'Surprised' Husband Claims Wife Of 50 Years Is Leaving Him And He Has No Idea Why — 'I Thought We Had A Good Marriage'
The fact he doesn't know why kind of says everything.
triloks | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Most of us have been in the infuriating situation of being in conflict with someone who claims to have no idea why we're upset. Sometimes this is because of genuinely poor communication between partners, and going into "if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you" mode can make this even worse.
But it's just as common, or maybe more so, that the reason the other person has no idea why we're upset is because they simply haven't been listening or paying attention. A man who wrote in for advice on a shocking request for a divorce from his wife seems to fall in the latter category, and that's only the beginning of the red flags.
A husband is 'shocked' his wife of 50 years is divorcing him.
Ask any woman in your life, trawl any online forum about marriage and divorce, talk to any divorce lawyer, and they'll tell you: Men being utterly blindsided by their wives leaving them is incredibly common. And it often goes down in exactly the same way as this man, where he seems to be the only person who doesn't get it.
I'm not an expert, but my theory on this is always that most men are socialized to expect to be taken care of, and until pretty recently, it was culturally normalized for men to be not just coddled by their wives, but to treat them like goofy, annoying nags who drive them crazy. Meanwhile, "the man who doesn't even know where the scissors are in his own house" has been a well-worn cliche and sitcom trope for ages.
A man turned to NJ.com's advice column for guidance after his wife "blindsided" him with divorce papers after 50 years of marriage, which seems awfully familiar in this context. It's not really surprising he's blindsided and "thought we had a good marriage." It probably was a good marriage for him. But it doesn't sound like it was for anyone else.
The husband claimed to have no idea why his wife is upset, but he seems to be the only one.
It's impossible, as an empathetic person, not to feel for this man, who is in poor health and is now left to fend for himself amid an increasingly frightening physical decline. Nevertheless, his story is full of discomfiting details that add up to something different from what he describes.
To hear him tell it, he felt blindsided because he worked so hard to give his wife and children a good life. "We didn’t fight or argue," he said. "There are no abuse, addiction, or infidelity issues. I worked my whole life and… as soon as we had children, she was able to stay at home and lived comfortably raising our children and taking care of the household."
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If that's not enough to set off warning bells, the reaction of the children in question provided another clue. They have sided with their mother and are currently no longer speaking to their father. "I think she has poisoned them against me," the man wrote. Yep, I'm sure you do, sir.
In an effort to figure out how to save his marriage, the man went to therapy, but that too was a bust. "I have had five sessions of therapy with no results," he wrote. "Without more concrete information, he [said he] cannot help me. I am not a bad person, yet here I am."
His story is full of red flags that suggest that he is, in fact, the problem.
I had a professor in college who had a saying: "If you're the only one who's right, you're probably wrong." That seems apropos here, because the only person in this story who doesn't seem to have major problems with this man is himself. Everyone else seems to be on the same page.
I have empathy for his health struggles, but his story is full of red flags. All of his children have "sided" with his wife and are now avoiding him, for starters. He seems to think he did his wife a favor by making sure she was "able to stay home," as if being a mother and housewife doesn't involve extraordinary amounts of work. And the therapy rendered "no results" because the therapist "cannot help me."
Sure, it's possible that his kids are awful, his wife is a monster who poisoned the well, and his therapist is just plain incompetent. But is it likely? Not in the least. What is more likely is that his wife, children, and therapist all became intimately familiar with how emotionally impenetrable he is and threw up their hands in unison.
It's just incredibly hard not to suspect that what's gone on here is what happens with men all the time: He has never had to be introspective or considerate of others because neither his wife nor society ever demanded it of him, so now that the proverbial you-know-what has hit the fan, he's incapable of basic empathy or introspection.
Hopefully, he finds the help he needs, because as NJ.com's advice columnist R. Eric Thomas told him, his marriage is over, whether he understands it or not, and he needs to figure out how to navigate his life's final chapter without the help of his family. Because it doesn't sound like anyone in his life has anything left to give him.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
