I want nuance and details and postmodern shifting perspectives in this story, but I’m too close to it now.
My marriage has been rocky for a year, and my ex and I were both considering whether it would go on. Although I usually share too much information, I wasn’t talking about this with my wide friend circle for a few reasons. First, I hoped, really hoped, that ex and I could move past it. I feared that if I shared what we were fighting about, too many people would be mad at him. I also didn’t want to shame him, and I was ashamed of getting myself into this situation, by going back on my vow not to marry and not to live with a partner.
Here’s the too brief story.
Ex moved to CA from Nevada to be with me. He was supposed to get his own place, but, finding it expensive, he ended up with me. He promised if living together didn’t work, he would move out and we’d still stay together.
He hated that my son, a graduate student, still lives here. Aside from rent being expensive, it’s been helpful, since I’m disabled in a few ways and since it’s allowed me to drop everything and live in other countries for months at a time, something I couldn’t do otherwise, because of our many special needs cats.
We did family therapy. Our therapist rejected ex’s theory that my closeness with my son was wrong and somehow damaging (ex is fully estranged from most of his family members, including his daughter). She said we needed to work on our relationship, our marital communication. I definitely had things to work on too: I have trouble being vulnerable, and living with partners dampens my libido, for example.
Then, a year ago, ex had a drunken, rage-driven meltdown about my son. Rage is his word, and it’s accurate. It was emotionally abusive and controlling. That’s when I should have kicked him out. However, he was having a cancer scare and had just been fired, unjustly. My son volunteered to be the one to go, since ex was sick. We started looking for places. I hated myself, and it triggered my PTSD, specifically to being attacked by one of my mother’s partners, drunkenly screaming that there wasn’t space in her life for both of us.
Ex became fully disabled and admitted that we needed my son to stay, so we asked him to. I simply couldn’t cover the bills on my own.
A couple of months later, ex needed to stop drinking for a medical procedure but couldn’t. Finding out he was an alcoholic somehow made him slide immediately into one+ bottles of whiskey per day 24-hour blind drunkenness.
In a rare sober moment in January, he suddenly asked my son for a move out date over text. My son alerting me led to the ex telling him he was kicked out, and then days of raging at me. I wasn’t allowed to talk, since I was 100% wrong.
He got so drunk that he was in danger of alcohol poisoning and then went into withdrawal when he stopped drinking for a few hours. That’s when he accepted he needed to go to rehab.
Now, he’s been in and out twice. He insists that our problems are 100% about my son. I maintain that they’re about communication, and that I can’t stay in the marriage if, instead of communication, he has rage tantrums. I didn’t let him come home after rehab, because what happened in January was so awful. I thought it was likely we would get divorced–what I needed was to trust that he would stop being controlling and stop projecting everything onto my kid.
In the meantime, our therapist recently fired him, due to his insistence that my son and my relationship with my son were the problems.
He found another therapist, and it was one minute before a session with her last Monday (over Zoom) that he texted me that he couldn’t be my husband if my son was in my life at all.
His story will be very different, but this is mine.
Wow. I am so sorry to hear all of that. If he can’t stand your having a kid, too bad, the kid came first.
I am so sorry about your situation.
Somehow I ended up in a stable marriage that’s lasted over 20 years thus far. I’ve never used a dating app because when last I was single, they hadn’t yet been invented. Part of why I liked reading this blog was your description of modern dating. Even though your dating tales were more interesting when they ended poorly, I wanted your marriage to work out well. To me it would be worth missing out on a few hilarious anecdotes if I knew yall were all happily living a cozy, boring, feline-filled life together.
Your candor is incredible. I can hardly wait to read the next chapter that you share from the Book of Karma. I hope it’s the chapter that’s full of fortunate events for the protagonist.
I’ve stayed quiet until now out of respect for the life Karma and I tried to build together, but I need to speak thetruth—not to blame, but to correct the record.
Karma paints our divorce as a story of my drinking, my rage, and my supposed hatred for her son. But what’s missing is the full context of what I tried—over and over again—to work through with her, long before my drinking became a problem.
I moved to California on the promise that if living together didn’t work, I could get my own place and we would still be together. I told her something similar about marriage. That we could just date, have a ceremony and wear rings but never legally get married, that we could be domestic partners or whatever. I didn’t care. I just wanted to spend my life with her. That’s all backed up in text messages and emails.
Karma now remembers it this way though “Ex moved to CA from Nevada to be with me. He was supposed to get his own place, but, finding it expensive, he ended up with me. He promised if living together didn’t work, he would move out and we’d still stay together.”
But instead of building a life together as a couple, I found myself in a three-person marriage with Karma’s 32-year-old son Dante—who has never lived independently, and who Karma wakes up most every day around noon by calling up the stairs, “Dante, lunch!”
Paragraph two of Karma’s blog post states “He hated that my son, a graduate student, still lives here.”
I certainly despise him now but that took almost two years to develop. Most of the time the only emotion he evoked from me was pity.
Karma also wrote “We did family therapy. Our therapist rejected ex’s theory that my closeness with my son was wrong and somehow damaging.” The three of us never went to family therapy. Karma and I would go for a few visits and then she would get busy and miss appointments and I’d be talking to our therapist alone.
There is an entire field of psychotherapy that focuses solely on enmeshment. At overcomingenmeshment.com you can view the practice of the shrink who wrote “When he’s married to Mom” a book I bought for Karma and one that, in spite of her voracious appetite for books and love of reading, she is too afraid to read.
In April of 2023 our therapist Jennie and came up with a plan to save my sanity and my marriage. I had started working in the Bay Area and would rent a room there. Karma and I could date but we wouldn’t live together again until Dante finally grew up and moved out. Then I got. False positive on a colon cancer test, informed my new boss that I needed to schedule an emergency colonoscopy the following week, and was fired a couple of days later for “performance issues”.
I wasn’t just facing my own mortality I was unemployed, fully dependent on Karma and trapped in a living situation I had spent months planing to escape in order to save my marriage and sanity.
Dante has only recently started paying rent for the first time in his life, and even now, he works two part-time jobs—one just a couple hours a week, the other about sixteen hours. He spends the rest of his time sleeping, playing on his phone or computer, and avoiding adulthood. He’s managed to drag a two-year master’s program into five years, and if he graduates in December, he will have taken exactly twice as long as every other student in the program. This isn’t because the program is too hard. It’s because he doesn’t have to grow up—not as long as he’s allowed to live at home as a dependent adult.
I knew this dynamic would be a challenge, which is why I insisted on premarital counseling in June 2023. That session was entirely about Dante, and the conclusion was clear: if Karma and I got our own place, it would send the wrong message if Dante moved in with us. Even Karma’s own friends agreed that my desire to build a life with my wife, in our own space, was totally fair. And that they were enmeshed.
And it wasn’t like I didn’t try to support Dante. I rebuilt his computer. I bought him books. I researched his school projects. I bought him a weighted blanket to help with his anxiety. I encouraged him and reached out to him repeatedly, only to be ignored or brushed off.
Karma now claims that all the problems in our marriage stem from my drinking.
The truth is that my drinking started because of the tension I felt in that apartment. The unhealthy family dynamic left me walking around with my stomach in knots, feeling like a permanent outsider in my own marriage. I made the terrible mistake of trying to numb that pain with Irish whiskey, and it only made things worse. Drinking was my dumb choice and I took naltrexone and went to rehab and then detox to quit drinking. But here’s my dirty little secret, I haven’t taken naltrexone in months and that all consuming desire to drink myself into a stupor first thing in the morning is gone. So is the clenched fist feeling I had in my gut. All because I am no longer living in an unhealthy environment.
But let’s not pretend the drinking was the root cause. Even in our honeymoon phase, Karma and I were tiptoeing around, trying not to make noise because Dante could hear everything through the paper-thin walls.
When we went to VA marriage counseling, Karma described Dante in glowing terms—the same script I’d heard on our very first date in 2022. That’s when I realized nothing was ever going to change.
Karma makes a big deal about the marriage counselor “firing” me. But the truth is, I was the only one attending. That’s not how marriage counseling works. It was part of the same pattern we’d been stuck in all along.
In fact, during one of those sessions, the VA counselor wrote in the chart notes:
“The wife sees the problem as the Veteran, but their main problem is that her adult son still lives at home and is a real burden.”
Even during my stay in rehab, Karma was visibly anxious when asked about Dante’s graduation timeline. One month she claimed it was “uncertain,” and the next she confidently stated “December.”
The truth is, he’s been dragging it out for years.
When we visited Karma’s family in Florida, almost every relative pulled me aside to ask what was wrong with Dante and why he was still living at home.
I never asked Karma to choose between me and her son. What I asked was for us to build a life together as husband and wife, while supporting her son in becoming a healthy, independent adult.
Instead, Karma chose to preserve the unhealthy, dependent dynamic—a choice I couldn’t live with any longer.
I’m not the bad guy for acknowledging that choice, and for refusing to keep sacrificing my mental health to maintain a dynamic that everyone but Karma could see was broken.
I know what it feels like to lose a child—I am estranged from my own daughter for painful but valid reasons. I didn’t want Karma to face that same pain, so rather than force her into a choice she wasn’t ready to make, I did the only healthy thing I could do—I asked for a divorce.
I own my failures. I drank too much. I made mistakes.
But I also loved Karma with everything I had, and I worked my ass off to make our apartment, our life, and our love flourish.
I spent over four hours moving my things out of our home today. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not because of tension or anger, but because we talked, we laughed, and we held each other like we used to.
We were a damn good couple, and I will always love Karma. I told her last night that I will be here for her if she ever needs me.
Maybe, if life is kind and we give each other the space to heal, we’ll find our way back to friendship. I miss my best friend, and I’ve never stopped loving my wife.
And that’s what makes this all so fucking hard.
Sincerely,
Mr. Dr. Karma:-)