Hey all, I recently found this site and it has brought joy to my heart. We have just introduced extreme disengagement with the skids in a final effort to prolonge our marriage. My hope is to share my backstory, my disengagement plan, and then hear your advice.

My DH and I met three years ago in the peak of COVID and had a long distance relationship for one year from our respective countries. We had both experienced divorce three years prior to our meeting. 

My divorce was after a 12 year marriage wherein I never felt emotionally safe enough to have children, but desperately longed for them. My exH eventually left for another woman. This was tragic for me as while I did not feel emotional intimacy with exH, I dearly loved him and enjoyed the mearning he brought to my life. I admit that I still have not fully recovered from the pain of the divorce, although I do fully accept that exH and I have gone in such different ways and have such diverging values that it was the right thing to do. 

I have no siblings or grandparents, and my biodad died when I was a teenager. I am very close with my mother who remarried a man a year after the death of my dad. The man turned out to be a covert narc and she is in the process of divorcing. The man disengaged from me when I was around 16 and we have no contact, although up until a few years ago I would visit for the holidays and it was always amical if tense/eggshell-y.

DH's divorce was after a 25 year marriage that produced two children, SD22 and SS23. He was the one who left his wife for a mistress with whom he finally found a sort of camaraderie that he never shared with his wife, but she ended up using him. DH's family is rife with covert narcissism and highly conflictual. He grew up in this environment, transmitted it to his children, and only with our meeting was able to see that he was a covert narc and correct many behaviors. I see his family once a year and it is always a terrible time when I am excluded completely. His parents and SD22 refused to come to our wedding because I gave them the ultimatum that either they be on their best behavior with respect to the ceremony or they do not come (they are very vocal atheists and we are religious and they cannot accept that, although we accept their atheism and never question it). Only SD23 came as a result.

DH and I have been living together since summer 2021, a year after our online meeting, as I have moved to the country where he lives and where I also happen to be a citizen and speak the language (thanks to my former exH who was the same nationality as DH). I first met SD22 that summer, when she walked into our apartment we were renting with her hands on her hips and did not even say hi. She ignores me completely when I am in their presence, which is extremely rare (2-3 times a year). She is very critical of her father and loves to slight and dismiss him also, but never to the point of ignoring him. She has just graduated uni and is working full time but he continues to pay child support without being legally required to, in addition to buying her expensive gifts. If she needs anything, my MIL just calls him up and harasses him until he buys it for her. SS23 is taken care of by BM as per their divorce agreement, and DH will occasionally send him a small gift but nothing more.

SD22 is the crown jewel of DH, even though they only share one interest in common and she treats him with contempt systematically. SS23 despite being more successful and generally polite and kind is not really appreciated by DH, who calls him once a month to check in and sees him once a year only. I have no issues with SS23, and my hope was that my relationship with SD22 would evolve into a similar entente. Only it has gotten worse this year.

I had not seen SD22 for an enitre year, when we invited her to our home last summer just before our wedding a month later, and she was most ungrateful, acting like she owned our house, looking in cupboards, commenting on everything in a critical way, and ignoring me everytime I would speak. She also got into a major fight then with DH about religion (she is very militantly atheist and DH is deeply spiritual) and they were yelling at each other by the end of the visit. DH said that he was so preoccupied by their own argument that he was unawares of her behavior towards me. 

After this incident, I decided to disengage. I told him that I did not want to be part of their relationship because he did not have the courage to defend me. He said that her problem wasn't with me personally but simply that she wanted to be with him only and now she realized she would have to share him with someone else. He called her to tell her that ignoring me was unacceptable and that if she couldn't be on her best behaviour with respect to our religion and union, she couldn't come to our wedding. She screamed at him on the phone and hung up, only to call him back crying and pleading. But he insisted and so the wedding was without her presence, which saddened him but he accepted it.

Fast forward one year: everything was peaceful, and then DH realized that it had been a year since they saw each other and that he should go see her in the city where she lives (separately) along with SS23. I said that he should go alone so he initially announced to SD22 that he was coming along, and she invited him to stay in her apartment. Then he had the idea that I should come and that it would be great to spend time together as a couple in addition to seeing the skids, so he called her up and said that I would be coming and that we would stay in a hotel. She screamed at him on the phone, calling him selfish and bursting into tears. I ended up caving to make him happy, and it was as I had predicted: despite DH and I's best efforts, SD22 was on her worst behavior and ignored me the whole time while SS23 was a joy to be around. SD22 dressed provocatively but her interactions with DH were not exactly incestual like a DaughterWife, more like a five-year-old who couldn't do anything wrong. She was rude at every meal, looked the other way every time I spoke, etc. Just a generally abrasive person. I did not indulge it and used reaction formation to navigate the situation, being extra kind and polite.

After the three day visit, I began to finally feel back at home the pain that she had inflicted on me, to not be defended in front of her by DH, and communicated this to DH back at home. DH said that for him she was still eight years old, and that he didn't have the heart to correct her because he still has that image of what was, but that he wouldn't mind if I corrected her. He said once again that it wasn't against me, just that she wanted him all to herself and that explained her behavior. He also said that she may have been hungry because she skipped breakfast, etc, etc, all sorts of excuses to excuse himself for not having the courage to stand up to her and to say that her behavior was OK. He was also unable to validate the pain I uniquely experience as a SM, since he has no such relationship as I bring no kids into the marriage. He said that it is similar to having his mother-in-law or my several friends, nothing different. This comparison made me very angry as I haven't seen my own mother in two years and although we talk daily she mainly stays out of our life. I speak with each of my five friends no more frequently than once a month for one hour and they have only been supportive of our relationship, and are generally not part of our life as we only visit once a year.

This caused a huge week-long argument in our house which is generally serene and full of love and joy. DH and I have a solid marriage and I think we both know how lucky we are to have found each other as very few people share our interests and beliefs. He is also an amazing lover. That being said, in addition to this level of companionship, I have always wanted a child of my own, and now at 37 years old, it has become a daily pain for me not to know if our marriage is the appropriate place for that given my in-laws and especially SD22. My in-laws are very old and DH and I had made plans to move back to my country to be free from them, as he doesn't particularly enjoy their company either. He also would like to a have a child together despite being twenty years older than me. His vision for our family was that we have our own child together in my country, in a house that we jointly own and leave to our child only while leaving his properties in his country (which are of equal value) to the skids, and that the skids visit our family once a year, with him returning to see them for the birth of sgkids and other life events. We discussed all of this before getting married and it sounded to me like the best one could hope for.

Now, fast forward to what has just transpired with the visit to SD22, I feel that his loyalty to me, and my first-class position, is not so sure. He refused to defend me and said that I should basically just remain silent while he speaks with the skids during visits. He said that he really wants to see SD22 happy as she was when she was a child, and that he is committed to improving their relationship by going to see her again in a few months, and suggesting I come and remain silent. I said that I cannot accept to be the second-class wife, and that I will not go and that he can go alone. Moreover I said that I do not want her to visit us in my country once we will have our house there, and that I would not want our children to have any contact with her. He was very upset but accepted this arrangement and has booked tickets to see her alone this fall and stay with her in her studio apartment where she wanted him to stay last time.

I should mention that while SD22 is generally successful in the sense that she has finished uni and has a full-time job, she is not socially successful and actually has no friends or romantic interests. She is very close with BM and her grandparents and SS23.

A part of me feels that I should be happy with this arrangement, after all, isn't total disengagement what I wanted? But in truth I feel that we are regressing as a couple, that our couple is slipping into second position as she will manipulate him into giving her yet more money (in addition to the child support he continues to pay, while meanwhile as a couple we have no shared finances or joint account and I am having to take out loans to finish my last year of school) and attention when he is alone with her. I also don't entirely trust him about his intentions for our future house, as he told me that he hasn't communicated to her or SS23 his intention to use half of his funds towards a down payment on a house that will be jointly owned by us and exclude the skids entirely, because they would be too angry to hear it.

I think DH and I had our final argument on the subject yesterday, which resulted in him shouting at me redfaced just because I expressed the feeling that I was being reclassed. I told him calmly that if he does not continue to put our marriage first, it cannot work. We are going to go forward with the total disengagement strategy to keep the peace, but ultimately I fear I cannot stay in a marriage with a man no matter how much I love him who allows such behavior from SD22 and does not defend me when exposed to such behavior, and then makes excuses for such behavior. There is a real moral issue with enabling, and it makes one unfit to be a father to further children, IMO.

I have begun what will be the years-long process of grieving the end of our marriage, not because I want it to end, but because I can't unknow this feeling in my heart. I no longer trust him when he promises to uphold future plans with respect to disengagement and inheritance. If not enough courage to confront the skids now, then when? When there are also sgkids in the picture he can dote on?

The grieving of our marriage in itself is difficult enough, but I am simultaneously grieving the child I will probably never have, and the loneliness I will feel once again, as I felt in the years after my first divorce. I love caretaking and cooking all meals for us, listening to what he has to share, caring and decorating our home, planning and taking trips, being an active family together. I did all of this when I was single but it just wasn't the same. I also love the idea of owning my own home, something that I likely never be able to do because of my student loans without the help of DH's downpayment. My heart just absolutely grieves. I have poured everything, all my hope, into this relationship, and have had only goodwill towards the skids. As I mentioned, DH is twenty years older than me and I fear for his future too as a single old man, I know him well enough to know that he needs a good structure and a compassionate partner who understands the healing journey he is on. Even SD22 has admitted that he is a changed man since he met me, not at all the argumentative dad she remembers. But ultimately, I cannot allow myself or my future children to be second-class, and I would rather be alone. The situation is so, so painful and I just wanted to share with you all here and get any advice you may have. I should mention that for practical reasons, I am unable to leave for another year so will need to find a way to swallow and hide these feelings until then. DH doesn't want to discuss the situation any more so it is my poor mother, going through a divorce, who has become my sounding board.