🎤 PODCAST • Divorce ~ Should I leave my lazy husband or stay for the sake of my daughter?
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Jackie, you're deciding whether to stay with your husband or not? Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about for several years, actually. Yeah, how long have you been married? We've been married for 11 years, but have been together for 20. Okay, yeah, so it's a long, long-term relationship. How many kids...

We just have one daughter. She's 11. Okay. Hence the marriage. Yeah. Oh, I get it. I didn't put two and two together that quickly. Right. Yeah. So tell me what's been going on the last several years that makes you consider leaving him. I feel... Oh, I'm losing you a little bit. Oh, can you hear me now? No, you're very faint. Okay.

Okay, we'll continue, though. I'll try very hard. Okay. His behavior is getting out of control, I think. Yeah, in what way? Well, he's very irresponsible. He doesn't work. He doesn't take care of me and my daughter. I'm the one who takes care of everything. I work, I pay the bills, I take care of her. And he's just...

I don't know. Sometimes he doesn't come home at night. Oh, that's suspicious. What's going on there? I'm sorry, what was that? That's suspicious. What do you suspect is going on there? I feel like it might be drugs, but I'm not sure. Oh, drugs? Any paraphernalia? I haven't found any recently, but I have. Like three years ago, I found some in the house. What did you find? I found a pipe for smoking. Okay. Okay.

And, you know, of course I confronted him immediately, and he denied that it was his, and I haven't found anything like that since. But his behavior is just so erratic that I just feel like I've been staying for my daughter because I know how much she loves him. Yeah.

That's how much she needs him, but I feel like I'm setting a bad example for her now. You mean that she will think that relationships involve staying with somebody who's not taking responsibility? Right. I don't want her to think that's okay. That's my problem. Is it more important for her to have her father, or is it more important for her to see me take care of myself?

It's more important for you to be honest. That's the bottom line. And it sounds like, have you been happy? Obviously not in the relationship, right? No, it's been a long time since I've been happy. And it's not that he fought in the war and came home and had an injury and you're dealing with that. It's something that's within his control. He can choose to go out and use drugs or not. I mean, I don't agree with the disease model of drugs.

And these are choices he's made. He can choose to find work and pick up some of the slack or even be the man of the house, you know, try to be the man of the house. Or he could choose not to. And the fact that you're doing all of this makes him much less lovable by his own choices.

Right, right. And that's exactly what we judge people on. We judge people on what's within their control. Could he have chosen otherwise in any of these? Could he have chosen to sit... Could he choose right now to sit down and talk with you and open up about what's going on behind the scenes? Or do you have to live with this big, huge question mark or dark cloud looming over you saying...

I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing, and I'm not telling you, but I'm not going to tell you, and I'm also not taking responsibility. I'm not acting like a husband. I'm not acting like a friend. He's certainly not acting like a soulmate. Right. So if your daughter has a view of him as a good daddy, does she also see some of the things that you're seeing?

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If your daughter has a view of him as a good daddy, does she also see some of the things that you're seeing that you do all the time? Yeah, and I used to cover it up a lot, but I just felt like I couldn't do that anymore because I just felt like now I'm lying to my daughter. And so she's been starting to see the behaviors herself, and I guess that's why I'm feeling like now

Now she's seeing it, and I'm letting her see it, and now I'm condoning it by staying. Would he go into counseling with you, or have you tried that? He suggested it, but he never follows through on it. If you made an appointment, what would happen? Let's see. In the past, I did make an appointment once, and he didn't show up. Okay. Go ahead.

I mean, I could try it again. I'll do anything that would benefit my daughter. Okay. And yourself. You want to keep yourself in... You're benefiting your daughter by thinking, by being honest, actually. That's getting back to my first point, that if you're looking at the facts and saying, he used to be a better guy and he let himself go, I'm assuming 20 years ago he wasn't this way.

No, he wasn't. He was a different person. When my daughter was born, he was working, and he seemed like he was proud to be the breadwinner and the family man. How did he lose his job? There was a back injury involved. He did heavy construction, and it put him on disability for a while, but...

Then he got over it and tried to go back to the same kind of job, and it didn't quite work out. I guess the pain was too much for him. Yeah. And so he tried to do other things, like his own business, like a maintenance business, but he just never completely committed to it. So it isn't that he tried his darndest and it fell through. It's that you didn't see him energetically trying to make it work when it could have. Right.

So if he didn't like the maintenance business, he could have looked for other businesses. It sounds like when this all fell apart 11 years ago, he could have made much better choices. So when you sit back and evaluate him and compare him to other men you know, you can see the difference to men who do take responsibility for their lives. My guess is your emotions are different towards him now too.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Go ahead. I don't see him as my partner.

So the marriage is dissolving even though you're both remaining married. So I know we're winding down here, but it's basically you want to show your daughter that achieving good things in life are possible, including especially your own happiness. But what does happiness involve? It involves happiness.

having a good romantic relationship or at least living alone where you're not trapped with somebody who's not supportive of you

and you could move on and find someone else eventually. It means having a career that you enjoy. It means having good friendships. It means having interests or hobbies that you enjoy. It means spending wonderful moments with your daughter and having maybe some hobbies with her or doing something. I think that's the fuel that we all live for. That's what makes us look back on any particular day and say, wow, that was worth living. That was fun.

I think that now that your daughter's older and has more facts, I think that it would be important to maybe get some, to go to a therapist for yourself, even if he's not willing to go, and to figure out how to strategize maybe moving out.

Listen, thank you so much for your call, Jackie. For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to drkenner.com and please listen to this ad. Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner. Is romance possible with an abuser who abuses only sometimes? No.

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