In my case, STBEX and I still have a common e-mail address that school and others can use for kid-related information and invites so that both of us are clued in. For instance, S got an invite for a sleepover next weekend (when STBEX has the kids) so this saves STBEX having to inform me directly.
Concerning bank accounts: We still have two common checking accounts active while each of us now have an additional one that the other cannot access. It makes money transfers a heck of a lot easier if there is still a good degree of trust in that arena. Fortunately I have that but I know it could always get a heck of a lot worse...
Me 52, STBEX 52 D 17, S 12 M 20 years Em Sep since 2002, Phys Sep Sept 2009
How much fun is it when someone is stalking you, encroaching on private information?
If a business partnership failed, would the passwords remain the same.
Life is better when a former spouse's antics (on either side of the spectrum) are not monitored.
No the business accounts and email are mine. Not shared. I could very easily change the passwords but am intrigued that someone who moved heaven and earth to get out of our marriage and who immediately hooked up with a tramp, still wishes to see what I am up to.
I do only use those accounts for what i want him to see or know. He does not realise I can tell.
* Why did the lawyer break up with me? @Puppy's got it basically right. He said, Look, there's not enough at stake in this divorce to make this worthwhile to me, and I don't feel like billing you for no progress. There just wasn't any value-added anymore in listening to her lawyer say "STBX doesn't like when SP says A,B,C." Plus, her lawyer wouldn't reply to anything we proposed -- her "strategy" was just to pretend we'd said nothing and make a completely different set of counter-proposals. So he wrote off my debt, and I'm free to find someone fresh.
* After I got re-situated, I started doing a lot of do-it-yourself divorce reading. Then I re-read Getting to Yes, and I decided to Take Action and do what I could to facilitate a resolution.
* To that end, I sent STBX an email last week. Basically it said this: A year ago, almost to the day, I sent you a note suggesting we get all the information put together about income and assets and liabilities, prioritize them, and see what we could figure out. I said there was a lot of stuff we hadn't thought about -- emergency notifications, life insurance, formulas for splitting up retirement accounts -- and that it would be useful for me to be able to see all of that in black-and-white. I trust you will recall that you didn't take kindly to that idea.
[Backstory: From D-Day on, she had demanded I "name my price." What was it going to cost for her to be free? I was not the Finances Partner in the M, so I didn't really have a clue what was going on, money-wise. The note I was referring to I'd written roughly 3 months after she dropped the bomb -- not a lot of time in the grand-scheme-of-recovery-things, I think you'll agree, but I was trying to DB and be the guy-only-a-fool-etc. and 180 -- and since I hadn't been involved in the financial stuff, figuring out what was needed was a 180 -- or so I thought. Anyway, even though she was deep into the Bliss of Signore Schmuckatelli il Primero, her reply foreshadowed her later pattern of Teh Batsh*t Krazee (TM): "So that's how it is! Well if you're going try to f*ck me in the a**, then I'm going with a lawyer!"
[Now she hemmed and hawwed about retaining someone, but after I took a meeting with a collaborative law guy -- on behalf of both of us and with her full knowledge, mind you -- she freaked at his statement that the court would order her to play alimony for more than 10 years -- "that a**hole's totally biased against me!" -- and ultimately pulled the trigger and got her Mouthpiece. (And she then told some people we know that she'd hired a "ball-busting woman lawyer" because her goal was "to bust SP's balls LOL!! That a**hole!")
[I've come to realize, apropos of nothing, that this is one of her key personality patterns: if she doesn't like an answer, the problem isn't the answer but the person giving it. So when the collaborative law guy -- whom she'd never met and was just going off of paper numbers and 30 years' experience in family law -- gave her an answer she didn't like, it was "obviously" because he was "totally biased against" her. I'm not sure how that fits into the context of the overall D-situation, but I've only recently become consciously aware of this shoot-the-messenger mentality of hers.]
My note of last week continued: Now here we are, 12 months and $30,000 later, and we're in exactly the same place we were the instant you clicked "send" on your reply. So we tried it your way. Can we please try it a different way?
And I suggested that each of us propose 2 candidate meeting places and times, agendas, meeting rules, recording rules, and a prioritized list of issues to be examined.
(There are some issues that are so trivial it's ridiculous -- who gets the station wagon. You want the station wagon? Take the dam station wagon, I'll buy a new one, know what I mean?)
I suggested that at this point we ought to be able to reach agreement on some number of things, so why don't we try to whittle the list of contentious issues down, and if we get stuck on 1 or 2 or 3, turn those over to lawyers? Trying this, I said, wouldn't make us any worse off, and if we do have to go to trial the trial would at least be shorter and less costly.
She accepted in principle, but she's resisting on defining procedural rules for the meeting, so we'll see how it all shakes out. I'm insisting on agreed-upon procedural rules because of her pattern of mis-representing what I say to score points with her lawyer.
I think the fact that my lawyer quit and so the mandatory court hearing we had for last week is now postponed until nearly the end of the summer freaked her out a little bit. Back in The Day when she was the Jolly Walkaway and was oh-so-happy to not get rid of me completely -- we can still be Good Friends! -- she was "confident" this wouldn't take more than a year. So the fact that she kind of screwed up by constantly getting her lawyer to whine on her behalf and so might have pushed the final settlement all the way to 2011 is a bit of a wake-up-call (okay, I'm guilty of projecting and mind-reading there, I'll admit, but it seems plausible nevertheless).
And I think seeing the size of the attorney's bills in one lump sum had a salutary effect -- it's one thing to say "$1,000/month" and another to say, "$30,000."
It sucks, what with being the Left-Behind and all, that I'm the one who has take ownership here, but it's clear to me that I'm going to have be the Leader here and get this zombie relationship put into the grave it so richly deserves.
Much to my surprise -- and, I must confess, much to my vexation -- I have to take a business trip to STBX's SexFest European Country. She texted me the other night: "Kids say u r going to Euro City?" Well crap. Reply: True tho plenty of other places would rather go. STBX: "Y? Just cause I fell in love there?" Reply: Boundaries pls. And yes. Some things dont really need 2 b refreshed. You can get Euro City in the divorce lol. So any place specific u go? Might avoid if possible.
For some reason, this wigged her out, and she sent this long, twisted, irrational e-mail that basically boiled down to "am I supposed to draw you a map?"
I was sort of asking, you know, do you regularly eat at Joe's Diner -- that kind of thing. Anyway, this somehow uncorked something in her, and I have had in the past 36 hours a DELUGE of messages from her -- over 50 emails alone!
When replies were in order, I worked on them very diligently and in accordance with the @Gypsy Doctrine, ensuring they always stopped "just short." For some reason, the fact that the tone of my replies, when I replied, was chipper and non-confrontational just made her madder and madder.
So she reverted to pattern and occasionally would send this really hostile and crude note; when it didn't provoke a rise, she'd try to jailhouse lawyer it into something; when that didn't work, she'd start cc'ing her attorney, as if trying to coerce me; when I replied (if I replied) I cc'd her lawyer, too, so there was not wiggle room for her to misrepresent; and with every iteration she would just dig herself deeper in the hole.
Finally, she obviously got so wigged-out last night that in frustration she sent one of the e-mail threads to a close friend of hers. In it, she'd mentioned this place she goes to in Euro City. And she wrote to her friend, "Of course he doesn't know I go there with Signore Schmuckatelli il Secondo, but I just like the idea of knowing he'll be walking in our footsteps LOL!"
Problem was, she was so mental at that point, that she sent it to me! Now I definitely don't think it was deliberate -- I think her e-mail client was auto-filling the "To:" field, and whomever she was sending it to had a similar address to mine.
But it was so awesome. Every time I thought about it I started to giggle. I sat on it a while and, just before bed, replied: Going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that I was not the intended recipient of this e-mail.
NOT A WORD. As if it didn't happen.
And all day today -- all day -- she sent a blizzard of notes on a dozen topics but scrupulously avoided mentioning it at all. Ah, gad, it was cool to watch.
Bottom line -- I don't know WHAT the hell is up with her. She's clearly out of her mind, but beyond that? We had another one of those power shifts today, that's for sure.
But the capper was this -- STBX threatened (or thought she was threatening) to file for a bifurcation of the D. We'd be legally divorced without a settlement of the other issues. In Coastal State they apparently give these things out like candy. Most people don't apply, because it means TWO divorce trials, not one, but (in theory anyway) it makes the property settlement easier because the emotional thing has been resolved. In practice, the people who DO file them do so because they've got major separate property issues (business or something) OR....wait for it...hold onto your hats...because they're wanting to get remarried. As a result, these things don't take more than 3 weeks on average.
Now I'm not sure what she was aiming for, but my reply clearly unsettled her -- because once she received it, she didn't send another note. And she'd been sending at least 4 an hour from 5 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
My reply?
"Great idea! Why didn't we think of it before?"
And the funny thing is -- it actually is a great idea in my POV. I feel so oddly serene, like a dying person who's accepted the inevitably of the Grim Reaper's knock at the door. For the first time in months, I feel energized. There's a kind of relief in it.
Reminded me of that line from "Cast Away": Now I know what I have to do. I have to keep breathing. Because the sun will rise again. Who knows what the tide will bring?
On the other hand, I experimented with Vitamin B-12 this week and am apparently allergic to it, because I am covered in a decidedly non-godly rash. Oh well, win some, lose some!
But the blizzard of emails with snarky comments sounds like patterns from wayyyyy back.
What in the heck does it matter if you're going to the same city she's been? Granted the former spouse slipped away to another city, but that doesn't mean he got it in the divorce. I went there often all my life and it never occurred to me to be vexed about where he saunters.
Why push her buttons.. as she pushes yours? Unless it provokes familiar feelings, an odd connection?
Anyway... just a few random thoughts as I'm half asleep.
Amusing! I really like the mistaken email. I am so prone to those myself. I love seeing someone else do it. Goodness! She owns the European city. My, just a little territorial! It is good she married a man with a sense of humor. I hope Senor II is equally humored. He will get his dose of bat [censored] crazy someday.
