Separated But Living Together
It’s not pleasant, but it’s not bad either.
In August, I told my husband I no longer wanted to have a romantic relationship with him. This was already after I told him that I no longer wanted to have sex with him (after 2 decades of a dead bedroom, it wasn’t much of a shift).
The catch: we have two small children and I’m not giving up their shot at being under one roof with both parents without a fight.
The least-worst option
Separating but staying under one roof for the children is called a “Parenting Marriage”. The gist is that unless there’s extreme animosity and fighting (which in our case, there isn’t), children do better when both parents are in the same house. Kids don’t care whether their parents love each other; they care that they are loved and that their parents get along.
In a nutshell, it’s the least-worst option when spouses break up. Finances, which are often a hot button topic when divorcing, remain relatively intact. Kids can stay in the same programs and aren’t shuttling between homes like cattle. They have one bed and one set of parents under one roof.
How are we making it work? That’s where it gets dicey.
Living arrangements
Since I’m the one who wanted to break up and my husband still very much wanted to make the marriage work, the first few months were hell. Ironically, my attempt to turn this into a Parenting Marriage because we weren’t arguing is what caused daily fights. He had many meltdowns and struggled to believe the marriage was over, despite threatening to divorce me for years.
Eventually, his mindset shifted. It helped when I told him that while this will most likely won’t be a long-term solution if it works out then there’s no reason for us to assume we’ll divorce when the kids reach high school.
We haven’t slept in the same bed for years but that’s because he’s chosen to co-sleep with whichever kid whines loudest each evening. Long term, we’ll have separate rooms. He pushed to have us stay in the same room because he insisted that other kids will tease our children for it.
Thankfully, our divorce counselor agreed with me: kids don’t make it a habit to talk about their parents’ sleeping habits and it’s not out of the ordinary for a snoring parent to sleep in another room. When we return to our workplaces, I’ll convert the office to a tiny bedroom and stay there.
The reason I’m choosing to take the tiny office as my bedroom is that my husband has made it very clear that I’m the one who should suffer as a result of this change. While I refused to move out of the house when he told me to, I’m picking my battles and am willing to sleep in a child’s bed in a small room if it will keep the peace. (In an ideal situation, we would alternate monthly who sleeps in that room.)
The money
Last week we discussed finances. It’s difficult to plan or allocate money when temporary working from home orders shifts our budgeting. We’re not spending money eating out, gas for the cars, and after-school childcare. Our next big-ticket expense is his hair transplant surgery, which I urged him to do since I paid to fix my body surgically after having children.
We plan to pool our paychecks into a single bank account (with bills coming out of that account) while we give ourselves an allowance that goes into our own, separate accounts. To manage family purchases, I agreed to something I refused to do in the past: get a joint credit card. Family necessities go on the joint card while our own individual purchases go on our separate credit cards.
Today’s status
We agreed to never tell our relatives. They don’t live near us and it will only cause drama and gossip. Frankly, even if I divorce my husband and move out, I’ll never tell my parents.
After three months, things seem to have settled down. Not that we had much of a choice. With our kids’ hybrid school model (2.5 hours at school, the rest of the time virtual at home), it takes both of us to juggle the pickup/drop off schedule with our work meetings as well as ensuring they’re following their online class schedules and IEP sessions.
The high tension in the house has calmed down. For now. Except we’re revisiting the plan at the end of the year. Cue the drama.
Separate love lives
The one area we can’t agree on? Dating.
My husband insists we should wait years before either of us dates again. This from a guy who received “happy ending” massages a year ago until he got caught. Our dead bedroom occurred in part because of his low libido. He has no interest in dating (I tried giving him an unlimited hall pass earlier this year but he declined). My husband’s self-esteem is so low, his attitude is that he will never find anyone else ever again.
When I brought up the dating timeline, he flipped out and said that I wasn’t even waiting for his body to be cold if I start dating as early as spring 2021. My husband believes anything that isn’t directly benefiting the kids isn’t something we should be doing. By that rationale, anything in the Motherhood Self-Care department isn’t acceptable.
Do my kids benefit when I get a pedicure? Do my kids benefit when I take a weekend to visit friends? Obviously not. I dropped the subject and let the divorce counselor work with him on self-esteem issues. Pushing him won’t help my cause.
On the plus side, he began working out with me at the start of the pandemic. He’s lost almost 40lbs and got rid of his “fat clothes”. Crossing my fingers that along with his upcoming hair transplant surgery, his confidence will increase enough to date.
I’m the only wife trying to pimp out her husband.
The only dating area we agreed on is when we start seeing people (or more specifically, when I start seeing guys), it has to be a certain mileage away from our house. That avoids us running into people we know and making it weirder. I’m okay with that; southern California is so spread out that going anywhere is at least a thirty-minute drive.
My husband is adamant that I’m going to violate our agreement in some way. I told him as long as he is open to revisiting the agreement, then I won’t violate it.
Revisiting the agreement
I already threw a bomb on our lives by requesting a divorce. I suspect the next bomb will be when I tell him I want to revise the agreement at the start of the year. I’m not waiting any longer for any dating clauses.
Do I sound like a selfish bitch? Absolutely. But I already took that title in wanting to divorce him in the first place. If this were a traditional divorce, I sure as heck wouldn’t wait five months for his permission to start dating. It’s a carrot dangled over my head, forcing me to play nice.
If I had pushed the dating topic, he wouldn’t have agreed to remain amicable around the kids. I don’t care how he behaves towards me as long as he puts on his best Academy Award-winning acting in front of them. My husband is the first to admit he can’t act for the sake of pleasantries and making those around him more comfortable. So I chilled out on the subject of dating.
I’m not planning on running out in January to get my Saturday nights lined up with dinner dates. Wearing a mask on a first date kills my mojo and I’m not attractive if I catch a gnarly, worldwide virus. I’m simply asking for the No Dating clause to be removed.
That way, whenever one of us does start dating, it won’t be weird like it would be immediately after the clause is lifted. Also, I don’t like that this schedule is completely at the mercy of someone else without any vote from me. My husband withheld sex from me when we were married and now he’s continuing to do so while we’re separated.
Will guys be okay with my living situation? I’m confident I can convince someone that it’s purely a roommate situation for the sake of the kids.
If something more serious comes along for either of us, we can revisit our agreement to determine the best course of action. Maybe we’ll need to try “Birdnesting” (where the parents swap in and out of the main house while the kids stay in one spot) at that point. That’s a Future Me problem; for now, I’m trying to get permission to start a new life from someone who thinks years of celibacy is acceptable.
Emotional freedom
In the grand scheme of things, living separated under the same roof isn’t all that different from my marriage.
The difference is that I no longer care. If he wants to avoid me every night in favor of watching tv, I don’t care. If he wants to buy dumb shit, I don’t care. If he wants to go out and not tell me where he’s going, I don’t care. If he wants to spend every night jerking off to porn, I don’t care. When he has a problem, I don’t have to run and fix it because…I don’t care. Once the kids are asleep at night, we each do our own thing with little interaction.
It’s liberating.
