And no matter how much “common sense” & fifty relatives tell you otherwise, it is a complete fallacy to reason that if you marry a “Christian”, you are guaranteed a Wife who will be worthy of the priceless heart & life you give her. She is just as likely to cheat, and cheat again, just as H. did to me, not caring that I was faithful both to her & to the children who she’d misused to mislead me into believing we were building a family.

This isn’t to blame Christianity itself. Just to warn anyone naive as my younger self that there’s NO guarantee your bride won’t completely turn against you with no explanation, or even notice, and that calling herself a Christian does not guarantee any exception to this risk.

How will my sons feel when old enough to realize their “mother” abandoned them in order to go cheapen herself, with no “reason” provided.

It doesn’t matter if the church is smack dab in the middle of America’s heartland, even the stalwart Hoosier heartland. Doesn’t matter if the church your prospective bride attends is a self-styled “family values” bunch. Doesn’t matter if their “pastor” gives lip service to faithfulness in the pulpit; or even if he yells about it, red-faced, riling up the “Amen!”s of the congregation. Doesn’t matter if he does that regularly. It is, after all, just talk. Only in the acts of a group, in the fruit of their acts, are their values revealed.

It doesn’t matter if she’s spent her whole life in the church.

It doesn’t matter if she’s the pastor’s daughter. Mine was: pastor’s daughter, serial adulterer, covert marriage saboteur, and unilateral divorcer & family destroyer. She admits all but the last, to me at least. To the whole church & to my sons, she lies.

There’s no guarantee of not being brutally betrayed, as I was, with zero empathy by the woman I trusted enough to make mother of my three children, enough to quit my law firm position–pretty thoroughly derailing my legal career–in the hopes of safekeeping our marriage.

To recap. Even marrying a churchgoing “family values” pastor’s daughter guarantees utterly squat. My father, too, is a pastor & co-performed our marriage on August 5, 1994.

You know the drill (for that’s all it is to her & her present allies–a drill). Better or worse. Richer, poorer. Sickness, health. Till death do us part.

What she really meant was: if her feelings ever changed she could secretly poison the marriage & withdraw from me without even the courtesy of any ultimatum(s) or any reason(s). I was given no chance. And also, by her “vows” she meant she could cheat all she wanted to and lie about it. Worse yet, once discovered, she revealed the active belief that, also by her “vows”, she meant she could openly cheat on me, without the slightest empathy. After all–I loved our three sons & was with them, at the time, almost 24/7 … so she didn’t have to worry about babysitters while “dating”–or, as it’s otherwise called, “working late” every night.

The church’s deepest failure is the failure to fight FOR families in crisis. There ARE churches out there that do this. I’ve seen magazine articles & at least one book. But these exceptions are far too few. Especially in the middle of America’s heartland. Her pastor parents’, for instance, blamed her cheating on the fact that I had Harry Potter books in the house!!!

Wake up, sleeping Church. Countless casualties abound. More should offer DivorceCare groups, too, but a lot already do, so that’s a good trend. But it’s for “too late” scenarios.

Prevention is far more valuable. I’m already broken, now. Deed’s done. As broken as broken can be broken. I can barely function. See no light in the tunnel. This must be The Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is true that I fear no evil–evil has already had it’s way with me. To wit:

“Take away a man’s son, you’ve truly given him nothing left to lose.”

–’Columbus’ (Jesse Eisenberg), in “Zombieland”, at 57:42.

Avoid hearing the song “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS (from their multi-hit-singles album “Kick” (1987)) until AT LEAST nine months post-forced-divorce. Maybe longer.

Incidentally, regarding the album, I think 7 of the 12 tracks were singles, mostly hits–a feat I can only compare to the Genesis album from a little earlier in the 80s, the one with “Invisible Touch”, “Throwing It All Away”, etc.

Acquiescence.

–Mark Frost, The List of 7 (Avon Books, Sept. 1994), Epigraph.

–Taking Back Sunday, “Miami”, track 9 on Louder Now (Warner Bros. Records 2006).

My name is not, unfortunately, James Tiberius Kirk.  It is Robert, and what I intend to do in this blog is to chronicle, from this point on, the excruciating position of being Forced2Divorce, something very many have experienced.  However, I don’t know them.  I don’t have a “support system” as does the perpetrator of this 3-children divorce, and so, I appeal to the rubber-necking voyeurs of the internet (of which, I too, am one) to listen to me as I, at worst, vent, and at best, accurately describe the experience in all its dark energy.  I expect side-splitting commentary (in both the funny and the anatomical sense).

I will omit detailing the long and emotionally-exhausting background that’s led to the current situation.

Why start today?  I came across quite a few emails revealing her long-sustained lies about recent crises, and including the surprise of one or more additional men she’s been involved with while I’ve been watching our three boys, aged (3 5 7), at home while she “works overtime”.

And so my scarred heart deflates under the weight of its own mixed metaphors, and I will only bore you with past details briefly and if absolutely necessary for understanding a new development.

As noted, I’ve secretly copied a bunch of e-mails today, unplanned, but the opportunity presented itself and I was suddenly possessed of a hunger for truth.  I will go through these to establish a time line, primarily to come up with the right questions I need to confront her with, as the more prepared I am, the less she’ll twist semantics before either the always pleasant ad hominem attack, or the rare frank admission of truth (and hopefully more details).

So, this will go bit by bit.  I am emotionally exhausted at the moment.  But I hope to begin introducing the maudlin emails as soon as I can.

She has so many shoulders to cry on ….  And I have no one but you, my voyeuristic readers.  So as I proceed, any comments of encouragement, e-hugs, and the like might save my shriveling soul.  But no pressure.

And if anybody knows of any similar blogs that diary a similar process, please bring them to my attention so I can link to them (and read them).  A future reality-hub for catharsis, maybe? It might work. I hope to see.  Doesn’t seem like a “business model“, but there’s more to life than monetization–eventually we all cry out somehow just to be heard in some fashion.

As for you, dear reader, may you spoon snugly with the one you love tonight … for, as Cinderella (Hair Metal band, not pink chick) reminded us on FM radio in the 1980s:  “You don’t know what you got/till it’s gone/[bla bla bla bla bla bla]/It’s a long, hard road.”

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