, being a lone parent has not been easy, but I have been very happy, DS and I are much closer than we were, we simply spend more time together and I have more time for him than when I was acting as a logistics manager for my ex, and lonely is the last thing that we have been, since the ex left, the house is full of friends, we are often out and about, and my friendships have become stronger.

I have worked hard to get the life we have, we are not rich, but that is no longer important, we don't need as many things as we did in the past. We have learned that a spontaneous picnic in the park with friends is equally or more enjoyable than sitting still in pizza express. We travel a lot, albeit not abroad. I work long hours, but that keeps me sane. so in general, we are very content with our life, it is a sharp contrast from the times when I was living one day at a time.

Life is about what you make it, not what you set up with.

C'mon, start living, we are only here in this world for a short time. Better to be poor and happy than rich and sad.

Ashamed to say I was with my ex for 14 years, at least 6 of them miserable. He ignored me and that was all I got. I was very unhappy.
Worried about lifestyle changes and the children missing out I put up and shut up.
Split up last year as finally could take no more. Children are happier , me and ex actually friendlier and all round relief.

It damaged me more staying with an emotionless man and having no intimacy or emotional support than the children and I went on to meet a really not great man who didn't deserve me but I was so grateful for someone who wanted me I couldn't see it was unhealthy. Have knocked that on the head now and am happily planning a summer break with my littles , we are much closer now. Don't set up a model for your children that makes them think what you have is normal.
It's a cliche but if you are happy they will be too.
Life's too short. I regret not being braver sooner.

notasgreen, it is "adequate" for my parents but wonderful for me and my siblings. The grass of divorce is not greener when compared with an adequate marriage, in fact much much worse in my 12 year old eyes. I am telling you what a child feels about her parents divorcing. Not every child feels like me but I have to counter the almost universal view (stated by parents on this site of course), that it is better for the children for parents in a loveless marriage to divorce than to stay together.

It is better for the parents, but don't put words in the children's mouths.

Studies show that children of divorced parents take the hit emotionally. It is not a pleasant statistic.

My parents divorced. It hurt me and my sisters a huge amount and knocked out confidence in life. They never argued, had a functional relationship. I do think it would have been better for us to keep things that way. Like many divorcees, the focus moved away from the children a little. My dad had new girlfriends to occupy his life and my mum went through a long period of craziness and introspection.

*I have to counter the almost universal view (stated by parents on this site of course), that it is better for the children for parents in a loveless marriage to divorce than to stay together.

It is better for the parents, but don't put words in the children's mouths.*

Child of divorced parents here. It was better fot my parents and my siblings and me that they split. No one is putting words in my mouth except me.

I'm quite shocked blueshoes that you never felt that guilt of knowing your parents were desperately unhappy and feeling that it was all your fault. That was how I felt for my whole childhood.

What I did not want was to live in poverty and be pushed aside because my parents decided to remarry and have children with their new other halves

Yep, that does happen too and it's something else that isn't often acknowledged on Mumsnet.

I don't think you can really tell whether it's better or not to split up at this stage OP unfortunately.

What does seem to be clear is that how you split up is as significant as if you split up. If it's going to be an acrimonious divorce then it's much worse for the children. If it's amiable then it seems anecdotally to have a much better outcome for the children ... as long as both parents are still involved and loving.

I'm the daughter of parents who stayed together for 'my' sake. In reality though I think it was as much for their sakes as mine as they were concerned about their futures apart.

In the meantime, as an adult I settled for some fucked up relationships because ok was good enough.

A parent marriage should be an example to what their kids are striving for. If they see an unhappy marriage as normal then they'll settle for less too and is not want that for my child. I'm very anti staying for the kids (and my parents just weren't the one for each other it wasn't a grim marriage) due to how it affected me.

PIL stayed together for their children, FIL having a very public affair, MIL I suspect being financially and emotionally abused.
MIL died aged 62.
Dh wishes they'd split up years ago, because his mother was miserable and bitter by the time she died.

I stayed for the sake of the children (because Dh was rubbish with them and I couldn't bring myself to put them in a situation where it was ever just them and him), because I was scared I couldn't cope on my own including financially, because I didn't think I was allowed to put my happiness before dhs.

Eventually I got too close to another man - a nice normal man who showed me what relationships could be like. We went from what could have been a difficult but straightforward breakup to me being a bad selfish cow and him being a wronged Saint.

Now we are both much happier and nicer people with new partners.

Just do it now before one of you falls in love with someone else.

Ps - my parents were miserable together and it directly affected my expectations of marriage and my view of my role in marriage. My own first marriage was pretty crap and I bitterly regret wasting so much of my time on it.

NoArmani: "I'm quite shocked blueshoes that you never felt that guilt of knowing your parents were desperately unhappy and feeling that it was all your fault. That was how I felt for my whole childhood."

I am sorry about the fact you felt it was your fault. No I don't feel guilt. I feel gratefulness that they put their children first. I don't feel guilty because I am not the one making the decision. Parents make the decisions and those decisions impact on their children. They decided to stay together - Neither me nor my siblings had any input into that decision. I don't feel at fault - that question does not make much sense to me at all and I suspect neither of my siblings.

I wonder if it makes any difference that my parents are still together. All my siblings and I are grown up with children now (and not divorced, I shall add). We are having a family reunion later this month, now we are scattered on different continents, so my parents can get together with us and the grandchildren again. Their marriage survived the rough patch and they have brokered their own peace with each other.

It is so wonderful they stuck it out for us and we are all together as a big family. This is one happy story of staying together for the children, to counter the tide of doom.

My mother was very angry with me when I said I wanted a divorce, she literally shouted at me "look at all I have done for YOU!". I just looked at her and thought "oh shit, no, I don't want to have your life".

Yes, a divorce is difficult for anyone involved, it is a wound you have to inflict on yourself in order to break free, but it is a last resource. Those people who think they did well staying for their children (or passing the blame to them), were obviously in not perfect but reasonably good marriages, or crippled with fear of going on their own.

I think, Blueshoes, that was the situation with your parents, things were not bad enough. Otherwise you would be joining the vast majority of children of divorced parents who say things were much better after the split (once the dust settled down).

Blueshoes would it be fair to say that your parents were friends and coparents rather than a romantic couple? If so it seems that they were not unhappy per se, otherwise they would have split after the kids left the nest. So yes i think that it makes a difference that they are still together, they survived a rought patch which is not the same thing as being unhappy for years.

My parents stayed together for us. It was shit. I wish they'd divorced years ago. It's not a good example to them.

What stigma for single parents?

Blueshoes that's not the evidence, or at least it wasn't when I studied it for my degree. Poverty was associated with more negative outcomes for children (and divorce makes this more likely) and so does conflict and mental health of parents. If conflict resolves after divorce (and it doesn't always) children tend to do better. These are population studies though so not necessarily applicable to individuals! Also not necessarily causative, but correlations.

I was replying to your earlier post if mine looks out of context!

Its a huge assumption that the state of your own relationship will influence your children's own relationships in the future, one way or another.

One of my long term single friends says she struggles with long term relationships as nothing matches up to her parents long, happy, loving marriage.

The OP is right to think about the practicalities of how a split would work.
Meerka's post is spot on - an acrimonious split leaving the OP in poverty and the father distant seems highly unlikely to make any child happier.

I don't think that being afraid of living in poverty is a fear to be scoffed at. Read the current tax credits threads.... :(

georgedawes, conflict does not always resolve (just look at the number of threads on mn with arsehole ex-es) and complexity is added when parents re-marry or have serial partners. I don't think there is any stigma with lone parenthood. That is a better situation than both parents re-marrying and then having their own children together with the result that the children from the first marriage feel like spare wheels in their own family, having already suffered the trauma of their parents' divorce and drop in living standards.

I am not saying my one example is the shining truth for everyone's experience. I know I am going against mn wisdom denial , but just have to make the point that divorce can often be very shit for the children and a better outcome could be for the parents to just tough it out.

Just to be clear, I am not recommending a woman stays in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship. That is toxic and children will do better to be removed from that situation. I am just talking about functional co-parenting marriages.