Things turned shitty very fast. His wife took out a temporary restraining order, accusing him of attempting to kidnap their youngest son. The claim was never proved in court. Then, with the aid of some high-priced lawyers, she extracted from him a whopping $50,000 a month—a full 75 percent of his monthly income. Barred from the house, he was not allowed regular access to the office he used to generate that income. (On the few times he was permitted inside, his wife did not let him use the bathroom. She insisted that he go outside in the woods.) “My lawyer kept telling her lawyers, ‘You’re killing the Golden Goose,’ ” recalls Paul. “But they didn’t care.”
Crushed by the payments, and unable to work, he soon faced such a severe cash-flow crisis that he had to declare bankruptcy. His wife still did not relent. She charged that Paul had been abusive toward one of their sons. Paul says the charge is absurd, but it did its work, limiting his visitation rights.
Paul was sleepless and nerve wracked; his spirits plunged. He still missed his old life with his family. He missed the sound of it—the bustle of all the activity, the life. “I can’t stand the silence,” he says. “I miss hearing my wife breathe as she lay in bed beside me.” In his desperation, he twice overdosed on prescription medication, but managed to call 911 each time before the drugs took full effect, and medics rushed him to the hospital in time. “I don’t want to die,” he says wearily. “I want to live. But I can’t live with this torture.” He did manage to keep a few mementos of his former life. Pictures, mostly. But also the kids’ baby shoes. “I was always the emotional one,” he says. “But that’s all I have—the shoes, a few pictures. That’s all. I used to be jovial, happy. But not now. I’m a broken man.”
Sudden Divorce Syndrome. You won’t find it in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that bible of psychiatric illnesses, but you will find it in life. In a 2004 poll by the AARP, one in four men who were divorced in the previous year said they “never saw it coming.” (Only 14 percent of divorced women said they experienced the same unexpected broadside.) And few events in a man’s life can be as devastating to his physical, mental, and financial health.
“I meet men all the time who are going through breakups, and it’s very common for them to say it caught them by surprise,” says Los Angeles–based sex therapist Lori Buckley, PsyD, host of “On the Minds of Men,” a weekly relationship podcast on iTunes. The warning signs are usually there, claims Buckley, but the male mind is simply not very adept at recognizing them. “When women make up their mind that the relationship is over, they stop talking about the relationship,” she says. “Men interpret a woman’s lack of complaining as satisfaction. But more often, it’s because she’s simply given up.”
To understand how common this scenario is, consider figures provided by John Guidubaldi, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Child and Family Welfare. Nationwide, Guidubaldi reports, wives are the ones to file for divorce 66 percent of the time, and, in some years, that figure has soared to nearly 75 percent. “It is easier to end a marriage than it is to fire an employee,” says Guidubaldi. If she wants out, it’s over. “You can get a dissolution of marriage on the basis of nothing.”
Oftentimes, men have a divorce sprung on them in midlife, when their kids are more self-sufficient and they’ve finally started to think they were over the hump. Like Martin Paul, they could start to relax. But that’s exactly the time of life when the instance of divorce begins to swell (another occurs shortly after marriage). Joe Cordell, of the law firm Cordell and Cordell, which specializes in representing men in domestic cases, attributes this to wives deciding as they approach age 40 that it’s now or never for getting back into the marriage market. It’s the same phenomenon as rich guys trading in their long-time partners for trophy wives. Only it’s the women who are shedding men.
Paul was sleepless and nerve wracked; his spirits plunged. He still missed his old life with his family. He missed the sound of it—the bustle of all the activity, the life. “I can’t stand the silence,” he says. “I miss hearing my wife breathe as she lay in bed beside me.” In his desperation, he twice overdosed on prescription medication, but managed to call 911 each time before the drugs took full effect, and medics rushed him to the hospital in time. “I don’t want to die,” he says wearily. “I want to live. But I can’t live with this torture.” He did manage to keep a few mementos of his former life. Pictures, mostly. But also the kids’ baby shoes. “I was always the emotional one,” he says. “But that’s all I have—the shoes, a few pictures. That’s all. I used to be jovial, happy. But not now. I’m a broken man.”
