My wife and I [early 40's] are staring at divorce yet headed to Europe together for a week. How do I survive?

There are three kinds of problems in your life: those belonging to you, those belonging to her, and those belonging to the relationship. So you can't address either of the second too. You, by yourself, can only address 1/3.

You're trying to make it sound as if the problems are 50/50 and you've done your 50 and you want your readers to follow you down that rabbit hole and validate your perspective. That doesn't fly with me - or with her. And I don't even know you - but I do know relationships and I know you can't be "certain" that this can be fixed.

First, you don't know her viewpoint. Some things are deal breakers and unfixable. I know there's a lot more you aren't detailing.

Second, none of that has much to do with your question about Europe.

During your details about that question, you work in that you make 96% of the income. So? Do you live outside the Western world? Do you not realize that 50% of that is hers? I realize you're going into divorce mentality - but if she's been a SAHM and you have two small children, she's going to get child support such that she can support a lifestyle roughly half of what the family has now, and possibly some spousal support (which may enable her to live at a standard of living in between half of what she has now and 100% of now). But it will be phased out and she'll need to make up the difference.

So you aren't the one "paying for everything" and I personally think your sense of household economics is reason alone to divorce you - it would be a total dealbreaker for me. (And I make the greater portion of the income in my relationship).

I divorced once. I went on three years of awful vacations with the ex (maybe four, can't remember) before we were able to afford a divorce. He wanted to spend the money (we were making roughly 50/50 throughout the relationship, sometimes him O, me 100% - but in the last two years, he was making 75% of a much higher income - and wanting to spend it on expensive vacations).

I got a job that paid more, got tenure, filed for divorce. The vacations were...hell on wheels. Every single bad dynamic in our relationship had plenty of time to show itself on those vacations.

We still went. It's up to you - and maybe you'll have a different experience. Not all our vacations were equally bad (but...yeah....they were really bad).

/r/relationships Thread