real life

Ex-husbands describe the moment they decided they had to end their marriage.

Men on Reddit have shared the moment they knew their marriage was over. Their stories range from the ludicrous (after she staged a robbery) to the utterly heartbreaking.

The revelations started a day ago when a brave man asked: “Divorced men of Reddit: what moment with your former wife made me think ‘Yup, I’m asking this girl to divorce me.’?”

Since then there have been more than 16,000 comments from men sharing their experiences and commiserating on, what was surely, one of the hardest moments in their lives.

There’s a lot of talk about cheating

  • When my buddies approached me to complain that she kept sitting on their laps, wiggling, and hoping for an erection. 
  • When a friend’s wife said to me “You know your wife is sleeping with my husband”.
  • The morning I saw a picture of some dude’s dick on her phone. She was classy enough to bring him to the divorce proceedings…

There’s strange deceitfulness

  • When she falsely told our marriage counsellor that I punched her. I legitimately feared for my safety towards the end — not that she would hurt me, but that she would make a false accusation to the cops or a crazy friend.

Disagreements over parenting

  • She had always been an impatient, angry screamer of a parent. But as my stepdaugher became a young woman, my ex just went crazy with envy or something. There were threats of cutting hair in middle of night while my daughter slept; pulling hair; slapping faces; ridiculing my daughter in front of her friends. 
  • My wife was around less and less… More often than not she would call me to pick our daughter up from daycare, after promising to pick her up and have some ‘girl time’… I went to pick our daughter up one day and, when they called her name, she came running over until she saw it wasn’t mom. She slumped her shoulders and slowly walked over to ask “what’s her excuse this time?” That was the breaking point.

Stories of ungratefulness

  • I used to love to do chores for her because she loved being taken care of. When she stopped noticing, it started hurting. One day I made a bench for our entryway out of barn-wood. Took about 40 hours of work. She walked in the house after work that day and sat her purse on it and proceeded to start the fight where she told me that she was mad she got married to me. She stormed out of the house grabbing her purse. Never noticed the bench was there. I knew then but I think she already knew. 
  • One of my best friend’s got a pretty substantial year-end bonus from work. He decided to use most of it for his wife’s Christmas gift and pay off her remaining student loans (~$14,700). She opened the card saying her loans were paid off and she just sat there for a minute. After the silence she asked “did you seriously not get me anything else? I bought you that stupid keyboard and you only got me a few things?” A day later he went to see a lawyer.