My ex wants to take our children 50% of the time

[Shakespeareandi]

Can my ex just decide to have children 50% of the time? He moved out following an affair with a mutual friend whose children would often play with ours. He has recently moved into a new place and is now claiming he can have the children 50% of the time.

I feel the children should have one stable home, and I never wanted to have a broken family. His name only on the deeds and mortgage for the house that the children and I still live in. He has kept paying the mortgage since he moved out. I cover all other expenses. My wages would not cover the mortgage. My name is not on the deeds or mortgage because he said we got a better mortgage deal that way. I have paid for bills and he has paid the mortgage. Yes, I know what an idiot I have been, so please be gentle. I am in so much pain as it is.
Currently, I have about £3,000 in savings, so I have to be very cautious about how I spend it. I've been in touch with a solicitor to see if it's worth spending £350 an hour (for context, I earn £15 an hour), but they haven't been back in contact yet. Our children are 6, 10, and 14 years old.

My family all live abroad and while I have supportive friends, there's only so much they can do.
Rents are very high. There's no chance I could privately rent. Maybe a 1 bedroom place but letting agency's have said singles or couples only. Council houses are pretty much non-existent and with long waiting lists. If he makes me homeless (he has threatened), he says he could have the children 100% of the time as he can provide safe housing with him.
To make matters worse, he was an alcoholic for years and has started drinking again but seems to be managing things at the mo. I feel so alone and sick with nerves. I am trying to keep things amicable and scared what he can do.

I know how stupid I have been. I feel rubbish and sleeping very badly but keeping it together for the children. If I could turn back time I would. I also still love him and want our family back. He doesn't.

Thank you for this. I know it wasn't to me, but I needed to hear it.

OP, please don't panic. I'm sorry you are facing such a difficult situation but you can get through this step by step and life will look different one day. You've made a great start having the courage to post about this online and you sound smart, even if you haven't previously been smart about prioritizing your own interests. Taking any free advice available (free initial legal, citizens advice, friends, online, but not AI which is often inaccurate) will help you feel more in control, and help to prioritize first steps. Accepting 50/50 temporarily does seem sensible for the moment.

As others have pointed out he seems to have screwed you over financially and he's also clearly cunning with his business finances. Therefore you need to be hyper aware that what he says may not be in your interests. BUT, I would agree with your instinct to avoid upping the ante just yet in case it makes things worse. You know better than anyone here whether this man has any shred of decency / guilt and might agree to a fairer outcome re the house than he is obliged to legally. When he threatened making you homeless and having the kids 100% was that as cold and cruel as it sounds or a panicked response on his part to you not wanting 50/50? If you think he might have any decency, you could calculate roughly what you have each put into the family financially since the house was bought (mortgage, bills, food, things for the kids, financial value of your childcare etc) and propose a share of the equity in the house based on this. I'm not suggesting many men would give you all this if they didn't have to legally, but you may get something and his reaction to the proposal would be useful in itself for telling you how to proceed.

If you need to play hard ball then you probably do have some cards up your sleeve, given you know he is hiding money from HMRC. You would be able to point out that he may not want solicitors / court/ financial investigator looking into his finances and that you are willing to help him avoid too much exposure for a fair settlement. Can you quietly collate any evidence of this, not necessarily to use, but to show him you are not a walk over if you need this?

There's some great advice on this forum, but keep in mind that it's all based on posters' own experiences of men. You need to filter it to fit with what only you know about your own relationship, whilst also being aware that your emotions may mean you want to see some aspects of your ex's behaviour and not others.

Good luck and things may look very different for Xmas 2025.

This.
It's alarming the amount of women who have children without the protection of marriage.

There is no ''Common law wife'' rule in UK.

www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/living-together-marriage-and-civil-partnership/living-together-and-marriage-legal-differences/

He's not threatening to make her homeless, their relationship is over and OP is living in his house. He doesn't have a financial obligation to OP and she is responsible for housing and providing for herself. They have a shared responsibility to provide for their children. She's not his child.

Get practical. If he has already left you are entitled to a 25% discount on your council tax as the only adult in the house. Apply today and try to backdate it to when he actually left.

Go through the broadband, phone etc bills and look to get on the cheapest suitable deals, cancel unnecessary subscriptions etc.

Together these could reduce your expenses by a few hundred a month and you are going to need that money.

Maybe he actually loves his children and wants them 50% of the time.

@Shakespeareandi

''He has made investments that pay off monthly. While he doesn't have huge amounts, it was enough to live off. He can sort his wkrk in a couple of hours a day. As a business owner and self-employed individual, he doesn't report a lot of earnings officially.''
^^

This was exactly what my husband did.

He's {still} self employed, and certainly when I was with him, he was paid a lot in cashmere and kept a diary where only a couple of 'jobs' were written in there, the rest were on bits of paper put in the diary that were destroyed.

I used to find bundles of notes under the piano !

During our Divorce, I told my Solicitor this, but the solicitor said ''there is no proof''...

I only ever got £25 a week for DS.

However...I was able to keep the marital home and buy him out, so that was a major thing. {was very difficult financially so we were very poor}

Never said he didn't? But the guy threatens op with homelessness and has consistently acted to ensure she has no financial protection, cheated on her, recieves the child support even though she's been doing the primary childcare and is generally a wrong'un.

.

Astonishing how people defend men like this.

..''Maybe he loves his children and wants them 50 % of time''

Except he's happy to see their mother homeless, so she's not got a place to house them during her 50%.

Nice dude.

NOT.

He knew what he was doing protecting his own interests only. Arsehole.

But the guy threatens op with homelessness

We don’t actually know how that conversation went though. Maybe the ex has been trying to talk about the way forward with the OP but she’s been refusing to talk and just wants her and the children to stay in the house whilst he pays the mortgage for evermore. Maybe he’s got so frustrated, he said, ‘I could just get you to leave you know, and then your housing would be your own responsibility’ (true).

We don’t need new laws, we just need people to be aware of the ones there are. I have seen so many women on here pregnant or with young kids not wanting to go back to work and when marriage has been suggested, saying, ‘that’s so old fashioned, it’s not an issue being married out of wedlock/this isn’t the 50s, you know!!’. And the another load of posts by women in exactly the same totally vulnerable situation as the OP.

You need legal advice. Child benefit should be in your name also. Apply for UC, why wouldn't you? Unmarried, you have not much of a leg to stand on unfortunately. I'm going to assume he only wants 50/50 to avoid maintenance. My ex said this. He couldn't cope with a few hours a week, let alone 50/50 and ended up moving to the other end of the country and abandoning our child. The realities of it are very different. Please see a lawyer. Find somebody on the Resolution website.

He might just want to be with his kids.

he says he could have the children 100% of the time as he can provide safe housing with him.

This is true and not something that the OP is currently able to provide, sadly.

Oh and get a maintenance application in TODAY. Yes it will change if he gets 50/50 (and that is reliant on him applying to court for that...will he?) but open a case and get the ball rolling. These are things you have control over currently.

@howshouldibehave Of course he might, but he's got a drink problem. I can count on one hand the amount of my friends ex's who have stuck to 50/50 and been a capable and invested parent. I'm not suggesting he doesn't love his children but the reality of having children half the time often doesn't work.

Yeah this thread responses has been really odd. Its as if theres a bunch of men giving it 'not all men' on it or something. No one's saying all men are knobs, we're saying this one is.

Wanting to spend more time with his kids doesn't change that. But I guess the bar is set so low for men that maybe some people are giving him a pass for all the other shit.

Like, who cares if he shagged ops friend, tore apart the family and now wants to make her homeless? He wants more time with his OWN children aww what a Saint.

I was just thinking about the horror people from countries that still promote moral fibre would display at the thought of man being such a stain on society that he'd abandon his family and turf the mother of his kids out on her ass. I think we need to stop being so understanding towards fucking losers like that.

Same thing goes for anyone not only low enough to cheat, but to actually cheat with their partners friend!

When did we start tolerating this crap as a society? People like him should be publicly shunned.

I totally disagree.

Nobody should be entitled to have a claim to someone else's home based solely on the fact that they happen to have a baby together. If you want those kinds of protections, you need to get married. It should be a commitment that both parties go into with their eyes wide open, not something that just happens based on a pregnancy.

Sometimes it doesn’t work but as a teacher in a primary, I would say most now are 50/50 where both parents are local and more than not, it works ok. There’s loads of great dads out there :)

OP, a lot of people are telling you to get legal advice asap but I don’t agree. Very good legal advice costs a fortune, which you don’t have. You are not married and so you don’t have much of a legal leg to stand on. Your ex does hold the cards here.

Your best bet is before things start becoming less amicable is to appeal to his good nature to try and sure up your precarious position.

I would agree to 50/50 uncontested. I would also request a sale of the house with you receiving 50% of the equity in the house. I’d try and get that done and dusted as quickly as possible. Then take your share of the equity and buy your own, smaller place.

Don't do anything to rattle his cage until you have your own place. He could turf you out of your house, give you nothing and move the OW and her children in. He can also afford better legal advice than you.

You need to be very careful how you play this right now. Appeal to his guilty conscience. Don’t let him turn you into the bad, difficult ex.

He also put the child benefit in his own name, despite OP being a SAHM for 6 years, depriving her not only of the CB money but far more importantly, the years of NI contributions towards her own pension.

This is simoly forcing anyone who wants to have a fair cut of the meat into a single option: marriage. That's not how it should be, marriage comes with it's own pitfalls.

Some of the replies on here - don't have children or buy a house or have any kind of life without getting financially and legally bound forever to one person first. That's pretty puritanical and smacks of patriarchy. Heaven help you if you get pregnant by accident - but I suppose having sex outside of wedlock needs to be punished somehow. And you want to stay at home to care for your shared children? Get back to the job market, idiot - put your kids in childcare even though you want to do it yourself. Well, you can't - not until you've signed this ancient document.

There should be more options - living together and having a family should absolutely confer fair financial protection to both parties. At the very least it should prevent worms like OP's ex from doing exactly what he's done with zero accountability.

@Simonjt

It isn’t her house, I have to assume you would give someone else your home and pay the mortgage for them, as otherwise you would be a bastard who means harm.
No it's not her house. But not because he was generous and wealthy and bought the house himself. But because he was sly and conniving and arranged for him to pay the mortgage and the OP to pay for everything else knowing full well that this meant he got the house whilst she just paid for consumable costs.
This is not some 'ooooh he's great and smart enough to buy a house' situation. This is a 'he's a bastard who knew exactly what he was doing' situation

In one of the 50/50 families I know , Dad refuses to buy clothes etc for the children so they do indeed have to pack/ unpack every change over . Anything left seems to end up with another child in the blended family !

Some of the replies on here - don't have children or buy a house or have any kind of life without getting financially and legally bound forever to one person first.

I haven't said that at all - I've said that if you need the protection of marriage because you're a low earner, or because you want to stay home with your children, then you need to use your head and not have children until that protection is in place.

Lots of women are disadvantaged by marriage and don't want to tie themselves to a man just because they've had a baby. In fact, there are many situations on here where it would be infinitely more simple for the woman to just be able to walk away and start over, but with a cohabitation type agreement in place by default, that wouldn't be possible.

You need to contact Women's aid.
He insisted you not work full time.
He insisted you pay bills, food, childrens things and not the morgage.
Do not move out of that house under ANY circumstances.
Tell him to go to court.
He has financially controlled and abused you deliberately.
Wake up to that.
Get on to Women's aid and get advice.
Agree to nothing.
Let him force you into homelessness first.
Do not allow your children stay with him.
Don't be bullied.
Tell him to take you to court.
You have been controlled and abused by him.
Be clear on that point with Women's aid.
Perhaps you can get free legal aid.