Hi all,

Sorry this is really long, but I've been in my head a lot lately and haven't really written this all out before. If you want a TL;DR just look at the last paragraph, if you want to read my stream-of-consciousness moping feel free to proceed.

I'm currently in the middle of a divorce - my first, and hope to God last, one. My wife and I are in our early 30s, live in Illinois, together for ~10 years and married for 4.5 at the time we filed. I met my wife shortly before I started med school and we got married a couple years before I completed residency. I am a psychiatrist. My ex - when I met her, I thought she was really mature, relaxed, and kind. I didn't have the experience or training at the time to recognize the signs of long-term trauma. I knew she had a really rough childhood - grew up the oldest child of a very unstable single mother, who essentially abandoned her/her siblings or placed them at risk for large portions of her childhood. She was the oldest of 5 and essentially had to raise her younger siblings. Her mom destroyed her credit, was emotionally abusive/manipulative, and so on. She had a shit time. Well, if there's one truism I've seen working with a high proportion of trauma cases in my career, it's that being treated poorly causes one to develop some very poor coping skills themselves.

My wife, was, in a word, fragile. What I saw as maturity when I first met her, I gradually came to understand was rigidly maintained dispassion, a learned behavior from a time when showing emotion or having needs would only slow her down or make her appear a bigger target for the adults who were supposed to protect her. Almost any perceived threat made her retreat and disengage, mentally and often physically. And threats included me wanting to talk about problems or things we both needed to work on. We did go to couple's counseling a few years ago, at my insistence. I wanted to work on our intimacy which had been fading since before we got married, if I'm honest - we met with one therapist maybe a dozen times, but once I agreed I felt we were making progress and we decided to stop seeing her, my wife immediately refused to make any of the changes the therapist suggested and said she was offended that they would ask her to change her approach to something like sex.

At that point in our marriage I still didn't understand that sex was tied to so much guilt and shame and fear of loss of control for her - because she didn't tell me. I feel really stupid now in hindsight, like a Hollywood caricature that would be too dumb for me to suspend my disbelief if I saw it on the screen. I work with trauma every day, and I am, frankly, good at what I do. I recognized that my wife needed support and did with her what I did with anyone else in my life who was struggling - gave her empathy, understanding, and support, to a fault. When it came to our marriage and the years prior to it, I paid for everything - rent, insurance, our cars, and so on. We never had a joint account - for me, it felt natural or maybe it was just the default to maintain our funds separately, and she never asked about it, so it was just how things were. I made more than her, though during residency of course it was not a lot. She was unemployed for a while, dealing with depression and low self-esteem - she got a lot of her self-worth and self-confidence through her work and career, so that was a blow to her. I never once criticized her for not contributing, or set the expectation that she should be contributing to our monthly budget, even once she found work - initially it was at a job I had applied to for her, at the hospital/university where I was doing residency. She eventually turned that into a research assistant position, then got her Masters degree at the school which was significantly discounted by her working there.

Once we were married and after finishing residency my income shot up. I mean, I'm a psychiatrist, so not hugely, but I was making significantly more than my wife and continued to pay for everything. I am very frugal and careful with my money - I contributed the max to my Roth every year I could since my 20s, bought a foreclosed house to live in before I started med school and flipped it when I left, etc. I do this not out of wanting to hoard my money like a dragon, but so I can have a stable base to help and support the people I care about. My wife was first among them - but I also helped our families a lot. I'm also the oldest of 5 and the most stable out of my siblings. I gave my sister a few thousand dollars here and there when she was having trouble paying her rent or unemployed. I helped my wife's family even more - I helped her younger sister buy a car, then helped settle the debt she was assigned in arbitration after she got into an accident driving without insurance (idiotic, I know, but I didn't help her with any new cars after that). Most significantly, her youngest sister came to live with us a few months after we got married, since her mother was still not providing a safe or stable environment for her. She lived with us primarily for the next 3-4 years, as we had space and were in a good school district. She was a sweet kid and I bonded with her a lot as kind of an older brother/dad figure. I spent a lot of time with her and did a lot of caretaking as my wife had difficulty dealing with other people having demands or needs of her - I understand this was likely related to her experiences with early parentification.

The end came suddenly and unexpectedly - we had agreed in early 2020, when I was a few years into my career and she had finished her Master's and was also in a career she enjoyed, that we would try for kids. I have always been completely clear about wanting children, and we of course had this conversation well before we were married. We were technically trying for kids through most of 2020, but I say technically because, well, sex is required to make kids (apologies to anyone conceived in a test tube) and we were hardly having it. My ex would say she was on board, she wanted this with me, but would break down when I tried to dig deeper. Then, in the fall, she essentially shut down entirely. It was early October when she told me she wasn't sure she wanted to have kids. I wanted to know what she was thinking - is she worried about what it would look like raising them? Is she worried about being stuck as a caretaker with no support or freedom again? I had been overwhelmed with work during the pandemic, too - I had been short, snippy. I had been frustrated about our lack of intimacy and had reacted coldly to her at times, tired of her not being able to meet me halfway. I wasn't a perfect husband. But I wanted to talk, to work things out, to give her support in the ways that she needed it - but her reaction, once again, was to withdraw and disengage. She and her sister went to visit family over Thanksgiving, they were planning to return by Christmas. But she wrote to me a few weeks into her vacation saying that she wanted a divorce - because she knew she didn't want kids, she didn't want to talk about it, and since I was firm on wanting them, it was an insurmountable barrier and there was no sense on trying to work on things.

I grasped at straws for a few months, asking for therapy/counseling - which she eventually agreed to, but it wasn't any more satisfying. To her, the therapy was for my benefit, to help her explain why she felt she had to leave, but we didn't discuss in any detail the questions I had. To go from actively trying for kids, her telling me I was the most supportive, wonderful, kind partner she could imagine having and she was thankful to the Universe every day for bringing us together, to her asking for divorce in the space of 2 months - I just was left reeling. By the time she came back to our city it was March. I had been alone taking care of the dog for 4 months to the day. We filed later that month. I wanted to go to mediation, but she refused. In the end, I think I can understand her motivation - my ex has an extremely difficult time asserting herself. It would make her uncomfortable to disagree with me, and there would be times in mediation where it was necessary to do that. All I asked her was, if we're going to do this through our lawyers, let's make it fast and painless. And please take into consideration the support I have given you and your family, and the fact that I want children and have been living frugally to build a foundation for that future.

Of course... she did none of that. It took nearly 4 months for her to get initial financial documents (account statements etc) to her counsel and mine - it took me maybe 2 weeks. Part of this, I understand, is just that she is not very financially literate. Just like with difficult conversations, finances can be stressful for her to look at and her answer was usually to just not look at them. Early in our relationship we did have some conversations about finances and I was a little incredulous that she had things like a car loan that she hadn't paid in years - it was for a car that her sister had totaled when driving without her permission, so the totaled car had sat in the family's driveway for a few years and she had just stopped paying on the loan. I have no idea why it was not repossessed or she wasn't being bombarded with collections calls, but that was just one of the ways she treated money that was totally foreign to me. While we were together I helped her to open a Roth IRA and set up student loan payments to at least make the minimum qualifying payment. She carried thousands of dollars in credit card debt all the way through our marriage as far as I'm aware. One of the reasons that I wasn't particular about her contributing to marriage funds during our marriage is because I felt like it would free her up to focus on getting her financial house in order. But apparently, she didn't. Her records indicated no savings to speak of, after working full-time through our marriage and contributing maybe ~$10k via Venmo or Quickpay to me when she felt like contributing to rent and expenses. That was over the 4.5 years of our marriage to filing date - I spent well in excess of $150k on rent, down payments, taxes, assessments, insurance, etc during that time.

We filed in March of last year. No children, no joint accounts, I did all the work selling our marital home already and split the proceeds with her. I am just at a loss as to why it's taken this long for things to progress. And in hindsight I see this as just another continuation of the dynamic of our marriage all along. She withdraws when she could face frustration or criticism, and I try to be as gentle and accommodating as possible to show her that it's safe to engage, and then she does not engage. She insisted on filing taxes separately last year, which ended up costing me while she got a return over $10k - I didn't fight her on that, though I did take it into account in our settlement. I also distributed the proceeds from the sale of our home to her, rather than holding it somewhere until our settlement completed as my lawyers said was something that I could do. I didn't fight her on taking our dog, or our better car. But at every step of the process I feel like she has been trying to cause me more pain and distress. Basically, she has pushed through her lawyer for the maximum amount of everything she could legally claim, dividing all accounts, and demanding maintenance on top of this. I am getting essentially nothing from her because she has no savings. She also didn't pay down debts or loans, so I am being asked to contribute for her credit card debts and any loans she took out for her Master's degree - she had a small amount. I honestly have no idea where her money went as she did not pay down debts when she had every opportunity over the time we were married. I believe much of it went to her family, who are often struggling, some to expenses for her sister, and nothing to savings or paying down debt.

Throughout the past year I've gradually become more willing to confront the dynamic at play here, as I've gone through counseling myself - her avoidance, and my accommodation. With the divorce dragging on, the concessions I'm agreeing to just grate on me more and more. I had a conversation with my lawyer today, but still could not really see from her perspective the meaning of the word "equitable" in a legal sense. I do not live in a community property state. When I read online about equitable division of assets, it usually says something like the court takes into account the contributions made by each party during the marriage. But, according to my lawyer, this is not always in a way that would make sense on its face. For example, paying a large amount of the household expenses even when my wife could afford to contribute wouldn't reduce my obligation to her in divorce - if anything, it could be used to argue that she was accustomed to a high level of support and would have even more of a claim to maintenance than otherwise. And apparently, the large amount of money she would get just dividing assets and accounts is not necessarily a defense to that either. In essence, she told me that "equitable division" even in a non-community property state in effect means 50/50, and that arguing about my contributions and support during the marriage would only really work if I was the lower-earning spouse. If I earn more, regardless of who contributed what and where the money went during our marriage, I would never be giving less than 50% of my assets.

In the end, I don't know that I have reason to doubt what my lawyer is saying. I even know that in a worst-case scenario, I'll survive - my ex and I are both in our 30s, I'll have a career ahead of me and time to rebuild my assets. But it's just the idea of this being called "equitable" or "just" in any sense that really hits me. If left to my own devices I would make sure that my ex was on stable footing - the car, the dog - though I miss him a lot, her need for emotional support is greater - and money to establish herself. But not half of everything I've earned and saved and invested during our marriage. Not after being the one who carried the majority of our financial and emotional burdens during our time together - our marriage and the 6 years before that we were dating. Not when she knew I've always wanted kids and was building a foundation for that. I don't think I could ever hate my ex. I know what she's been through, I know the emotions driving this behavior - and for the most part, I believe it's just her disengaging from something stressful and letting her lawyer do what her lawyer is paid to do. I don't know if she justifies it to herself somehow, or just doesn't think about it. I have a hard time accepting praise or positive feedback and I feel shy even saying this, but I was patient and generous and kind to her during our marriage, and when given the chance to recognize that in a situation where she had the power to do so, she just spits in my face. Or maybe, just stands back and lets her lawyer do the spitting. I just want this to be over. I'll be 35 this year and I gave the last decade of my life to someone who told me they wanted a family with me, who was probably even then not honestly engaging with the stressful questions of whether she actually wanted children, until the time came to actually act on that choice and she was forced to answer it.

I'm just so stressed and tired. Ready to move past this. If I have a question in all this it would be, for those not from a community property state, is it true in your experience what my lawyer said? That in effect, "equitable division" only means that the lower-earning spouse can get more than 50% of assets, and that a higher earner can't argue for keeping more of their earnings? I'm also just frustrated and venting. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read.