Is he an asshole or has he done the right thing?

[MarjorieWinklepicker]

So my dsis partner of 11 years left her two weeks ago. This was completely out of the blue, told her he had simply fallen out of love with her and of course she was completely devastated. They have two dc, aged 5 and 1.

I immediately suspected someone else but I didn't like to suggest it to her at the time. But lo and behold he reveals (on Valentine's Day too) that he has developed feelings for someone else. He says he hasn't had an affair and this ow doesn't even know about his feelings for her, but they are in constant contact and he had an inkling that she likes him back.

My DH has turned around and said "well at least he has done the right thing, ending his relationship before starting another". I can't get my head around that kind of thinking. He has completely destroyed dsis and their dc all because he fancies someone else? His timing couldn't be worse either as dsis has other issues going on (bereavement and health issues).

Just wondering how I can support her and what are the right things to say.

So sorry to hear this is happening to your Dsis and her little dc. Try and support her in practical ways. How will she get to work, do school runs and do her shopping? What benefits can she apply for and how can she get her ex to support both their dc?

I think it is beyond cowardly and speaks volumes about this man's personality by leaving one afternoon, unbeknownst to your Dsis and their little kids. Who the fuck does that?? Only a callous, nasty piece of shot would merrily skip into the sunset leaving his offspring behind and not care a jot about how their former partner and mother/father of their children copes. He has essentially caused massive trauma to the dc's main care giver and not even had the decency of just sitting her down and telling her about what he's going to do.

Rudeelf, I normally agree on so many of your posts with you but here I beg to differ. Yes he has every right to leave but he has a legal obligation to sort out responsibilities and care for the children and a person he spent a decade with and who has most likely made work/earnings sacrifices to give him those children.

No one is beholden to a partner for life and people change, fall out of love, life happens but really, you have kids and just walk out stealthily and not say a thing?

People are entitled to a new life but you've got to tie up loose ends and still co-parent together for the sake of the children you chose to have.

You only have your sisters side of the story. The DH might have used his " crush" as a reason to leave.
No one knows what goes on behind closed doors do they?
Okay it is never nice when partner leaves, but at least he hasn't strung her along for years.
Just be there for her; support her through this crisis. It's horrible for her and the children but they will get there in the end.

Rudeelf, I normally agree on so many of your posts with you but here I beg to differ. Yes he has every right to leave but he has a legal obligation to sort out responsibilities and care for the children and a person he spent a decade with and who has most likely made work/earnings sacrifices to give him those children.

You will see nowhere on this thread where i have said this man can or should neglect his legal obligations to his children! And if you have seen my posts elsewhere on MN i am shocked that you think i would ever say that. Because it certainly isnt what i am saying or what i think. Nowhere have i said that. Why do you think i have?

Not more shocked than I am

By omission I guess. You just keep repeating that he can just leave by stealth and not care about how his ex partner consoles the children/comes to grips with this swift and wordless ending of a decade long relationship.

Sorry if I seem to have made assumptions into accompanying facts which you have not addressed at all.

Point is we are free to pursue our lives but not to the extent of being oblivious to our obligations.

"You just keep repeating that he can just leave"

Yes he can. Absoloutely.

"by stealth and not care about how his ex partner consoles the children/comes to grips with this swift and wordless ending of a decade long relationship."

No. You wont have seen anywhere where i said he was right to leave by stealth and not care how she deals with it. I cant imagine why, having been familiar with my posts on other threads, you would assume in the absence of any comment addressing it that those are my feelings on it.

My comments about him having the right to leave have only been about that. He isnt an asshole for leaving. You will see i have said he was wrong to be engaging with the OW as he has before ending with his partner. You will see i said he was wrong to be publicly flaunting his new relationship before ending his relationship with his partner. You will see i have said he was wrong to take the family car. You will see i expect that he will continue to parent and support his children.

You will see i expect that he will continue to parent and support his children.

Can be tricky when you are no longer living in the family home and may (I say 'may' as we don't know how often)not see them that often. Support yes, parent - trickier.

Of course, doesnt mean there wont be some parenting happening on his part. Unless he just opts out entirely

There are a lot of posts on the relationships board telling women that not wanting to continue being in a relationship with someone anymore is the only reason you need to split up. You can leave a relationship for any reason you want to.

Same applies for men.

However, they are still 50% responsible for their DC.

^^this exactly.

There are a lot of posts on the relationships board telling women that not wanting to continue being in a relationship with someone anymore is the only reason you need to split up. You can leave a relationship for any reason you want to.

But you'd hope that would be after lots of thought, lots of conversation and lots of planning for the welfare of the children.(with the obvious exception of abusive relationships)

To just walk and it comes out of the blue to the ex and the children, isn't right.

I think he did do the right thing, if everything is as he says then he absolutely did the right thing.

There may or may not have been some kind of emotional affair going on but it's going to be very very rare that someone is going to leave someone at the first sign that they may develop feelings for someone else.

It's also very, very hard for people to leave when there are children involved.

However, if he had been feeling like this for a while then he should possibly have suggested counselling, with a young baby and a young family in general then you owe it to them to try everything to make it work.

But then we don't know the details of the relationships and perhaps there were problems there that he didn't think they could overcome.

But the OP isn't just asking if he can leave, she is directly asking if he can leave like THIS.

So while technically he can very well leave I believe it's the manner in which he has left which has opened up a can of worms.

Either way, I think the OP sounds like she'll help her Dsis and nieces/nephews as much as they need and I hope in time they will not focus on the ex and how he left but look ahead and plan a future without him. The manner in which he has left will come back to haunt him in the future.

I mean which woman in their right mind would like to be involved with a twat that ups and leaves just like this? Writing's on the wall on that one..

The Op asked if he was an asshole or as her DH said has done the right thing.

I think elements of both. (As i have said across multiple posts) not sure why i'm having comments attributed to me that i never said.

I know a man who's done something similar, he fell in love with another woman who he wasn't having an affair with, and she'd left the country for a year, being v unreachable (so no real hope of a relationship with her), but he said realising he loved someone else exposed how little he cared for his wife.

He did end up with the ow but a long time later (and I believe he dated someone else in between, who everyone thought had been the ow, all very awkward), but really she was just a jolt that he was in a relationship with someone he got on ok with, but there was no love.

Op, if your bil doesn't love your sister, how would talking it through have helped her? "I have realised I don't love you, am considering leaving you." How awful would that be? That would be cruel pushing her into a "make him love me" situation.

It might be there's an emotional affair going on and the ow will be aware of his feelings and pushing him to this, or she might be blissfully unaware.

Another issue op- have you thought your sister might be playing up this "crush" as the alternative is too painful? If there's an ow, there's a reason he left, someone to blame. If there's not, what is your sister left with? He rejected her. He doesn't love her. If there's no external reason, then it's just she's not good enough.

I know another couple who are divorced, he left for an ow, the wife kept saying "it won't last, he'll come crawling back" and it didn't, ended with a few months of him leaving. But he didn't try to come back, I believe she made it clear he could come back if he wanted, but he pressed ahead with a divorce, something the exw found harder than the initial break up, she thought he was leaving to be with ow, not just wanting to not be with her. Up to that point, she hadn't seen it as rejection of her. (I worked with her and it was that point she fell apart)

Yes he can just leave if he wants. But that doesn't make it morally right does it? You get married with the intentions of being honest and trying to work through problems. This isn't an abusive reladtionship. It really isn't fair for him to just decide he wants out and he s going with out trying to sort his marrage out- add on the fact he has a small toddler and one in the way, whose life path he is about to change forever. He absolutely should have talked, discussed and tried one last time.

Regardless if he has slept with this OW or not, he left op sister, whilst pregnant because he just couldn't wait to have the fresh new Relationship. He has already been sleeping with her.

Yep he is a selfish, arsehole.

The truth is that it is extremely rare for 2 people to agree they want their relationship to end at the same time, one will want to work for it, the other wouldn't and there is no way around it, people will get hurt when a relationship ends, it is part and parcel of being in a relationship, one will be heartbroken at the end even if it is because one passed before the other.

He has a responsibility towards his children, but you cannot assume he is walking out of it just because he left the house a couple of days ago. These things get talked calmly and agreements are made when the dust has settled a bit.

Personally OP, I think you are doing a big disfavour to your sister by focusing so much in what the guy has done to her. You shouldn't make your sister feel so much as the victim because, although it is absolutely natural to feel victimised at being left to raise 2children mostly on her own, you are disempowering her.

What she needs is support in finding answers on how to move on from now on, and the support to put things in place for her life to continue.

I had a very acrimonious divorce process, it was really bad. I was miserable and scared but working hard trying to move on and get some stability and normality for myself and my son. Having people who just talked about how bad the ex had been to me, certainly made me more miserable and I started avoiding them.

There are two kinds of support:

1. that bloody miserable bastard, how on Earth did he dared to do something so horrible to you and left you fully destroyed with the responsibility of raising 2 kids??? He has ruined your life!
2. That he has done is absolutely awful, how can I help you to put things in place to make you feel more secure?

The friends that really helped where the ones who offered the latter. Because they helped me rebuilt my life.

If it was my sister, yes I'd probably be calling him all the bastards under the sun.

But with any objectivity, he's done the right thing. I can't see why he should have talked it all through if he knew deep down that he really was going to leave.

On affair threads, we are told that if people want to have a relationship outside their marriage, they should leave that marriage first. Yet when anybody actually does this, they get slated.

What's the answer? Stay in a relationship while harbouring thoughts of leaving, and of somebody else?

If he really wanted out of his relationship, it looks like he's done the least worst thing.

Talking it over, if he'd already made up his mind, would be cruel and unnecessary.

Your sister must be devastated, OP. Telling her it could be worse wouldn't be helpful, obviously. But it really, really could have been. If you could focus on that, you might help your sister move forward a bit easier.

Did DP do the right thing? Very similar happened to me and this is why I think not.

These abrupt endings are a denial of due process to the other party. IME DP is likely to be trying to comply with OW's terms of his being free before she invests too much in him. OW is already his lover.

From what OP says there is nothing honourable or loyal that DP has done, and it will be hard for Dsis to separately co-parent with a deceiver because this all seems to have happened so smoothly for him. Loyalty, duty, compassion have no meaning to him as shown by his actions. Mantras like 'there are always two sides' leaves a particularly nasty taste in cases like this. Two faces more like.

It may be true that you don't know what goes on in a marriage, but if you use your nous you can see the fallout - the evidence is there in some form if you look objectively. It leaves me wondering why we as a society tolerate people trashing the lives of others? Oh, I forgot, it's not against the law. Great.

I guarantee you if you speak to my STBX he would tell you that we had had a great relationship and that I had just suddenly ended it one day without discussion and totally out of the blue. I think that he actually believes that. But I assure you its not the case, I had repeatedly told him that it wasn't working, we had tried to fix it and I eventually said that I couldn't do it any more). I think that while its common for one person to be the one who wants to end it, its also not uncommon for the other party to have ignored the signs that it is ending (however clear and obvious).

There are a lot of posts on the relationships board telling women that not wanting to continue being in a relationship with someone anymore is the only reason you need to split up. You can leave a relationship for any reason you want to.

I'm amazed at the number of people who seem to think that if you don't love someone anymore than it's ok to just leave. Just like this.

For one you need to ask yourelf what 'loving someone' actually means? Is it always a strong feeling, does it have its ups and downs? Does it change with time (ie what you feel when you love someone after 2 months is that the same that what you feel after 2 years, 5, 10 or 30 years? I don't think so).
I suspect that what a lot of people talk about are the butterflies, the 'rush of love' when they see their partner. The time when they could only see the qualities and very few of the deffects and they didnd't matter. If you are realistic, that's not going to happen in the long run and certainly not with young children that WILL put some strain on the relationship (because it changes the dynamics, it means two peopole who are more tired, less money, less time for yourself yada yada yada).

But more importantly, to love is a verb. Not a noun. Not a feeling that you just feel and can't be changed. Something that just happens. You love by what you do, how you look at the other person. I do believe that you can make yourself love someone as well as fall out of love of someone.

So before saying 'well I don't love her anymore so I'm leaving', I really would expect some conversation going on. I would expect some efforts to be out into the relationhsip, into loving that person.
Not a simple. 'Well I don't love him/her so I'm leaving.'

And that's before you even start talking about the effects on the children (Eg some studies actually show it's better for children to be raised in a family where people have 'fallen out of love' but are still civil than by separated parents). Would you sacrifice your own 'happiness' for your children or is it a case of 'happy parent = happy children' so I can do whatever I want?

IME DP is likely to be trying to comply with OW's terms of his being free before she invests too much in him.

Yes, that's probably very close to the truth.

Tiger the one thing I have done to support her is to help her feel empowered and believe that she doesn't need him to be happy. I have listened to her slag him off and call him names but I haven't really done that myself, as I know full well they could get back together (although looking very unlikely as he has made up his mind).

He is a good father and I have no doubt he will continue to co-parent with dsis although at the moment she is reluctant to have him do too much as I think she wants to show him she can do it without him.

Obviously he has done the right thing as he says he feels absolutely nothing for her at all and now has these feelings for someone else. But the way he has gone about it is just all wrong. He has shown no respect for dsis or their dc, a few days after he had left he got back in touch to ask if he could move back in because he had nowhere to go. But she wasn't to talk to him about any of it and she wasn't to come anywhere near him whilst they were both there at the same time. Apparently it was meant to make it easier for her obviously she told him to fuck off.

She's angry right now but she seems a lot more positive than she did a week ago. And she has now found out it is her close friend he has developed feelings for despite this woman also being in a relationship. I know it happens but it's really shitty behaviour.

well- if he doesn't love her, he doesn't love her.
he can't help that.
still though, how easy it was for him to walk out on his kids! i smell an OW but she'll probably never get the truth out of him.
fuck him.
let the OW take the booby prize. that's all he's worth - the wooden spoon.