My story, condensed. I met a great girl and we hit it off 9 years ago. We moved in together at year 2 of our relationship. Things were really good until about year 6 of our relationship, when I nabbed her having an emotional affair with my friend, my friend, nonetheless who I got in crap for going to strip bars with, who after I stopped going due to her concerns continued to repeatedly try to drag me there and I refused to go based on the grounds that my SO didn’t feel comfortable with it. Year 7 or so we got engaged. Year 8 we were in big trouble, she separated from me in year 8 and broke off the engagement, then fully sealed the deal on our 9 year anniversary.

Sure I made mistakes. But at the beginning of year 8, she quipped to me that she just “wasnt happy any more”. As the ever devoted fiancee, I of course tried to do everything in my power to get her happy again. I tried going to places I didnt really want to be, I tried improving myself, I tried sweet gifts, romantic evenings, and at every turn I was sabotaged; even Valentines day, when I was beating around the bush trying to prod her to figure out what she wanted as a gift or what she’d like to do, I found out that she had taken off her engagement ring and “was confused” (talk about a ruin to Valentines!).

We went to counselling, and it became a huge littany of gripes about me. I wasnt doing this, I didnt like that, I did this, I did that, SHE wasn’t happy. The counsellor never once corrected her, that maybe happiness comes from within, never actually told her that if you choose to be happy, you will be. I’d come home to laundry lists of complaints sometimes, from everything like whether or not I wore fitted T-shirts to the kinds of sports that I played. I was like, come on, I’m just being me and enjoying life, why can’t you just relax a little and do the same??

Well when she left me, she did so abruptly, when I saw a passage in a book she left on the coffee table and she was writing about having so much passion in her life since she met “Greg”. I confronted her about it, calmly, because I was still having trust issues about the emotional affair a few years earlier. Of course, it was “creative writing” and meant nothing. I woke up the next day after being quite angry about it and she had packed her things and left a note.

Not to go into every nitty gritty detail, what I found the most hurtful, shameful, dispicable thing about women and the counselling and self help profession in general was the absolute sheer stupidity of the level of support she received from everyone, friends, family, other women, the counsellor, everyone female.

She was “finally doing things for her”, she was “freeing herself”. She was sleeping around quite a bit (12 guys in 7 months!) and she was “exploring her sexuality, having wonderful experiences”. She was “finally doing things for her for a change”, everyone was so damn “proud of her” for “taking control of her life”. Her counsellor told her to “not tell him where you live for your own safety, set boundaries”. I was trying to talk to her, to try to work things out, and she kept throwing this mumbo jumbo crap in my face, “I dont want to talk about this right now. These are my boundaries”. I mean, my fiancee of nearly 9 years had just left me, and the counselling profession was encouraging her that she didn’t even owe me any kind of an explanation.

Now what I found so dispicable about this whole group-think mentality surrounding women right now, was that if I had dumped her and broken off the engagement because I decided that I didn’t want to be in a committed relationship and I wanted to bang a different chick every few weeks, that I changed my mind about marriage after all that time, I would be a jerk. A loser. A deadbeat, a slimebucket. Even my guy friends would be raking me over the coals for breaking this “poor girl’s heart”, for leading her into expecations that I wanted to marry her, then shattering her heart into a million peices.

The double standard is real, it is pervasive, and it is literally the most horrible thing to be a guy and go through it. As guys we dont really talk about our feelings to other guys. We always have felt more comfortable talking about those things with women. It was our father who gave us the spanking, but our mother who soothed us when we were scared, its just a normal thing.

But when all of the women around you support someone who just broke your heart in a huge way, you are left with the feeling that you’re totally been thrown off the cruise ship of happy life without a lifejacket and the boat has just turned the engines onto overdrive.

I have done a lot of reading about this whole thing. Women used to be chastised for having meaningless sex or cheating — now they are celebrating this very same thing, slapping eachother on the back for it!

There’s a book called Eat, Love, Pray which is a wildfire hit with women these days, it’s about a woman who dumps her husband, leaves the kids behind, jumps on a plane to Italy and sleeps with various men and eats great food, then goes to India and toys with their culture for a while, after a year or two decides to go back home and be single. The book isn’t the cause but rather a symptom of womens’ values gone horribly wrong.

If you were to reverse the book (as one blogger did) and have a man leave his wife and kids behind to go to italy and sleep with younger sexy women and drink booze, then go to a party zone he’d be a loser deadbeat and the book would be pointed to by the same women who celebrate it as a stellar example of what women should do would petition to have the book banned, or at least stage public burnings and protest the publisher. Rather, because it’s a woman at the centre of the book, it’s touted as a “liberating experience” for the seemingly oppressed woman who had a great career and a non-abusive husband and what was probably a fairly regular family life.

At the root of all of this which is how I bring this all back to my own experience; my fiancee was taught by her counsellor (no joke, she sent me an email to this effect) that her getting engaged to me was her merely telling me what I wanted to hear to keep the peace (she had actually been dropping hints to me for 4 months before I went out and bought the ring), that the reason she ended up having an emotional affair was because she was not getting her needs fulfilled at home (sound familliar?), and that the cause of some of her medical woes like hemmhoroids and gastric ulcers were because of the stress of living with me and “not being happy”.

I mean come on. I’m a nice guy, I never cheated on her, I cooked most of the time, picked up the slack around the house, cooked her breakfast in bed once every few weeks, never once raised a hand to her or threatened her in any way; I was living my life in bliss that I had such a great woman in my life and I didn’t really want to change a thing about her. I even lost 60 lbs after I caught her in the affair, and I’ve been in great shape ever since, down to ideal BMI.

Now I’m single (while not technically, I could almost be considered divorced due to the length of our relationship) left picking up the peices and trying to get out into the dating scene and I’m seeing women who are lying about being married, cheating on their husbands (even trying to invite me to stay the night and meet their 9 and 10 year old kids!!), and the ones who aren’t lying or married are expecting that on a first date off an online dating site we’re going to have this “magical connection”.

Women have been taught these days that the world should come to them on a golden platter, that they can work a good job and make money but that men should still pay for everything, women are independent and can make their own decisions but men should always be the ones to make the first moves on everyting. Men who move too fast just want sex, men who move to slow are mice. Men who call too often are needy, men who don’t call often enough are non-committal.

Women have been taught rediculous, unreachable expectations — and it’s all due to one thing: “post-feminism”. The feminist movement did many great things for women, in gaining them equal rights. Now they have it, but the feminist movement, once their goal was acheived did not see this as a positive reason for their demise; the feminist movement went much further than that and started teaching women that not only were they equal to men, but they were better in all respects, more deserving of everything.

In the process what they did was completely destroy womens’ sense of values, (marriage is a prison like sentence, women can sleep around too and it’s ok), but it actually now I beleive risks the entire institution of a family.

I don’t beleive that this is all neccesarily womens’ fault, I think that women are wandering through life these days perpetually confused because who they’re “supposed to be” has become such a meaningless, selfish, drifting, shallow role. They’re supposed to do anything and everything, all for the “experience”.

Makes me sick. Sorry for the novel, I’m glad someone is talking about this kind of stupid bias. I’m dating now and this pervasive new-woman mentality of the late 2000s is causing me to lose hope that I’ll ever be able to meet a nice girl and start a family before I’m too old.

Because the problem is, to have a nice type family with a mother and a father who stick together and raise their kids together, requires a woman to be in the picture. And women are being taught right now that to be in that kind of situation, is a sin and a waste of their lives. Like raising children and having a nice marriage is so freaking bad.

Lots of stereotyping there.

My wife of 25 years is divorcing me because I don’t “respect” her – with “respect” being defined as “agreeing with her / doing what she wants” 100% of the time.

She tried to force one of our kids – one of our adopted kids – out of the house 5 years ago, when he was in 7th grade. She didn’t want him in the house because he didn’t ‘respect’ her – pointing out that her obvious rejection of him might be a factor was taken as disloyal. The fact that he was undiagnosed/untreated bipolar until 22 months ago is irrelevant – I should have banished him, regardless of the impact it would’ve had on him, because she didn’t want him around.

Last year, she disowned her own daughter for having the nerve to ask me to intercede when communications broke down between mother & daughter. I was supposed to punish my daughter for “going behind her back” – I was supposed to disown her as well.

My wife is extraordinarily self-centered & she has no capacity for empathy. We wound up adopting because something happened when my birthmother (I’m adopted too) was carrying me that left me unable to produce sperm. We learned about this 22 years ago, after I had a testicular biopsy (not the most painful surgery I’ve ever had, but it ain’t beanbag); my wife says she has “22 years of pain” to overcome … and confided in one of our many counselors that once she learned I couldn’t get her pregnant, her attitude was “Why have sex? I can’t get pregnant.”

Seven years ago, she started stockpiling cash in an account in her name alone. My dad gave us both cash gifts every year – she put her gift into her account, telling me she was saving it for “us”, that my dad had told her to save the money “for our future.”

Guess what account is funding her divorce attorney?

Guess who she thinks should pay all the debt?

I agree to some extent with an earlier comment – we both have our share of the blame for the current state of the relationship. I made plenty of mistakes, not the least of which was buying into the adage “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy (so make momma happy!).” Most guys expect their wives to be emotional, upset, etc. – we’re “taught” we should be understanding and accommodating, that we should “try to make the little woman happy.”

IMO, that’s a big mistake – the man who treats his wife like she’s a little kid to be humored & coddled, that it’s asking too much to expect her to act like a grown-up when facing challenges, disappointments, etc. digs his own grave.

I married a very pretty doctor’s daughter. Guys who pursued her did what she wanted to do because they wouldn’t get a “next” date if they didn’t. She was taught to care what society thought of her – I think someone found some way to inject Emily Post intravenously – and to base her self-esteem on getting the right kind of attention from the right kind of people. Quite honestly, she expected the “dating” stage of the relationship to go on forever.

I didn’t see it at all for a long, long time. When I eventually began to recognize the symptoms, I still wasn’t able to appreciate their ramifications. By the time push came to shove, I was full blown co-dependent.

It isn’t “over” yet – we’ve not gotten to the point in the process where I have had the “No, really, THAT’S what you think you’re entitled to?” moment. I can see it coming – my wife is VERY materialistic …. she thinks its horrible that she’s having to use her divorce slush fund to pay her bills (the debts, of course, are MY responsibility).

Now, what will I be looking for in a future relationship?

A woman who (a) likes herself, is comfortable in her own skin & accepts responsibility for her own happiness; (b) likes me for who I am just as I am; (c) wouldn’t dream of changing who she is to try to please me or of asking me to change who I am to try to please her; (d) wants to be included in my world and welcomes me into hers; and (e) is capable of loving and accepting love.

And if she has kids she loves ferociously, GREAT, FANTASTIC, WONDERFUL.

And any woman, childless or with, that thinks a child in distress should NOT come home if remotely feasible is…is…oh, a horrid enough word just won’t come to mind!

You children are your LIFE, they are your focus, and if they need you that is WHAT YOU DO- it’s called being a parent.

I made it clear when I divorced the first time that it was a package deal, me and my children; AND, I made it clear that my children’s best interests would always take precedence- even over MY wants and needs if required- as being a parent was my first job and my deepest commitment, and if they couldn’t agree to that completely to just walk away now.

Sadly, I have discovered that men are more than capable of putting up a front and feigning the commitment and involvement for quite some years IF they think it will get them what they REALLY want- or if they think what you are saying is not REALLY how it will shake out.

And then they resent YOU for not making THEM the first and ONLY priority in your life! Hello?

I see no reason to subject myself to the whole relationship/marriage issue; just too distrusting of men at this point, and don’t expect them to be real and honest vs playing to get what they want from you.