[BrightFuture]

Bea, Gwen, thanks for the comments.

I have not been feeling good today at all. I’m spinning like crazy. I feel like I am an animal in a small cage who keeps bouncing from wall to wall and cannot find an exit. I had a huge knot in my stomach this morning then I had an anxiety attack in the afternoon. Thanks goodness I worked from home today.

Bea, why do you say that I’m still “deeply” emotionally attached to H? I just don’t know what to think anymore. Is it because I’m posing these little details about our rare interactions? I was starting to feel that I’m actually letting it go. But, here I am again, trying to figure out what is going on with me again.
One day I feel like could be care less what he is doing and I’m going on with my life and doing fine. Then a little trigger makes me spin again. I think the trigger this time was the conversation with my friends yesterday.

As you know MLC is a long term and messy thing, and a good proportion of MLCers appear to never wake up to what they have left.

This is always a downer .

I suspect that your hope might be that starting divorce proceedings might shock him out of limbo.

Not at all. I actually don’t want to start a D. I think my posting didn’t come across how it was intended. After my friend’s comment that H is happy about this limbo state, I felt that I lost all the hope again. Obviously this limbo state starting to have a toll on me. So, I was just asking myself that maybe I just need to get the D process started, because there is no hope that H will come out of this (also according to so many posters here who a familiar with my sitch), and he would file for D himself.

On the practical and financial side is there any advantage to your divorcing him?

Yes and no.

If he would want to do this by the law of our no fault state with 50/50 rule, I would lose. I have a house that he signed off to me and that has some equity. On the other side, the condo that we still share jointly lost its value. I’m not even sure that if it is sold, the proceeds will cover what we own on the mortgage. Plus, I make a lot more than him (it’s been like that for at least 12 years now), so he could claim a spousal support. I doubt that he would, but considering his financial situation, he might go for it.

At the same time, I am building my savings (that was depleted after 1 year out of work), and also contributing to 401K and other benefits. I don’t know if this is going to be taken into consideration as well during the D. One lawyer told me one thing about this and another one told me the opposite. So, it could be that by delaying the D, I’m ricking to give away more and more. H is not contributing to his retirement in any way now. And what we have in our IRA accounts is about the same, with me having a bit bigger savings.

So, I don’t what is best for me right now. The best timing for D from the financial stand point (for me) was last year when I was out of work and he was making more money, plus the housing market was just starting to pick up.

I’m going to use my company benefit and get a consultation with the D attorney to ask all these questions. I’ve been procrastinating on this, because it just makes me more depressed and I have hard time to even setting an appointment.