Sometimes marriage isn’t what it’s all chalked up to be. Unfortunately, not every relationship is meant to last forever and can break down to a point where even the slightest and pettiest actions are cause for divorce. As unbelievable as some of these reasons are, they’re all true and cost a lot of time, energy, and money for everyone involved. So much for “till death do us part,” right?
1. Grocery Expenses
It took the couple two hours to decide who would get the groceries left in the fridge. The estimated value of the groceries was around $40. Two hours of my time, opposing counsel time, and mediator time added up to about $1,000. It all came down to a bulk-sized jar of peanut butter.
2. Just a Little Spittle
When I worked for a judge, two prominent local news people had a divorce. They filed mutual restraining orders against each other for "violence." The filings were vague on details, but still somehow conveyed a sense of Shiloh or Antietam levels of blood. At the hearing, it turned out the "violence" was spitting. More specifically, during a heated argument, flecks of spittle managed to touch the other party.
Judge denied the restraining orders, and both parties' attorneys probably bought new yachts. Such is justice.
3. More Than You Could Chew
His wife was a loud chewer at the dinner table. He developed a complex and literally needed out of the marriage as he couldn't bear to eat with her.
4. So in Debt with You
I’m a divorce lawyer and one client filed for divorce because he owed his bookie $70,000. He didn't want to leave his wife but he figured he would get half the house in the divorce, which was worth $700,000 and pay his debts. He had already blown through their life savings gambling. He was the worst guy.
5. Smack It Outta Ya
My neighbor filed for divorce because her husband smacked his lips when he ate and slurped his coffee and soup. She thought if she didn't divorce him, she would end up in jail for battery.
6. Just the Usual
I had a client file for divorce because every morning his wife would ask him how he takes his coffee...for seven years.
7. Playing Favorites
The wife wanted to divorce her husband because he kept taking their dogs for walks while she was at work, unintentionally making it so they’d rather cuddle the husband instead of her after a long day.
8. Man’s Ceramic Throne
One couple that I am close to were in the process of filing for divorce with papers served and lawyers involved. The husband put down for one of his reasons why things were irreconcilable was because she would poop in HIS bathroom. I’m sure not exactly in those words. But I’m happy to say that they worked through that issue and are still together.
9. Open-Door Policy
My friend’s mom has divorced her husband because his mother still coddled him at age 40 with his consent. They lived with his mother, which is common in Asia. By coddle I mean that she would walk straight into their room after his shower and powder his back for him. They couldn’t lock their bedroom door because his mother would come in when she wanted.
If they locked the door, she would knock repeatedly asking what they were doing. What would they be possibly doing? Playing poker?
10. Sabotage Suzy
I did my student practice at my family's law firm. A young woman filed for a divorce because her husband drank ONE beer during weekdays, after a day of work. The guy wasn't violent, using substances, or anything like that. He was just a normal, polite guy who liked to have a cold one after working 10-hour shift.
They are a very good couple and argue so rarely that this woman's friends told her to write down everything he did to upset her and re-read it every day, so she had reasons to be angry about. My mom, her lawyer, set the woman straight, told her he's just doing what all guys do and to find herself new friends instead of ones ready to sabotage their marriage.
11. Too TP’ed Off
My boss just got divorced. His wife was telling people one of her reasons was the amount of toilet paper he used. She was a super coupon clipper thrifty lady and would listen when he went to the bathroom to see if he was using “too much toilet paper.”
12. The Chamber of Bullets
I worked for a law office where the owner would talk about the man who sued for divorce because his wife would no longer allow him to use a loaded gun as a "marital aid." She had apparently agreed to it at some point, and was fine with the gun as long as it was empty, but that just wasn't good enough for him.
13. Despicable Dad Probs
My jerk of a cousin told his wife she had three chances to give him a son. The daughter was born first. Strike one. Son was born second. Then they find out the boy can’t eat gluten. So, my cousin divorced her and has made zero effort to see his kids.
14. Hosed Down to Bits
The wife glued all of the outdoor hoses together so he wouldn’t spend time washing his vehicle anymore. When the glue didn't work, she just cut them all up. When he bought new ones, he filed for divorce.
15. Out with the Dogs
A man came into the family law firm my friend was working in and says his wife was cheating on him. He's extremely rich and wants to get divorced. The lawyer proceeds to ask him about his assets and what he wants to keep. He says that she can have the house, the car, the boat, the kids, etc. The lawyer asks him what he wants to keep then, given that he doesn't seem to want anything. His reply was so disturbing it’s impossible to forget.
The man angrily responds, "that woman only loves her dog. I want her to suffer so I want the court to order that the dog be taken away from her and cremated. She can have 50% of the ashes and I'll have the other 50%."
16. Breaking Red
A couple that were both lieutenant colonels in the Air Force had one daughter that was about 11 or 12. Both had graduate degrees and were generally intelligent people. Well, the husband had an affair and things went sour with the relationship. The daughter was at that age when her relationship with the mother was starting to get a little strained and she mentioned how she wanted to stick with her dad because he was about to be stationed elsewhere and the parents would be going their separate ways.
The mother absolutely freaked. The first thing she did was go to the local police department and claim the father had been abusing the daughter. They investigated and couldn't find any evidence so they dropped the case. The mother, still furious, then goes to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and reports the same thing.
The Air Force then suspends the husband from duty and conducts their own investigation and come to the same result of no evidence of wrong doing and the case is dropped. The mother then goes to the next state over where the husband is about to be transferred and contacts the local police there with the same story. They of course do their own investigation but get the same result. The case is dropped.
Of course, this whole time the daughter has been interviewed a dozen times by psychologists, various therapists, the police, the Air Force, and who knows else. The daughter is straight up traumatized by this. People constantly asking her if her dad had been touching her and such. Not to mention the harm it did to her father's career. He was basically screwed from any possible promotion just because of the allegations as well as the fact that infidelity in the military is a big no, no. But that was his own doing.
Well, once word of all this gets back to the judge, he is furious. He's a former Air Force Jag and still has contacts in the ranks. The couple comes in front of him one day for a hearing and he outright tells her she better stop this behavior or he's going to hold her in contempt of court for the maximum amount of time he can lawfully hold her in a cell, contact the DA and recommend the filing of charges, contact her Air Force superiors and recommend reprimand to the fullest extent possible, and basically anything and everything he can do within his power.
17. Choose a Side
Someone in my family holds the state record for longest divorce proceedings. 30+ years of unrelenting fighting that divided the family into who talks to which parent complete with long periods of not speaking to one another and family members not speaking to the people who won't speak to the family members that they like.
The reverse too. Some people talk to the mom and some talk to the dad, but you can't talk to them both, not allowed. God forbid you ever mention one to the other. It's a war and it totally messed up their kids up. It won't end until both parties are dead and in the ground.
18. Birthday Girl Picks First
My friend's ex-husband tried to force their daughter to have to choose which parent she would live with every year on her birthday. The daughter wanted to live with Mom. Dad is always out of town for work anyway. The judge told him that in no way was he going to force this girl to disappoint one of her parents every year on her birthday. Her ex-husband is a jerk.
19. What’s Mine is Yours
My uncle has been a lifelong videographer and still works to this day as a news photographer. During the early to late 90s he stopped shooting news and started shooting freelance. This was before everyone and their mom had a camera/editing software/and whatnot. Eventually he became a sought-after photographer.
In the 80s when he was working as a news photographer, he met and married a reporter with whom he would go on to have two children with. After leaving the news business to freelance he decided to start a video editing business with his wife. That went extremely well for a while and they were making money hand over fist. He would be asked to shoot for channels such as Food Network and HGTV, DIY, etc. and then edit it into the show. She would work as the go between for his clients and as bookkeeper.
Eventually it turned out that she was a secret substance abuser and adulterer and their marriage ended in divorce. At this point my uncle was making a quarter-mil or more a year with their business. She decided to sue him for alimony mostly because he was worth a good chunk of change but also because she helped him build his business. Her demands were ridiculous, something like 75% of the business for the next so many years or something crazy. My uncle’s lawyer was afraid she was going to win because she had played such a big role in building the business.
Fast forward to court day, her lawyer stands in front of the judge and lists off what she wants in the divorce. Once he is finished it's my uncle’s turn. He blindsides her and offers to give her 100% of the business. The judge and both lawyers are confused and ask him if he is sure. Without him shooting and editing there is no business. So basically, she would be left with a hell of a lot less than she asking for by asking for X amount of profits.
The judge reasoned that his offer was fair and that she could take it or leave it. She was furious, her lawyer was furious and she ended up getting nothing.
20. Mocked in Translation
A friend of mine divorced his then wife because she would only speak French when her family would come over. Her family spoke English, French, and Spanish and he could only speak Spanish and English. It was only when he recorded a conversation while they were there that he learned her dark secret. When he had it translated, he found out what was going on.
She got bored of being married to him and her family basically talked bad about him while he was there.
21. Getting Played
The husband and wife both played some sort of on-line role-playing game, sort of like the Sims I think, but a little more elaborate and adult. The wife got heavily involved with the game like 10 hours a day and wouldn't reduce her time playing no matter what he said. What tipped things over the edge however was that he set up a fake profile and went online to stalk her in the game and found her avatar hooking up with some random guy's avatar.
Nothing ever happened in real life, but that was enough for the guy to initiate a fairly acrimonious divorce.
22. In Clear Violation
This guy getting a divorce becomes suspicious and insanely jealous that his separated wife is having an affair. He secretly follows her to a bar and waits outside in his car. She comes out many hours later in the dark and follows another car to a house. The husband follows her and parks down the block. He gets out, sees the house her car is parked at, and goes around into the backyard. He's sneaking around looking in windows and finally opens a sliding glass door and enters the house.
His wife and the guy she’s with hear him moving around, lock the bedroom door, and call 9-1-1. He starts pounding on the bedroom door and shouting at his wife, and then the cops kick in the front door. The cops get everyone downstairs to sort this out. That is when the guy made a shocking realization: his wife was sleeping with his own divorce lawyer.
23. Of Man and Wife
I was a marriage counselor for this soldier who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay that met a local. They fell madly in love. They decided to get married so she could come with him back to the States once his tour was done. She was working on American dishes and was making spaghetti. He comes home from work one day while she's making it. She puts the meat in, puts the canned sauce in, and then pulls an unlabeled bag out of the freezer and adds it to the sauce. At this point in the session she's hysterically crying with broken Spanglish. She's trying to explain she didn't know any better. What she said next was absolutely shocking.
Through the hysteria he informs me her mother and grandmother told her if she wanted to keep her man, she needed to put her menstrual blood in his food. It was so hard to keep my composure. I was trying to hard not to gag. They both said that they were madly in love, but he couldn't let it go. They ended up getting a divorce.
Having done this for 14 years, I have found it 100% accurate that truth is stranger than fiction.
24. By a Hair
My dad was a divorce lawyer in the 70s and had a client who wanted to divorce her husband for two reasons. First, he did not have enough hair on his chest and second, he did not drive fast enough.
25. No Free Trial Option
My grandfather’s brother was a judge who presided over state issue marriages from time to time. One couple he married returned six months later to "confirm" the wedding and end their trial marriage. He thusly informed them that there was no such thing and that they had been married for six months. They subsequently broke up.
26. The Slow Reveal
My dad split my mom because "she takes too long to tell a story." He was actually having affair #4795809374 and that came out shortly after. But this was one of the main reasons he gave when they did a counseling session together.
27. Things Got Bloody
Every morning this couple would sit in the bathroom together while one of them had their morning dump. One would sit on the toilet and the other on the rim of the bathtub. This particular morning the wife was on the toilet and husband on the edge of the tub. They started to argue about their relationship so the wife reaches down, pulls her tampon out and flings it at husband.
I’m told the tampon stuck for a brief second to his forehead before sliding off. He filed for divorce that same day or the next.
28. Let’s Just Swap
I had two couples come to me. They had been friends for almost 15 years. Husband A decided he liked Wife B more than Wife A. Wife A decided she likes Husband B more than Husband A. The reverse was also true, and Husband B preferred Wife A, Wife B preferred Husband A. The couples had near identical assets in terms of value. They came to me all together, and I drafted two sets of paperwork.
Two default judgment hearings were set on the same day. The judge signed all the papers the same day. A week after that, they all went to a JP and remarried. The husbands swapped houses and they all went about their lives exactly as they had the week before, but each slightly happier.
29. Can’t Mess with Us
The groom got drunk at the wedding, the bride did not like it, and decided to divorce him right after the honeymoon—which she went on without him. Moreover, this was all an elaborate scheme of divorce-robbery because the guy was loaded, and so was his entire family. Well, there was one plot twist she didn’t expect.
They were loaded because they were a family of EXCELLENT lawyers, and he was a third-generation lawyer with all the smarts and experience of his predecessors combined. Let’s just say it did not go well for her.
30. Bathroom Break
This girl I went to school with marries this rich guy from Ohio. She moves in with him and they seem to get along well. Six months later, she files for divorce. Up to that point, all I’ve heard from her was how good it was going. Anyway, it turns out our buddy had a fetish for urine. He asked her to urinate on him in the tub. At first, she agrees to it as she thought it was a one-time thing.
But he kept asking for it more and more. She tried to decline it respectfully but he wouldn’t get any of the hints. She finally used the tub being too small as a reason. Next day she comes home with two dozen construction guys and their heavy equipment tearing the bathroom walls. A week or so later, they finish up the bathroom.
She comes home to a sign left on the fridge with a note to drink up, she got some watering to do. I don't know what exactly she put down as the official reason in the paperwork but that was definitely her biggest reason to walk out of that relationship. Oh, I forgot to add, he also wanted her to make animal sounds while she stood on top of him.
31. Hardly Something to Brush Off
He was frustrated by her hoarding. She was frustrated by his utter uselessness. He filed for divorce and she was my client. Her prized possession was a room or two full of scrapbooking materials. His prized possession was a yard full of junk cars that he never worked on. They had no children and no real assets.
They hated each other more than any two people I'd ever met, and the only terms they would agree to were these: he gets the scrapbooking stuff, and she gets the cars. The woman also took the house, as he had no income and didn't want it anyway. These two also fought over a toilet brush, as he didn't want to have to buy one when he moved out. I politely instructed my client to "give him the stupid toilet brush."
It was the shortest divorce decree I ever drafted. I intentionally squeezed it onto one page, and the judge and I had a good laugh over it. Once the decree was signed and filed, she hauled all the scrapbooking stuff to the yard, and he removed it to the dump. She then called a junk shop I referred her to and had all of his cars removed from the yard.
32. Triple Bogey
A friend of the family got divorced by her husband because she couldn't outperform him on the golf course. We all think he was cheating and just wanted an excuse but she did say he would often yell at her in public while golfing and mock her for her "attention to detail" whatever that means in golf. He would also force the family to go golfing on most weekends so it's hard to say if that was the real reason or not. She doesn't even like golf but was, and still is, afraid to tell him that.
33. Nay the Force Be with You
I had a client incur about 20 additional hours of billable hours because he and his ex-wife were battling and went to trial over their Star Wars Collection. This was the only issue at trial. They were able to work out custody, child support, the house, but the Star Wars collection went to trial. The judge ended up splitting it basically giving each side half of what they wanted and then mixing and matching everything else and breaking up “collections.”
When speaking about it at a conference, the judge admitted she did it because if they were going to act like children, she would treat them like children. The thing is, the value of this collection was over $100,000 so it was hardly kid’s stuff. Neither side had it in them to appeal nor was the case law on either side given judicial discretion in property distribution.
34. Smoochy Mooch
My aunt was dating an unemployed dude for a while. He was staying in her house rent free. They got married and were getting ready to go on the honeymoon when the new husband tells her he’s not going because he has to take care of his plants at the house. There was a big fight. Aunt goes on the honeymoon with her sisters instead.
She comes home and tries to kick him out of her house but he refuses to leave. She tries to get the police involved. Dude is live-streaming on Facebook how he is being trapped in his own home. But that’s not even the worst part. Police tell my aunt there is basically nothing they can do and that she can file for eviction after a divorce. Dude gets to live in her house with his precious plants for like three months until everything legally gets worked out.
35. Alone in the Dark
I knew an eccentric guy in his late 40s from the job at Burger King I had in high school. He acted like all the other high school coworkers were his best chums. He told us that he divorced his wife of two months because she would sleep with a nightlight. Apparently, he could only sleep in total darkness, but this was never discussed in advance because they didn’t lived together until after getting married.
He hated her nightlight so much that he would often sleep on the couch instead, but sometimes he would claim the bed for himself and lock her out of the bedroom for the night.
36. Financially Tied-Up
The wife was kidnapped in Mexico. The husband’s reaction was bone-chilling. He straight up refused to pay ransom. Eventually, her family managed to pay and she was left on the side of the road. They divorced afterward.
37. Every Reason in the Book
There’s a guy who is 100% convinced that his wife, our client, is actually a lesbian in love with his sister and just using him as a cover, but he also claims she is hooking up with me to pay for her legal fees, and with every male whose phone number is in her call history. But that wasn’t the worse one I’ve ever seen.
There was a woman who was divorcing my client because he was "too sad" after his father died the year before. My client had to break down her door to get his father's ashes a few weeks after he left the house and she refused to let him back in or give them to him.
38. Reality Prank
My friend bought a lottery ticket and played the numbers that had already won the night before to play a trick on his wife. He went home and put the ticket on the fridge where the other one’s were thinking his wife wouldn’t have a reason to pay attention to their specific date. He heard his wife get up and make some coffee and yelled from the living room that he hasn't checked the lottery numbers yet and for her to see if they won anything last night.
He heard her use the laptop to check the numbers and then she is quiet for a minute. He said he had this big grin on his face waiting for her to start yelling they won and thinking how funny it would be. She yelled from the kitchen that they didn't win anything. She then went back upstairs and 15 minutes later, she passed through the living room with both their elementary age kids in tow and said she forgot to tell him she had to go to her mom’s place for the day and left with the kids.
He was shocked. He went and checked, lottery ticket is gone, not in trash or anywhere else. He realized she thinks they won the lottery and she is trying to run off with the winnings. She didn't return calls or talk to him and when he called even though the grandma confirmed that she was there, she only put the kids on the phone, but that was it. She finally showed up with the kids a couple days later and just walked into the house, swore at him, walked into her bedroom and refused to talk to him!
The kids confirm that mom thought she had won a ton of money. Realizing what kind of person she was and that she also isn't very smart to think she would have gotten away with it, he divorced her.
LucidMagi
Wikimedia Commons, Santeri Viinamäki
39. A Mother’s Love
This husband wanted a divorce because the wife still wiped their perfectly healthy and mentally able teenage son’s rear end, among other things.
40. If You Got It, Flaunt It
My great-great-grandparents had an interesting case. He was abusive. This was the 1910s, though, and in our state, you couldn't initiate a divorce for cruelty. In fact, the only possible grounds for divorce was infidelity. A few times, she tried just leaving him anyway. Once he came home from work and she plus all eight of their kids were just gone. But he always found them, and since they were still married, he had every right to grab the kids and go back home with them.
Finally, she moved out and went to live with another man. She flaunted the new guy around town until her no-good husband got embarrassed enough to sue her for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. Although she couldn't read or write, she put her X on those papers the minute he served her. It was a major local scandal because it was very Catholic community and divorce was rare, but she got what she needed to be safe.
41. Copy That, Sir
A couple in their mid-70s to early 80s did their will with our firm. We drafted everything. They had been married 40 years total, divorced and remarried once. The husband wanted us to put in his will that his kids get his entire estate, but—and this is a big but—did not want us to tell his wife. He wanted to have us make a secret will and a fake will.
The fake will would be signed with her present and then he wanted us to shred it and he will come in later to sign the "real will." He copied his wife on the email that had all of this information disclosed in it. Two weeks later he called us and said he wanted to file for divorce instead.
42. Possessed by an Evangelical
One of my clients had an inner ear condition that caused chronic vertigo, but her symptoms could be treated with medication. Her husband was an evangelical who was convinced his wife 1) had become possessed and that her vertigo and general crankiness with his methods were evidence of demonic possession, 2) the medications she was taking was enabling the devil to hide inside her, and, worst of all, 3) the only proper recourse was exorcism. He would hide her meds until she got dizzy and then try various methods of exorcism.
This included sweating it out where he’d put her under blankets while incapacitated and locked in a room full of space heater, freezing it out, which was pretty much the reverse with AC, fans, and bags of ice, and surprising it out where he would jump out and scare her like it was the hiccups, but instead of yelling “Boo!” he would recite the Lord’s Prayer or Psalms. The final straw was that he tried to “surprise it out of her” by pushing her down the stairs when they were heading out for dinner.
43. Legal Gaslight Terms
This guy didn't think his wife should be able to divorce him because she had Lyme disease. He thought that having had this impaired her mental facilities and therefore she was not in her right mind to make this decision. We were just the GAL, guardian ad litem, where you have another attorney represent a party due to some incapability for the kids, so every so often we would get calls from him going on and on about this.
44. Cheap Real Estate
I spent six months costing Legal Aid cases for solicitors in the early 90s. This included many divorces. The most notable one was a woman divorcing her husband because he discovered he could talk to the dead on their honeymoon and then later spent all their money on spiritualist groups. During the divorce, the woman left the house.
At some point her husband approached her and claimed that as he was letting the house fall into ruin, it would be better for both of them if he sold the house and split the proceeds with her. She agreed to this without consulting her solicitor. A few weeks later the husband gave her £5. She asked what it was for. It was her share of the house.
He'd sold it to his sister for £10 and kept living there. When she went to complain to her solicitors, she found they'd done the conveyancing for him. He'd deliberately used his wife's divorce solicitors and nobody at the firm had realized.
45. Mother’s Approval
This guy signs over Power of Attorney to his mother before leaving. As soon as he was out of the country, his mother files for divorce on his behalf because she never got along with his wife. Dude is in the middle of the desert and didn't know until he came back, three weeks after the fact.
46. In the Wee Hours
I knew a couple who were married for only a few hours. The bride’s side of the family was being disrespectful to the groom’s side at the reception. He brought this up on the way to the hotel after the reception which caused a heated argument. The bride calls up her family who arrive to the hotel and start a fight with the groom in the lobby.
But it doesn’t stop there. The groom called his side of the family as well. The hotel lobby turned into a screaming match field and they separated there and then. It was such an extravagant wedding. What a waste.
47. Personal Accessories
I was a legal assistant when this case came in, but this lady divorced her husband of two months because he got her an iPad case for her birthday instead of the expensive jewelry she wanted.
48. The Finest Storage Containers
Neither side would follow the court orders. When they had to go back to court they were fighting over a pistol and the man's grandmother's bowls. I assumed for weeks that these bowls were some sort of heirloom or expensive china. When they finally brought the bowls in to swap, it was Tupperware.
49. Nobody Wins
I dropped into court to visit a family friend who was a judge and had quite a treat. A wealthy area farmer and his wife were in court that day fighting about possessions/assets. The judge had had enough. After briefly reviewing the history of their case, he offered the couple one last opportunity to retire to a conference room and come to an agreement. Both refused.
Their lawyers were clearly as weary as the judge. The judge then asks each party which room in their house was their favorite room. She picked the kitchen and he picked his gun room. The judge then informed them that because the matter had dragged on for so long with both behaving like children, he was going to decide the matter of the property.
She was awarded everything in the kitchen and he the gun room. Everything else was to be sold at auction with the profits equally divided. Then the judge told them, “Now neither of you is happy, right?”
50. Love Is Robbed Blind
I got into scams because of a lawyer in my old office. He represented a woman whose husband left her because she got involved in a romance scam that started as a pen pal. It was a weird marriage. He was clearly a closet gay who married her for her money because she was ugly as all hell. They kept separate lives for 30 years.
She began corresponding with someone she believed was a three-star general serving in Afghanistan. It went the typical way scams like this do: she fell in love and he needed money to move from Afghanistan back to the United States. She eventually would transfer him about $70,000 over the course of eight months. Even when my friend brought me into the conference room to lay out the case as being a scam, for which I had piles of proof, she continued to transfer money including a $8,000 transfer the day after.
The judge ruled she owed her husband dollar for dollar what she gave the scammer, so that was the $70k plus he issued a temporary restraining order barring her from transferring marital assets. My friend dumped her as a client when she showed interest in appealing the TRO and trying to expedite her divorce so she could "marry" the scammer.
51. Trauma Savings
My client was the outrageous one, so my heart went out to his poor wife. He had OCD which manifested primarily financially, so he made their lives a penny-pinching hell. He was obsessed with avoiding unnecessary driving due to wear and tear on the car and gas expenses, so he cut the whole family’s hair at home and never let them eat at a restaurant or go to the movies.
One of the weirdest things of all was that he kept one toilet paper roll on him at all times and you had to get one square from him before you could go to the bathroom. He never gave more than one square. The wife finally got fed up and left him when 1) he gave her bangs during an in-home haircut and 2) their daughter was so traumatized by the toilet paper thing they couldn’t potty train her.
52. Awaiting Death
The saddest divorce we were hired to do, but ended up not doing for reasons that'll become apparent, was a woman in her fifties whose husband had really just let himself go. He was over 400 lbs., just did his third triple bypass, refused to do ANYTHING different, just drank all day long while watching TV. His doctors told him he was going to pass in six months if he didn't change his behavior. He told them they were all morons.
Meanwhile, his wife is this successful woman who makes over $10,000 a month on her HOBBY while making six figures in her normal work. She lost all respect for him, all desire, and all love for him by watching his decline. For the past few years, she can barely stand him. It also sounded like there was some verbal abuse going on where he constantly accused her of cheating and gaslighting her while cheating himself throughout their marriage as well as spending all her money, the usual. His accusations ramped up considerably once she lost about 200 lbs. the good old-fashioned way.
We were working on her divorce and one of her provisions was that he’d keep her as the beneficiary on his life insurance for obvious reasons. She assured us he would agree to everything she suggested in the paperwork if she talked him through it. One day, we get an email from her saying to halt the divorce. The reason was shocking. It wasn’t because they were reconciling, but because he refused to keep her as the beneficiary on his life insurance if they divorced.
So, she stopped the divorce so that she could get the benefits when he inevitably dies in a few months.
53. My Precious
A couple got divorced over a cat. The wife called the cat Snowball because of its white fur and only wanted the cat to eat wet food or chicken breast. The husband called the cat Lily again because of its white fur and believed it should only eat dry food. These two argued for a year over custody of the cat but did not give a thought about their human kids aged 15 months, 4 years, and 6 years old.
54. Wildly Overreacting
I once had a heavily pregnant client that attacked her husband of less than a year with an iron. Said client was now sitting in a police cell, sobbing, and insisting that her husband deserved it and she wanted a divorce. I asked what he had supposedly done, assuming he'd cheated or something similar. It turned out that she'd checked his phone and found a single dirty website in his browsing history...from over two years beforehand.
Sure, it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to discover, but hardly worth battering him half to death and demanding a divorce.
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