resentment over ultimatum

[whiningshinji]

Many years ago my wife gave me an ultimatum around having a third child. I adamantly didn't want a third, but to spare my other two children a broken home I acquiesced.

All the things I knew would happen happened. I got locked into a high pressure,high paying job I hated to cover heightened costs, free time totally evaporated and the friends I did have soon drifted due to me going from work to home and back again and never seeing anyone! My hobbies, modest though they were all withered due to lack of time/funds. My wife maintained some of her social contact and hobbies once all children were into school(less full on job with better annual leave - mine unsurprisingly was stingy and was absorbed by school holiday coverage)

The resentment I felt towards my wife over this never went away. Our third child is now approaching adulthood and all I can think about is leaving.

I got dragged to yet another (tiresome) couples thing by my wife. I normally don't drink, but I had a couple this time. We were talking to some people who were talking about how hard the baby and toddler years were and how they stopped at one, saying to us and another couple how did we manage three. I said it was a very hard slog - my wife chipped in by saying that we wouldn't change a thing.

Apparently at this point I scowled and muttered that I would. I wasn't even aware of doing this! Either way my wife is now getting an inkling that my mindset hasn't been changed by the years. He attitude has wrongly always been she was right and that I fell into line in the end and was content.

Now suddenly she is encouraging me to meet up with friends (who I haven't spoken to in 15 years) and mentioning finding a club for one of my old hobbies.
Bit late!

I am 80% sure I will leave, but this has thrown things because I was hoping to quietly arrange things and then cut the cord. I certainly wouldn't fight on the house or forking over half savings, the house is paid off and she can have it! Well worth it to break free of her.

I don't know what to do, I just feel the resentment has totally eaten away any affection I had over the years.

Actually I thought the suggestion of a bot to do the job was quite fresh.

I really don’t understand how the cost associated with that third child made the difference between the life you wanted and the life you had? I appreciate the financial pressure before they were school age with extra childcare costs etc but after that, the extra cost of food and holidays wouldn’t be a reason you couldn’t have changed jobs if you were that desperately unhappy? Did you have to get a bigger house to accommodate the third child? Did all your kids go to private school?

It seems to me that you were stuck in a life you didn’t want with so much financial pressure you couldn’t see a way out. But there were other options, even with a third child. You just didn’t have the strength to make decisions that were best for you, and in the long run your family if it’s now so bad you are considering divorce.

Instead you sat in resentment and blamed your wife and third child for not having the guts to change your life. Your wife wasn’t right giving you an ultimatum but you should have stood up to her then. This is coming from someone with three children, who wasn’t sure about the third. Life is more expensive but I know it’s not forever and we can make changes if we needed to. I would never turn back time because I couldn’t imagine life without all my kids and I would never blame them for my own inability to voice my needs. You are not the victim of the situation. You were the breadwinner with financial control. Unless your wife was abusive, the life you have lived was a result of your choices or lack there of.

Of course you can divorce your wife if you don’t love her anymore. But acknowledge your part in why you are unhappy and how you let it get to this point. And get therapy.

She should not have given you an ultimatum. You should have dealt with all this much, much sooner if the third child is teenage now.

Is there a woman on the scene you are now developing a ... friendship with, by any chance?

Saying you will end the relationship is not abusive or controlling!! We may not agree with her choice to do so. But she was perfectly entitled to end the relationship if he didn’t want a third child. What would have been wrong is to trick him into the third child by getting pregnant ‘accidentally’.

I think the people claiming the OP had a free choice are forgetting that the assumption of 50/50 childcare is a relatively new thing. If he'd chosen to spilt 18 years ago he'd have probably ended up with extremely limited access to his children, a court order forcing him to support his ex wife and a squalid bedsit for his 'home'.

Thankfully, things have changed for the better.

I also wanted a 3rd child, my DH did not for all the reasons you said, plus I did not find pregnancy easy either time. We didn’t have a 3rd. I agree with you what this meant was in a practical sense we could afford to do nice things (we both worked), we could see friends and still afford hobbies. A 3rd for us, would have pushed us into long hours at work with overtime being the norm for my DH with much less disposable income.
It seems you clearly communicated this with you W and I am presuming gave in, as you loved her and the kids.

I think the continued conversation (after 3rd child was born) with W would have been helpful - not about your 3rd child (as you said there is nothing you can do about that) but about friends/ hobbies etc. How resentful you were that you had no life. however small outside the family!

Perhaps counselling would have helped you (and your W) earlier - to understand these feelings and what next steps could have been.
I think you need to leave, anyone willing to give up the house and go is someone who is at the end of their tether. I wouldn’t leave with nothing though - she needs to take clear responsibility for her part in this. Get good legal advice - it feels though like you want to be fair in any separation/ divorce.

@Yerblues OP’s wife got the 3rd child she wanted, she got the easier job, she got the husband working long hours to pay the bills. She’s happy. She actually said she wouldn’t change a thing. Where is the bit about her not being happy?

I think the word ultimatum here is a bit of a red herring TBH. Day in day out in real life and on this board we hear from women (and men) who have strung partners along who want a baby, and the advice is always if you want a baby and your partner doesn't or isn't giving you a clear answer then to leave.

I do think you should leave, your resentment is eating you up. But I don't think work will be easier if you give your wife the house and have to start again from scratch.

But I really don't think her being desperate for another baby, and being prepared to leave if you aren't aligned on that is unusual or wrong.

I suggest seeking counselling to talk through your feelings with an independent professional.

Your feelings are valid.
Life's too short to stay in a relationship where you feel this resentful and unhappy.

If you still have some love for her, maybe couple's could be an option.

I'd be careful how you phrase it to her, because I can see situations where she will tell the kids and especially the third child, about why you've decided to leave and that will turn them against you.

You don't want to end up losing the relationship with your children.

What nonsense. I had several friends whose parents divorced when I was a teenager 25 years ago and none of their dads ended up in a sad bedsit on their own seeing their kids once a week while paying through nose to their ex-wives. Their dads had normal homes and new partners, usually in quite short order.

There wasn’t generally a 50/50 parenting split then but out of the several single mums I am friends with now (being one myself) only one has an ex who is even prepared to do 50/50. My ex certainly isn’t.

Absolutely this^

As a lone parent with dc, a very demanding ft job which is where I have to be to pay my bills because my ex (whos behaviour actually WAS unreasonable unlike his wife) walked out on me and who still sees friends/ makes effort- I just can't understand why this guy decides to fixate his energy on all that he doesn't have. Takes no responsibility for seeing friends and prioritising relationships. My life looks incredibly different to how I foresaw it and I refused to let resentment eat me up. Taking accountability looks like therapy and focusing on the positives.

Op is not some meek lamb who has no control over his own life or happiness some elements were a difficult choice to make, absolutely, but he did not fully buy in and act with accountability for himself. And now all he's left with his looking for someone else to blame for that because isn't that easier?

I just feel your attitude is all wrong. You blame everything on the fact your wife insisted on a 3rd child but I doubt it was all down to that. Having only two children could have resulted in exactly the same life you have had. And surely there is the compensation of the child themselves or do you resent them too?

You were always in a position to make choices. Your wife wasn't your owner. Life often doesn't go to plan. But making the best of it, accepting it and moving on is the better way to go.

Leave her if that's what you want but don't blame her for the life you've had - accept that you made your own choices all along, even if that choice was you had to stay for the children.

I do accept though that she should have accepted your desire for only two children.

It will help you a lot of you take responsibility for your actions in all of this. For no other reason than carrying all this resentment and anger is doing you no favors (and you really don't want to carry this into your next relationship).

I'm not buying any of this. Especially that the reason he wants to leave now is a decision made 17 years ago.

It sounds a bit like my parents. My mum wanted 6 kids and my dad 3, they had 4 kids in total but my dad always maintained he never wanted the 4th child. He resented my mum AND the 4th child ever since but he didn't wait for us to be adults to divorce her (we were all in primary/secondary school still). Sadly, my dad was always really, really harsh with 4th child, borderline emotionally abusive. It's only now that we're all in our 30's/40's that things are getting repaired emotionally (although obviously not between my parents who still couldn't be in the same room together for more than 10min).

Have you considered your own role in this situation at all?

Your youngest is presumably around 18 now and your mortgage is already paid off.

Could both of you not have decided to:

• more to a more affordable house?
• extend the mortgage so the pressure on cashflow was lower?
• seek alternative jobs that would have allowed better balance?
• To look at her working or changing her role?

A vasectomy would also have been an option. Other forms of contraception too. It's unfair to blame everything on your wife when you were a willing participant too.

It appears that you went into victim and resentment role from the off and did very little to change it either.

What could you have done differently?

Are you honestly saying you don't love your third child and wish they didn't exist?

You don't like your wife ... that much is clear. So you must go.
Your children have lived with your simmering resentment for years and deserve better, especially your youngest.
Whatever the trigger for this resentment, and whether it is solely the one you have identified, is irrelevant.
You need to do the right thing now and free your family of this resentment.

This is a sad story and I don't actually feel anyone has done wrong.

OP resents what he perceives as an ultimatum but a woman's strength of feeling around having another child is often so great that she has no option but to put it in those terms- the choice is between having a child with her husband and having one without her husband (and in fact when people post on here about fundamental disagreements over having children, they're often advised that the only solution is to accept the possibility of a split).

His wife clearly felt that his agreement was genuine and that he would come to love their child and be happy with the decisions taken, and is now shocked to find that's not the case.

I agree with PP that you seem to be pinning all your dissatisfaction with life on this one thing- a sort of Sliding Doors moment when everything went the wrong way- whereas in fact the reality is likely to be much more complicated than that. You're focussed on the ultimatum because it felt so unfair to you but I think a lot of your dissatisfaction sounds more general than that. It's really unlikely that everything you dislike about your life stemmed from a single moment and it sounds as if that premise has led to you feeling like a victim of circumstances who isn't able to improve their situation- you can't do your hobbies due to lack of time due to supporting another child, you've lost your friends for the same reason. I simply don't believe that it's that simple. It sounds as if you've got into a spiral of resentment where you haven't taken any steps to improve things- everything is grist to the mill of you feeling wrongly treated.

I am worried that if you leave, it will just be part of the same pattern- you'll end up in a worse situation, because subconsciously all of this is about proving that you've been wronged. I'd suggest some therapy to help you break out of your spiral of resentment. Then you'll be in a better position to take positive steps to improve your life, because you'll actually want to improve it.

So does OP.

So this ultimatum was that either there was a third child or your wife would leave the marriage (and presumably seek to have a child outside of it)?

Not a great situation to find yourself in BUT if one partner feels so strongly about a topic that they are willing to end the marriage over it, that is their choice. It's really only an 'ultimatum' in this case because it's a topic for which there is essentially no available compromise - you either have the child or not.

You also seem to be forgetting that you also had choices, and made them. Were there great options? Perhaps not, but that's life. Other people's feelings sometimes do create situations in which you're required to pick the least worst option and get in with it. Essentially what you're railing against is, "why couldn't she just feel happy with two?!" which is essentially just fruitless fury against facts on the ground. The facts presumably were that she couldn't, and so that fact had to be dealt with one way or another, just as your feelings did.

Your wife didn't trick you, or get pregnant in secret - she gave you agency in this and you made your choices accordingly (to have the child, keep the marriage, maintain the life available with the income, to stick with that particular job etc.) All, no doubt, for good reasons. Were there things you could have done during all this time that would have made things better for you? Almost certainly. There always are, and we can learn from that but only if we can acknowledge what was in our control, and that it's usually more than you think.

If you had said to her, "either we stick at two children or I can't stay married to you," and she had chosen to stay, would you consider it a fair and acceptable way forward for her to make that choice while also quietly resent you for two decades and blaming you for her life not being the way she imagined it at the end of them?

I think there's a bit of accountability missing from your post about the choices you made and why, and the fact that - once you chose - you didn't wholeheartedly commit to your choices but have hung on, looking backwards for 18 or so years. It has not served you well. Part of making hard choices is accepting that they do come along from time to time, acknowledging that you made the best choices you could at the time with the information you had and making your peace with what you chose.

You are and we're also always free to then pause, take stock, and make choices available to you later down the line too, as you're doing now (and a your could have done for 18 years).

Leave the marriage now if you'd like to, by all means. That's your choice. If you can't let go of this it honestly may be better for your wife, too.

But you also need to learn something from this about your approach to tough, no-win situations because this won't be the last you face! Sulking because you were ever faced with them at all isn't going to lead to a happy life.

Good luck.

The first mistake you made was accepting your wife had a right to blackmail you into having a child.
You had the choice.
Instead you've wasted at least 16 years of your life feeling bitter and resentful.
How sad for that child.
If you hate this woman that much (and I personally would not have stayed with someone dishing out ultimatums about children ffs) then divorce her.
Why is it only 80%.
You do realise what (most) women give up to be a parent?

This is very well put.

I disagree that her ultimatum was wrong. It was unfortunate and it definitely was almost inevitably going to have the effect that at least one of you were unhappy, but if a third child was so important to her, I guess she'd have been unhappy if she hadn't issued it. So it's a no-win situation there.

The problem is that perhaps you made the wrong decision. Hindsight is 2020 though you have to let that go.

The bt I'm struggling with is ho wthis has gone on for 18 years? I mean, I can see it being really bad the first few years, but surely once you were out of the trenches as it were couldn't you have made a bit more effort? We, admittedly, onl yhave 2, but I'm really starting to feel like our time and ability to live our own lives is coming back to us and they're 10 and 13 now. Your martyr complex is thing I'm finding hard to get my head around.

However, as it's gone on so ong, I am not sure there's anyway to reccover from this so divorce might be the best option. I do think you should at least TRY to talk to her. Perhaps also seek some counselling to try reframe the last 18 years in your head. There are three young people involved here too after all.

I wouldn’t say she gave you an ultimatum, she gave you a choice and you chose to stay and have another child. You could have left, had your current 2 children regularly between your single-man lower pressure job and kept your social life. Your wife would then be free to pursue a third child with someone else who wanted to bring another child into the world and would not resent that child for existing.

You chose to get her pregnant. You absolutely could have held onto your no and she could make whatever decision she needed to make in the face of that.

You also could have both went to therapy before making any decisions, to talk out why you both had such clearly opposing views and decide what would be the best course of action to avoid either of you a lifetime of regret and spite.

But no, you said “Wife says if I don’t get her pregnant our relationship will end. So I guess I just have to suck it up until that child is an adult so our relationship can finally end.”

See the irony?