I was out with my cousin last night.

Let me dump the backstory here. It's one you all know and have heard before.

The summer of 1999. We attended a spectacular wedding. I was playing a function band at the time and we helped him out by doing the entertainment for free as a wedding present. Given the utter spectacular display of the rest of the wedding, I wouldn't be surprised if this party cost the couple at least £20k. All were happy, everyone had a good day.

Cycle back to the night before. As I say, I played in a function band and as a result have played my fair share of weddings! The night before the wedding, I've never met a more nervous groom. The constant texts from the bride's sister, demanding to know whereabouts, occasionally calling to check up on the story. Beta me put it down to genuine concern, not checking he wasn't going anywhere. But hey, whaddya gonna do. There did come a point in the night where he was genuinely thinking about making a run for it and calling it off. We talked a long time and eventually, though now I realize it was more for the sake of the money spent and letting down relatives, he went through with it.

2003 rolls around. We'd heard that the couple have had their problems. There's a kid in the equation and another on the way. Given this turn of events, the wife decided that the family should move back closer to her home town way up North. It's not a decision I thought very highly of for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, there was the family connection. We were all very close knit, we hung out as family members and as buddies!

Second, my cousin was pretty well high up in his company. He was educated well, he had taken chances and gotten the higher paying positions, you could say he'd been red pill through and through up until this point. Where the wife wanted to move to, however, would have meant moving jobs. And in their new locale, jobs on the same sort of paying scale were not all that easy to get. I remember my cousin hammering his vacation days traveling to go to interviews in the locale only to find that he was vastly overqualified or didn't pay anything near the same rate.

There was a conversation one evening prior to the move. He was visiting me and my Sister at my parents house. He let out all these problems and my opinion was, don't move! Buy a second home there or something, but don't move. He was already earmarked for various promotions, why make the move?

My Mom interjected and reasoned that the wife must want to move back home to be near her parents. Given that there are kids, help from the Mother's side of the family is just how it goes. And that to keep the family unit together, he should make the move. It was a notion closely followed by my Sister. It appeared I was the sole voice of opposition but, given I was a beta, I was battered into agreeing.

2011 I'm talking with my Mom on the phone, I hadn't heard much about my cousin since he moved off. My Dad's death was still ringing in various peoples ears as he was the first of the generation to die. Given how close knit we were for so many years and given that my Dad had gone out on a limb for my cousin a few times - nothing sensational, just family shit - I took it as a little offense that my cousin didn't turn up for the funeral. In fairness, it did kinda sting me. I don't know why, I wasn't amazingly close to my Dad, but I fully feel it's the whole Daddy's daughter/Mommy's Boy just shining like it's inevitable. My Sister was inconsolable that day. I'd never seen her cry so hard.

But anyway, the crux of the conversation on the phone was she told me that my cousin was back in town and the news was that him and the wife were "finally" getting divorced. "Finally?" It turned out that the move up North had not gone so well. As was predicted, he just couldn't make the same money he could in the South East. The same powerplay tactics and experience just didn't pan out in the swathes of low-tier Mom and Pop businesses that seriously demand a who-you-know not what-you-know mentality. Money for a few years was scarce. He hadn't shown up to the funeral because the wife told him not to!

So in around 2009, the wife decided my cousin should move back to the South East to earn some money. Which he did and did well. We didn't know he was even around, for some reason the wife wanted it this way. But to cut to the point, despite the money was now rolling in, wife still wasn't happy.

She retained the services of a solicitor and filed for divorce while he was at work one day claiming that they had been separated for two years! This wasn't technically true, he had been living with the parents mid-week to earn the cash and returning home on Fridays. I'd call that, "What a man does to keep the family in cheddar" myself...

The divorce was not pleasant. When I was told he was around, he was in the final stages and had finally sent off the decree nisi for the final application. They had attended court and between child maintenance and spousal maintenance, he was in the hole for about £850 per month. Not a small amount I assure you. Added to this, although the marital home would remain jointly owned, he was still liable for the mortgage on it as she didn't work. The court ordered that it would remain the family home until the last kid turns 16. So that's £850 per month support, PLUS mortgage!

When my Mom told me of his predicament, obviously I sympathized wholly. My Mom's response? "Well if he was a man, he would have stuck by the family unit, not gone chasing the money by moving back home mid-week!". Amazing... from the females in the family? Next to no sympathy whatsoever!

Last night, I took him out for a few laughs. Went to a gig and had a few drinks. Given his dire financial situation, socializing for him is dependent on people basically paying for him. Sure he buys the odd drink here and there, but between the maintenance orders, the mortgage payments on a property he can't live in and the kids needing this, that and the other, it leaves him nothing for anything else. The ex wife doesn't even ask him for the money. She writes to his Mom demanding money to pay for heartstring items, such as dental contributions for the eldest's orthodontics, school uniforms and books, loads of other random shit that the Mom then pressures my cousin to pay!

We ended up back at mine at some point and we're shooting the shit. I'm talking about my LTR and how we had a dead bedroom for years. She'd shit test me all the time and I was such a pussy for letting it go for so long. His story mirrored the same thing. Dead bedrooms, failed shit tests. The only ballsy move he took was deciding to seek work in the South East during the week to make ends meet; apparently the work where he was became very unstable and just didn't pay the money. It's ironic that the ex wife used this very thing as the reason to petition for divorce in the first place, citing he'd moved out. The only reason, he said, he relented was that he couldn't afford not to. The legal process was just draining his accounts between solicitors and travel.

It's a crying shame to see this guy who, for all intents and purposes, is a pretty genuine bloke. A typical nice guy. He's 36; when his youngest kid gets to 16 he will be 50. That's the point at which the child support stops and he can ask his ex wife to sell the house. That's if she agrees willingly to sell the house; if she doesn't, it's back to court to petition for an order for sale.

I got off lightly with my ex. We were not married, there were no kids. Had I been married with kids, I'd be back living with Mom and Dad too, waiting until my 50th birthday where I might get to start over! MIGHT!

My cousin is really depressed. We hang out every so often, but he doesn't like being taken out like a charity case. Sure I bought his gig ticket and got the train fares, but he doesn't like that he has to stoop so low to accept these things. It's just not how we were raised. It took me fabricating some story of "I was going with someone else but they flaked, fancy a free ticket" in order to even get him to accept.

All because he had kids and got divorced!

It's crazy how eerily close I came to his neck of the woods. I don't know how he handles it, being essentially fucked until at least age 50, having to live out the rest of his 30s, go through his 40s just being financially immobile. How can he take a new girl on a date? Where's he going to bring an ONS back to fuck? He's parents pretty much have clear opinions on that sort of thing. It's almost maddening.

I heard through the grapevine (he wouldn't tell me), his ex has also moved her new boy into the family home. Given the distance and lack of money for train fares, he just doesn't see the kids all that much, nor does he see what goes on in his own house anymore as he's not allowed to go there. He's paying for his ex wife to get ploughed by her fancy man and for kids he rarely gets to see! I'm amazed he still finds the strength to get up in the morning!

tl/dr Guys: Never get married! Ever! Don't be my cousin! Just don't fucking do it! Ever!!!

EDIT: Tried to add clarity as some people were confused.