My ex told me on a Saturday he wanted a divorce and that he'd move out when we returned from a family vacation we had planned for the following month. By Tuesday he decided he needed to move out ASAP and left Saturday morning. I obviously wasn't spending 24/7 with the person who just asked for a divorce, so he ended up going with just his brother.

As he left for the 4-week trip, he told me to do research and figure out what I wanted so that when he got back we could start hammering out the details. I met with my lawyer a couple of times, I worked with a financial planner, I spent days inputting every credit card and bank transaction into a budget program - I spent four weeks researching every detail I could get my hands on. When he got back he sat there convinced I was trying to screw him over. It had been two months since he walked out and he still hadn't met with a lawyer; I'm not entirely sure he had thought things through beyond "I get to fuck other people", so the reality of what he'd set in motion was a bit of a shocker, to say the least.

It was over a month before we actually sat down to start working on an agreement. We'd previously agreed to each go to a lawyer, bring their proposals to the table, and split the difference, which is pretty much what we did. We shifted a few things around before things were signed, but in the end our "negotiations" involved sitting here at my computer for about three hours.

I definitely wouldn't recommend anyone following in our footsteps. It was torture for me to be in limbo all of those months, not really being able to plan anything because he refused to discuss "stuff". He completely sabotaged his relationship with the kids, which wasn't great to begin with: Even though there was an open door policy, he'd only taken them out to dinner three times in those three months while he managed six weeks on vacation - including two trips to Europe. Yup.