I was oddly comforted by reading some posts from those who are in a similar situation. The common theme about how hopeless the relationship seems, but is it bad enough to go through the pain of a divorce or do you just suck it up and drive on? I've buried my unhappiness deep for a few years now, it's gotten to the point that there's only one path to take. I have a call into an attorney so waiting to hear back. In the meantime I thought I'd give a brief summary and see if anyone has any constructive input from a strategy perspective.

Married 7.5 years, I adopted her daughter who is 10. My daughter and I have a wonderful relationship and if it weren't for her I'm sure I'd have started this process years ago. We get along okay, don't have much in common, we basically have turned into roommates/co-parents and lead separate lives under the same roof. She's turned into quite a negative person, rarely does anything around the house. I carry the vast majority of the weight around the house and the couple things she does seem to be a pain in the ass, such as the grocery shopping and her own laundry. There's a lot of tit-for-tat stuff, but the bottom line is that I have a son from a previous relationship, he's 15 and she's been in his life since he was 6, every other weekend type situation. She has not been able to form a good bond with him and acts like a stereotypical step-mom favoring her daughter and barely acknowledging him. This has made him not want to come to our house, we worked through that 2 years ago, now he has brought up how awkward it is when he's at our house, she tries but honestly it's a poor effort on her part. For sake of the story I'll just leave it like that rather than go into detail. I struggle because I adopted her daughter, think of her as my own, we have an outstanding relationship and she is unable to put for the effort to treat my son decent. It's little things like never going to his basketball games, but every event for our daughter is a must-attend event. It's all just lopsided and it's changed my feelings about her.

7 months ago I was in CA at a conference. I had a security camera for my patio that'd fallen off its mount so I had set it on my desk in my office before I left thinking I'd fix it when I returned. A few days later I'm in my hotel room after dinner and drinks in CA and I get an alert from Patio Camera. I was thinking what? that thing is broken. It was just off it's mount and worked just fine so I saw her walking into my basement office/man cave with a beer in her hand and a dude following her. It was a guy she dated before me. They stayed in touch and both like photography, anyway they'd met up for drinks and he was pretty wasted which I can confirm was the case based on the video. They watched a movie and fell asleep on the couch. Nothing happened and I watch them on live feed all night. He left and she called and told me about it but lied and said she slept in bed. Anyhow, I was pissed and came home knowing that it was over. She was almost going to sign a lease and I agreed to counseling and we backed out of her moving out. We went a few times, made a few small concessions and had a busy summer. As much as I've pretended to try to get back to normal I finally realized that our normal sucks. I try to avoid her, don't really like talking with her because we're never on the same page conversationally and it's more of a frustration. Just not a good match and I don't see a future so this is where I'm at.

Yesterday I told her how I felt and was trying to work through it. She responded with anger, said she's not leaving the house and I can leave. I slept in the basement, I think we both know where this is headed. I contacted an attorney as I'd mentioned but am unsure of that steps I should be taking from this point to protect myself. Ideally I'd like to keep the house and have 50/50 custody of our daughter. She is a Nurse who works 7-5 and I own my own consulting business working from home so I have the flexibility to shuttle our daughter around to and from school and practices. I'm not sure what I'm looking for but this is where I'm at and this post is WAY longer than I anticipated.