Dear Prudence,
My first wife “Trish” and I divorced about five years ago. She didn’t want to have sex after the birth of our kids, so I found sex elsewhere. I was very discreet, but she found out after several years; then she informed me “what’s good for the gander is good for the goose” and she started seeing other people too. That was fine with me, as it gave me more freedom and less paranoia about getting caught cheating. Trish asked for a divorce within the year, and since my girlfriend of two years, “Annie,” had been pressuring me to leave Trish, I thought it was the best outcome for everyone. Annie and I got married soon after the divorce was final.
I see Trish every week when we hand off the kids, who are now teenagers, and I dread it. Not because she’s mean or rude … she is warm and generous and funny. I recognize that she hasn’t really changed; these traits were always there, but they were buried under my resentment over the sex thing, the nagging, the financial stress, etc. On top of that, her career took off almost as soon as we separated, but not soon enough for me to ask for alimony. She’s earning more by herself (thanks GlassDoor) than our combined household income when we were together. Her live-in boyfriend (she has told the kids she’ll never marry again, which feels like an attack on me, her one and only experience with marriage) is a well-known writer and together they travel to exotic places, eat at fancy restaurants, and have a crowd of well-known writer friends. They’re even taking the kids to London this summer while he teaches a workshop there.
I am struggling financially and having some health issues—the recent loss of a visible tooth I can’t afford to replace hit even harder than the diabetes diagnosis—and my now-wife Annie has health issues of her own that make her tired and irritable, and affect her ability to work. I used to be mostly content with my life, even when married to Trish, as long as she wasn’t nagging me. Her new life makes me feel terrible. Like the spotty overweight kid at a high school dance. I feel like in the game of divorce, I lost big, and it’s eating me up. I’m resentful that we had money problems when we were together because she didn’t work very hard—she said she was focused on the kids and the home. I hate that my daughter showed me a picture of her mom beaming happiness with her boyfriend on a mountaintop in Patagonia.
I hate the idea of therapy, and can’t afford it anyway, and the antidepressants my GP prescribed don’t seem to be doing anything. Can you help me re-frame this so I can get over it? How do I live in the life I have now, maybe even improve it, instead of going around and around about all the ways it could have gone differently for me?
—Me: 0, Ex: 100