Un-Divorce?

great_lakes_mom
Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:17:38 +0000

I personally feel hardwired to be with my kids as they are growing up. Which is why I thought divorce sucked, with the current 50/50 placement modality. There are good reasons I’m divorced, but would have put up with a rather crazy seeming situation for the sake of maintaining a family home, a better economic situation, and daily access to my kids, IF a harmonious agreement could have been worked out. I do think it is possible to recover from our idealization of romantic love, and be adults about the limitations of marriages and some people’s capacity to maintain a marriage over the long haul. My impression is that they’ve been doing this in France for a long time, and our insistence on divorce in the case of a marriage being over emotionally is not always the case there.

A friend of mine did just that. Agreed that the marriage in terms of a romantic relationship was over, they were free to date other people, but kept the family home intact, and both lived there. It was a big enough house that there was plenty of separate space for both, and it took a good deal of tolerance on both parts, but it worked till the kids were in college. It saved them a pile of money, the kids had 2 parents at home though their teen years, and they were able to maintain a friendship and the good parenting partnership that they’d had all along. After the kids left, they did divorce, but were proud that they’d stayed together for the child rearing years.