"I'm never getting married!"

I have lost count of how many times recently Son 1 (age 13) has said -- apparently apropos of nothing at all -- "I am never getting married!" It makes me sad. I mean, my parents fought too (sometimes, mostly during a span of a few years when they were having business troubles) and yet I always assumed that I would get married ... certainly that I wanted to. My father has suggested that maybe -- he's not sure -- taking a long look at my rather abrupt marriage could have encouraged my brother to avoid getting married. If it has the same effect on Son 1 and Son 2, that will be quite a lot of damage traced back to a single cause. But there may still be plenty of time for the boys to find themselves in a better place. I don't know, but I can hope.

I wrote all this to D last night, and I think it irritated her. Of course I should be careful talking about things like this, because quite obviously her perspective is that the sooner I am free of Wife (and the sooner she can take Wife's place at one level or another), the better. In any event, this is what she wrote back:

I can only get angry at your passive acceptance of Son 1's repeated statement that he will never get married. Of course Son 1 (and perhaps your brother) see the destructive features of your marriage and have become hesitant to marry. Looking down the road, your brother has no children, although from all reports he would make an excellent father, and if Son 1 remains single, he will probably enter a number of short-term relationships, perhaps father children, and yet spend little time with them. [I assume she is pulling this prediction out of some statistical study.] This pattern, so common in the community where I teach, is dreadful for children. Both boys and girls do worse in school, have more mental health and substance abuse problems, and the little girls become much more vulnerable to sexual assault. You have options, and you refuse to take them. You must bear some of the responsibility here. Wishful thinking will not provide a model of love and happiness within marriage; you have to create that with hard work and risk. It sounds like I'm advocating a kind of economic entrepreneurship for marriage; I don't mean to be so calculating. I realize too, that I am advocating for a divorce that might benefit me as well as the boys. I'm hardly a disinterested commentator. Yet it's hard to argue with me sociologically. The benefits of good marriages are profound, and the love and warmth witnessed by the children are blessings that echo throughout their lives and greatly benefit civil society. Love and partnership might also bless and enrich your life. Therefore, I have a difficult time when asked to respect your decision to remain indefinitely in a relationship so destructive to you and the boys. I accept it...I don't admire it.

Of course she is right about the benefits of marriage in the abstract. No question. That's part of what kept me in my own marriage for so long. (That and a certain basic lethargy.) But I do have some trouble applying her rant to my case in the sense of deriving any concrete program from it. I wrote back as follows:

Point taken, but I have to question what my alternatives are. It's not like the boys are three and five. If I filed for divorce tomorrow, Son 1 would be out of the house long before anything was settled. [He enters a boarding high school in the fall.] Son 2 might still be there long enough to witness the demolition of his entire known way of life, but not long enough to see anything rebuilt afterwards. [This assumes that he follows his brother to boarding school in two years.] Even assuming I were emotionally ready to remarry the day the decree was finalized, even assuming ... oh, a hundred other practical things all lined up just so ... [and even assuming I were prepared to marry D, which is not at all a foregone conclusion] the years for modeling loving spousal behavior are all gone. If anything better and sweeter happens in my life after this, no matter how soon I start, from the boys' perspective it will all be relegated to some vague, gauzy, And They All Lived Happily Ever After. It won't be a part of their lives, where they can learn from it by imitating it. At best it will be a case of "Gosh, I'm glad to know things worked out for Dad after all." And that skips over the colossal devastation that will be an inevitable part of the dissolution beforehand -- "inevitable" because we both know that Wife won't go quietly. She'll have no more motive to. Of course the responsibility is mine and all mine, but that's because it was my decision to marry their mother in the first place and then have children with her. Those horses are out of the barn by now. So yes, it leaves me deeply sad.

I am confident that there is a way forward, but I have not yet discovered the right one.