Leaving isn’t always better

[SpinningFloppa]

Does anyone else think people say to LTB too quickly and not take into consideration that it’s not always that easy? And for some staying is actually much easier? Once you leave you get no support and are just expected to get on with it and not even so much as moan as you made the choice to be a single parent 😒 is it any wonder that people stay when the alternative isn’t actually any better. I’ve tried to be strong in regards to my ex but what is the point when the grass isn’t actually greener! Has anyone decided to stay for the kids as leaving isn’t actually better?

Ex and I stayed together for 10 years longer than we should have.
What I have to show this from this is -
-bad mental health
-no energy left to parent kids properly (although they seem to be getting on well enough)
-no confidence eg don’t think I can get a new job. Even if I had a new job, I’m not sure if I could be bothered with doing it
-feel like all kids learnt about relationships is arguing

I think if you are staying together, you need to protect yourself mentally and not run yourself into the gutter. Also, make the kids see decent relationships and treat everyone with respect.

I have never seen anyone say it’s easy to leave.

lets take abuse out of it. And let’s take money out of it.
If your partner is disrespectful, miserable, doesn’t do his fair share around the house or with the kids, treats you like a house maid it is usually easier, treats you with contempt (all or a combination of some of these) life would be easier to leave. When you don’t have that person making everyone feel like shit, life is better.

Being a single parent isn’t easy. But it’s easier than trying to parent in the same house as someone who creates more work, provides no support other than financial and casts a dark cloud over everything.

Obviously, finances do come into it. Which is why no one is told to leave immediately unless there’s quite bad abuse. They are told to start planning and working on the plan. And it’s not better for the children to have that model for relationships. It’s not better for children to see one parent being treated badly. Those things impacts childrens outcomes. But leaving does need to be planned.

and you forget, 2 people have to decide to stay. If the relationship is miserable, who is to say the other person will stay indefinitely. So if you are staying because, financially, it would be better, you still need to prepare because being left with no warning is likely to like having a bomb thrown into your life. At least if you have a plan and working on it so you can leave, the other person leaving won’t be as devastating as when you are blind sided.

I take offense to this in a way, your suggesting being a single parent is a miserable existence, I can assure you it's not!
Why do you feel you need a man to cope with your life??

Leaving my Ex was not easy and it’s taken a good 12 years of struggle. I am in a foreign country and have no family support. I went into emergency accommodation and finally got moved to a damp, mice infested flat that was eventually demolished six long depressing years later. Ex never paid maintenance and I relied on benefits for ten years but ….. leaving was the best thing I have ever done because the long term cost of hiding in a shitty relationship would have ruined my mh long term.

I get the impression OP you’re seeking validation for staying, ultimately it’s your decision and you need to own it. However, I take great exception to your claim that those of us who LTB had family support and tons of cash. In my experience the IRL pressure to stay in a shitty relationship is greater and MN balances out those messages. MN should trigger critical thinking, it isn’t the magic eight ball!

I haven’t been in a relationship since Ex and that has everything to do with me not wanting to introduce another man into DD’s life and my BS tolerance levels being extremely low. I don’t think myself superior for leaving, I left because I would have hated myself for staying and I couldn’t have pretended that he was something he clearly wasn’t.

Im fortunate in that I’m financially Independant

frankly that’s the main thing . That’s why I’m happily single , as I have a roof over my head and a job

not because I have a trust fund but I’ve always worked hard

so job + tween aged kids = can survive

As long as there’s no violence or arguing in front of the kids. I grew up like that and I do not thank my parents for staying together for the kids. It’s not easy on your own no. Many people say LTB but in reality when it happens to them they don’t leave. I think sometimes a lot of pressure is put on women to leave but the same women just stay when it happens to them.

I've said many times on here that I left a loveless, sexless, at best dysfunctional, at worst abusive relationship 10 years ago.

I had no support and wasn't working at the time. So no income.

When I say no support, I mean none. Both my parents were only children and their parents/extended family were dead so no extended family for me. My dad died 2 weeks before the split and we'd gone NC with my mother 6 months earlier for reasons I won't go into here but it was not a decision I could have reversed even if I'd wanted to.

I had no friends due to the circumstances at the time - dad's extended illness, my relationship and the emotional load of dealing with my mother was too great.

It wasn't easy in the early days but I have never once regretted it and was prepared to stay single indefinitely. I dated a bit here and there but it took 10 years for me to have a relationship.

My children have both told many times that they are happier.

It certainly isn’t easy, even more so currently with the way the country is? How does anyone afford to do it?

I see the line “you deserve to be happy” trotted out a lot on here. I would say that you can be happy in other ways and it shouldn’t take a relationship to make someone happy. Often 2nd marriages tend to be worse than the first one and don’t last as long.

if a marriage is abusive then I would always advocate to leave.

if it’s just not 100% fulfilling then I would look for other ways to meet that need and find happiness in other ways as long as We rubbed along ok.

It certainly isn’t easy, even more so currently with the way the country is? How does anyone afford to do it?

There are plenty of us running a household as a single person with dependents.

So all you have to do is work hard, is what I’m getting from this thread. Lazy women bring it on themselves.

I left due to emotional and sexual abuse 8 years ago.

i wish I hadn’t.

Yes my DC were affected but he spent virtually no time with them and I was able to protect them from his behaviour. Now they spend solid chunks of time with him running me down, confusing them and generally being a sh*t father. He does nothing practical to help with parenting, pays the maintenance he has to and no more. Took them on holiday and literally left them in a hotel room for days while he went sightseeing with his girlfriend. Then I had to deal with the aftermath. They are still affected by him, yet now in some ways it’s worse.

Nobody really discussed that aspect of things with me. I expected him to eventually stop seeing them but instead it’s a weapon to hurt me with still.

The weird thing is that elsewhere on Mumsnet, people are shouted down if they admit to voting Tory (usually with ‘evil’ or ‘selfish’ prefixing if) told that teachers and nurses are using food banks and that children of working families are living in grinding poverty.

Wekk, which is it? Because we can’t have it all ways. Either poverty exists or it doesn’t.

All this talk of maintaining your career has a point if you command an executive position with a salaried role, sick pay and so on. If you’re a cleaner who gave up work when you had kids as couldn’t find the childcare can you honestly say that woman compromised her career? It’s all very middle class, isn’t it?

I have never worked harder than when I was a carer, doing in excess of sixty home visits a day, early mornings and late nights, Sundays and Christmas Day and bank holidays. I still had no money not because I did not work hard, I had no money because the pay was shite.

Some of you have no idea how people actually live.

It certainly isn’t easy, even more so currently with the way the country is? How does anyone afford to do it?

Its true. COL will leave more women trapped. That makes things worse. Not better.

I afforded to do it because I always maintained a job. I started planning to leave 2 years before I left and made a career out of, what I considered just a job before. And kept at that after I left.

If I was leaving now it would be so much harder. But that doesn’t make staying the better choice. But choices are shitty.

Sorry that last line was meant to be ‘Both choices are shitty’. It’s between a rock and a hard place.

But if you can get out, more often than not it would be better.

Spicycurry

sorry , not a day passes when I don’t thank whoever is above for my crap and yet secure job
and the privilege that got me into education and work

I know from my mental health support groups that people have what I have (mentally ill kid) and have to work away from home

we all choose different paths and I always knew one day it would turn to shit hence I’ve always worked

what I handle isn’t easy , but I’m also grateful

Spicycurry

id also challenge the assumption that the only work available is low paid
you are clearly intelligent and articulate

but I don’t know your circumstances , skill set and ability to transfer sideways

Yes and the thing I think is most overlooked is the fact that the person is never out of your life if you have children and sharing custody without living together is a living hell for most engaged parents and for the children, confusing and disruptive.

Wekk, which is it? Because we can’t have it all ways. Either poverty exists or it doesn’t.

Poverty does exist, and many, many people don’t live in poverty. Using stats from Joseph Rowtree Foundation suggests that 22% of the population live in poverty, meaning 78% don’t. Around 60% of those living in poverty are working age.

While we need to consider the structural and systemic issues that drive poverty, on a thread talking about poverty being a driver to stay in a bad relationship, it’s fair to also look at individual choices made in good times which are disastrous in bad, such as women becoming dependent on their partners income and removing themselves from the job market. Which you’ve clearly not done.

I disagree, just because I have heard more than one person say they wish their parents had stayed together ‘for them’, rather than have had to go through divorce/remarriage/new half siblings, all things they found more damaging to them than the prospect of their parents remaining together. I’ve seen it on here too, but of course it gets shouted down and dismissed because people don’t want to hear it.

I do think that the massive trauma that divorce can be to children is often brushed aside with a ‘children are resilient’. Like most things in life, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

I know it is awful and so so hard but ultimately I still think in your case you have done the right thing. You cannot protect your kids from the world all of the time.

My MIL just recently left after decades of this she is an absolute shell and even though FIL didn’t directly abuse the kids abusing their mother was abusing them and it has had enormous consequences for them.

As I said earlier in the thread where she lived there was absolutely no alternative but staying because the culture refuses to deal with abusive men and instead punishes women and children so it is absolutely not a comment on MIL staying in any way.

I think you are incredibly brave in the face of extreme injustice. Accepting we cannot always protect our children is one of the hardest thing any good parent will experience.

It’s not that it’s ignored. It’s that it’s impossible to say ‘it would have been better if xyz happened’ when it didn’t happen.

You can have no idea if life would have been better, had someone’s parents stayed together. It could have easily been a whole lot worse and that the parent who ends the relationship, could see where it was heading and wanted to stop that happening. The kids may have been blissfully unaware, their parents hates eachother, or that their dad was crap and disrespectful to their mother. But would have been aware further down the line. The building resentment could have made the home environment awful after a few more years.

Working on the assumption that life would be better because, as a child, you didn’t realise there was a problem until then doesn’t make sense. Because you have no idea that it would have been better.

Thats like me saying my life would have been great if I won the lottery at 17. I have no idea if it would have been. I might have pissed up the wall, found the pressure too much, got into drugs and be broke or dead now.

If the parents relationship is unhappy the far more likely outcome would be that as the kids got older, the home situation got worse. Not that things carried on with the kids in blissful ignorance of the problems.

I do agree, that the impact of divorce on kids in downplayed. But the kids who are traumatised by divorce are traumatised because at least one of their parents handled it poorly. It’s usually because one (or both) of the adults doesn’t put the kids first. Again, why do you think those parents would have been any better at putting their kids first, if they all lived in the same house?

You don't know that though, you didn't stay. You don't know how you would have been affected if you had.

Well yes of course, but that goes for both doesn’t it? The people that say they would have preferred their parents split, don’t actually know what that would have looked like in reality.

I don’t have any skin in this particular game as it were, but whether reasonable or not, people DO think that, just as they also think the opposite. My point is that it does vary according to individual, which is why absolutist statements are unhelpful.

Well anything would have been better than this.

Not bothered about sex now, but maybe that’s because I haven’t had it for so long 🤔
But yes, I’d love a cuddle and to hold someone’s hand.