Here’s something that I often hear from wives who have been left: “How is this fair? He gets to go off and live a great life with his girlfriend and I’m left picking up the pieces. I’m alone with all the responsibility for the house and kids and I have to fight him for any bit of help I need.”
“HOW IS THAT FAIR!?!”
In a desperate attempt for the runaway husband to have to suffer consequences for the emotional damage he’s done to his ex and kids, some wives proclaim that wife abandonment should constitute a crime - an actual legal crime - that can be prosecuted in a court of law.
Wives want justice! When someone harms another, we expect that justice will be served and the offending party will have to pay. That just makes sense!
So when women tell me that they want justice and that’s all they can think about day and night, I tell them this story, that I heard somewhere years ago, in order to encourage them to let go.
The story goes like this. A guy, we’ll call him Mike, was driving his rental car out of his friend’s driveway in L.A. when out of the blue, a Mercedes comes speeding down the street and t-bones him right on the driver’s side, causing his car to spin around twice during which time, he thought he was going to die. His car eventually came to a stop and there was a moment of silence after which he heard the other vehicle go skidding down the road away from the accident.
Twenty minutes later, after the police had assessed what happened, an officer stuck a form in Mike’s face and told him to sign it. He was completely shook up and asked what it was and the cop said, “It’s just to verify that you weren’t hurt” so he signed.
Mike went to the E.R. just to make sure he hadn’t sustained internal injuries and was surprised to learn that the other driver had already been there before him. The doctor, who had also treated the other driver, said that after hitting Mike’s car, the Mercedes guy sped around a corner and hit a tree. The E.R. doctor confirmed that the other driver was drunk and was taken to jail.
A couple weeks later, when he was back home in New York, Mike heard from the rental car company saying that he had been found at fault and had to pay $12,000 to the other driver to repair his Mercedes. Confident that it was a little mix up, Mike contacted the L.A. police to correct the error. Turns out that the officer on the scene that night had gotten mixed up in his identification of the two cars and, on the form that Mike signed that night, had mistakenly written that it was he who had hit the Mercedes.
Mike then spent the next year trying to get justice. The L.A. police wouldn’t even listen to him and he couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case. He became obsessed; it was all he could think and talk about. He didn’t care about the money - he just wanted the truth. He’d exhausted his friends and finally, his girlfriend said she couldn’t take it anymore and was breaking up with him.
It took that for Mike to wake up and realize that his futile attempt to get justice was ruining his life. He gave up the case and paid the guy $12,000.
By pure coincidence, I just watched a stand-up routine on Netflix called “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” by the comedian Mike Birbiglia in which he hilariously recounted this story, which had happened to him. Somehow somewhere, I had heard about it and have used it many times to illustrate a point.
Why do I tell women this story? Because too often, abandoned wives get stuck trying to get emotional justice which never comes. They want their ex to acknowledge what he did. They want their former in-laws to know the truth of what happened. They want to clear their name in the community because people make judgments or their ex circulates a false narrative about the break-up. They desperately want the true story to be told about what he did because he so often unjustly blames her.
My message here is not about whether you should fight for financial justice in the divorce agreement. That's a separate topic and I always believe you need to protect yourself financially. Here I'm talking about the fact that striving to get your ex to acknowledge, apologize, show remorse or set the record straight with the kids takes a lot of emotional energy and keeps women obsessing. I tell the Mike story because sometimes, you just need to pay the metaphorical $12,000 and move on in the service of mental health and emotional peace.
Justice is a luxury that most abandoned wives don’t get to enjoy. But rather than letting it consume you, you need to recognize when it's time to accept that you won't get closure from him and give up trying.
So, in the end, does it feel like your ex committed a crime and got away with it? Maybe. But, that’s not your problem any more. You’ve paid the emotional price - now let it go.
