When you say, I shouldn't say wife left the marriage, who should I say did?
People don't leave good, happy, healthy marriages. They leave shattered, broken, miserable marriages. Our marriages fell apart long before our spouses left, we just turned a blind eye to it. Your W would probably say you left the M a long time before she did. But again, don't try to keep score or assign blame, that just leads to anger and resentment. Your M imploded due to actions on both your parts, just leave it at that.
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I provided a nice home. I built it with my own hands, from foundation to roof and did every bit of upkeep and repair.
A home which you say has zero equity because you say you never owned it, because it's owned by the business. If so then you built it for the family business, not for your W. That's the point that I think 25 is trying to make, on the one hand you claim to be a great provider but on the other hand you claim you don't owe your W anything because you have zero home equity, zero savings, etc.
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I worked, (and continue to work for daughter and myself), to keep our home beautiful. I took care of the yard, I took care of our cars.
I remember saying these same things about my sitch. Have you read No More Mister Nice Guy? It's not what the name implies, it's more a study of the "nice guy" syndrome and how seemingly nice guys are not nice at all, but are hiding some serious character flaws behind things like clean cars and a well-kept yard. The book helped me to realize how much of ^^^that^^^ stuff I was doing to gain validation from others. Also there's another book (Venus/ Mars maybe) that goes into how men typically assign value to material possessions, but women don't. So we think women should be happy because we give them all the trappings of a nice life, but their value system is completely different, it's based on personal relationships and emotional connection. If we don't give them that then all the possessions in the world don't mean anything to them.
