Long story, but I’ll summarize. Wife wants divorce, about to celebrate 20th. Early in I screwed up trying to live vicariously through a friend. Thought I could walk the razor edge and I stumbled. Confessed, and we stayed. Made 3 kids and built a pretty fortunate and idyllic life. Now, she says I trapped her in the relationship and she was just waiting for oldest boy to finish high-school. Now she just wants me gone. Ok, so I scrambled. She’s not had any real income for decades (other than working in one of my businesses, or making $3000 a year as day care teacher at church school). She has all the plans about how the world works and how this is easier for everyone to be happy. She wants the process to be friendly. She also thinks we have way more free cash than we do. Business has been tough and I’ve wiped us almost out to repair things. I don’t want kids to suffer uprooting their lives because she can’t let something go and see the positives about our relationship. I’ve looked at rentals to make sure the kids home life is stable. But it’s impossible to find something that I can share with them. I’m pretty angry, I’ve worked hard on myself for last couple of years. And now i have to start over from scratch and she gets no pain? Wantonly willing to burn down kids sense of security because doesn’t want to change her approach to marriage communication. We have a good relationship, until she’s in a down cycle or triggered. Then it’s silence and abandonment. She wants to be a nurse at 48 years old and assumes that 1 year of class is going to give her an 9-3 job paying her enough to live on. She’s delusional and using that psychotic “I can do it without you” planning. I’m trying to protect her from the current reality of what it takes to survive. AITA for this thought? Make her move out, give her enough support to find an apartment and give her all the cash I can get away with. But I stay at the home I built, keep my kids in their house, and let her figure out how to be “independent”. I hate the money part, it’s wasteful spending, but I can make it back in a few years. She can come over everyday for dinner and after school cuddles. They can spend the night whenever. We’re busy with extracurricular stuff so it takes both of us to run the kids all week. I love her dearly, I think she’s getting her head filled with ideas from other recently divorced friends about how easy it is to get by. But she never tells them the truth about her situation. I’m trying to save my kids emotionally and make her life easy as I can. I don’t want this, it’s silly to pretend that this is a solution.
Maybe this was just venting , but I can’t reconcile why i leave or burn down the kids sense of security for her refusal to deal with resentment and move on.