Hi everyone. One of the other members mentioned she was invited to join this forum, and I was also happy to accept a similar invitation. It seems the forum is just getting started now and spreading by word of mouth and invite.
To start with, my username is Divorced&Happy for a reason. My thought when joining this forum was not necessarily to seek out advice, but to hopefully provide advice to other people. I went through a lot in my two, yes two, marriages, and I think that gives me some perspective and experience with which to help other people. I also found a way out and changed course on my life to find true happiness, in the purest sense. I gave advice to a friend of mine a while back as he was trying to recover from a divorce, and it made me very happy to help him. He ended up getting through it just fine and is in a lot better place now.
To introduce myself in a little more detail, I first got married straight out of college, when I was 22. My immaturity at the time and not really knowing who I was, where I was, or where I wanted to go didn't set me up for success in marriage. The same was true for my ex wife. We were married for 8 years, had two kids, and tried to make it work countless times. Eventually, the core reason I think we didn't work out was because we quickly grew apart. I came to have strong career interests, but she wanted me to be home more. There's much more to it, but that's what the basic problem was. I wasn't going to sacrifice my future and my career to sit at home just to keep her company, so it caused ongoing problems and never resolved. All in all it ended when I came home after a business trip to find out my garage opener didn't work and my key didn't open the front door. I was 'evicted' from my own home without notice. From there it was a fairly typical divorce story you've heard a thousand times.
My second marriage happened far too quickly thereafter. I really don't know what I was thinking at the time, although now I wonder why I would ever consider getting married again at all, much less that soon after a divorce. Well I actually do know what I was thinking. Or what I was feeling, rather. I was lonely and feeling rejected, so it was nice to have someone that wanted me and kept me company. I should have found other ways to deal with that and would have been much better in the long run. That marriage was full of a lot of conflict after just a few months of marriage, primarily because of my children from the prior marriage. My current wife at the time just couldn't get on board with the time they took, because they deprived her of my time. She was always invited to spend time with us, but didn't want to most of the time. Eventually we just decided the marriage was going nowhere and we were not happy, so ended it on agreeable terms.
I hope that didn't drag on for too long. There is much more I could say to introduce myself, but I'm not sure anyone would read all that!
Divorced&Happy, thanks for joining the forum and giving your introduction. Your perspective and experience as someone who has been married and divorced twice is particularly valuable, and I'm glad you're here to help other members and share that experience and the lessons you learned from it.
The part of your introduction regarding your ex wanting you to work less and focus less on your career is incredibly common, as you likely already know. I have experienced that myself, having had demands made that I work less and spend more time with the wife doing some yet undefined activity, or even nothing at all. I have heard similar stories countless times from friends and family, and we will likely hear the same repeated constantly on this forum as more members join.
I would recommend you take note of the 'divorce considerations' forum here. As someone who has been through it, and ended up much happier thereafter, your advice would be particularly helpful in that forum, and I predict many users visiting that forum will want to hear from someone like you and get advice.
Thanks again for joining the conversation. I look forward to engaging with you more.