For those whose parents divorced early in your life, how did you grow up, were your parents cordial or nasty, how is your relationship with each now?

They split before I started recording coherent memories. I lived with my mom who was mostly poor until she re-married and occasionally saw my dad who was mostly not poor except for a brief period of time when he was unemployed and supporting a girlfriend. Usually about every other weekend I spent at his place but that varied and sometimes I spent longer than that and it wasn't always every other weekend. I remember at least a few times it was months between visits. He lived in a nearby city so it wasn't like it was that inconvenient but I think he was living the party lifestyle and was definitely working a lot at night too. I remember many times I would be at his place and he would be gone most of the time and/or sleep all day, and he often brought me to parties with his friends. I was a super uptight square kid so it was a pretty weird experience for me, like he would pick me up from my moms place on a Friday night and we would drive to some mansion full of coked up drunks where I would spend all night reading books or watching TV by myself. Really my dad was mostly not in my life and tried to play more of the cool guy friend role, especially once I was a teenager. It was always very clear to me that he was completely self-absorbed.

My mom re-married and had another kid about when I became a teenager. My step-dad also tried to play the cool guy friend role, but he was kind of dumb and liked to argue about stupid shit so we had a lot of random conflict. Mostly he left me alone though. My mom was very prone to anger too so I think he kind of fed off that, they argued all the time with each other but usually teamed up to argue with me. It was a weird dynamic but she mostly ignored me too except to give me shit about my looks. Once I was a teenager we really didn't interact much, I was severely depressed and kept to myself so we barely spoke for weeks at a time. Like my dad, she was also extremely self-absorbed.

My mom was almost always polite to my dad when they interacted around me but it was clear she looked down on him and she did occasionally say negative things about him but it was very rare. My dad almost never said anything bad about her and always seemed more friendly towards her when they interacted. Basically they both made it clear to me in private that they hated each other but never expressed it directly to each other except for my mom sometimes using a snippy tone with him. Same with my step-dad, he was always very friendly towards my dad. As far as I know the only negative interaction they had was when my dad found out my step-dad hit me, I don't know what went down but my step-dad apologized and never hit me again.

I no longer have any kind of relationship with my parents. Once I was an adult it became apparent that they are selfish people who don't particularly care for me, or even really know me as a person, and are generally a bad influence on my life. There were several years after I moved out were I put in a lot of work to build a better relationship with them but it was ultimately pointless, they are who they are. I've been much happier since removing them from my life.

/r/AskMen Thread