Dear Prudence,
After a lot of soul-searching, I’ve decided to divorce my wife of five years. All we did was fight, and we had little in the way of sexual intimacy. The problem is that my soon-to-be ex-wife just had a baby a few weeks ago. I was thinking about divorce when I found out she was pregnant but decided to stay for the sake of the baby. It’s four weeks after the birth, and things are worse. We fight constantly and we haven’t had sex for almost four months, so last week I finally got the courage to break ties and move into an apartment.
The problem? My friends and family say I’m horrible—that my wife just had a baby; that we’re in the miserable newborn stage and of course we’d fight; that she’s not even cleared by the doctor for sex yet, so of course we’re not sleeping together. Even my brother says I’m being selfish. What do I say to these people? My wife stopped being the woman I loved almost a year ago, but I only hung around because she got pregnant.