I Lived With My Ex During Our Divorce

After 23 years together, my marriage to Kevin* ended on a park bench on a cool spring day in 2024. I had been unhappy for years, and couples counselling was not helping. I knew I had to leave for my mental well-being. That bolstered my courage to tell my husband that our marriage wasn’t working.

Even though Kevin disagreed, I knew it was time to separate.

After our talk, I felt sick but mostly relieved. I was free—sort of. We agreed not to tell our child, who was 13 and about to graduate eighth grade, just yet. We finished running our errands and picked them up from school. That night, we went to sleep in the same bed. Nothing— and everything—had changed.

Kevin and I met in university. In 2006, when he was 23 and I was 26, we married; we were the first in our friend group to do so. We spent half of our lives together. We love our child. Still, there were aspects of Kevin that I never really understood. It became clear to me that we had never had deep conversations about anything: our insecurities, how we felt about having a kid, parenting, getting married, being married, living in suburbia. I realized I didn’t know him very well at all—what I did know was a carefully crafted persona. And he had never really tried to get to know me, either.

In 2018, Kevin made significant changes to his lifestyle to focus on weight loss and fitness. While I’d never call us couch potatoes, my child and I weren’t particularly outdoorsy. Yet Kevin would always be disappointed, even upset, if we didn’t want to go on 50-km bike rides with him. He didn’t seem motivated to learn what our child’s interests actually were.

It was clear to me that he was more concerned with appearances—his physical appearance, but also the appearance of being a family—than being happy. He was unhappy with how he looked and would make comments that made me question whether he was also unhappy with how I looked. A husband’s love should be unconditional, but Kevin was no longer my safe person.

We had gone to couples therapy prior to our separation, but the therapist’s idea to have us speak to each other without distraction for five minutes a day wasn’t working. When she asked if we were doing it, Kevin said, “Well, I’m doing it.” How could he be doing something on his own that was assigned to us together? I didn’t find her approach helpful.

By the time we wound up on that park bench, I realized that ending our marriage was all I thought of from the moment I woke up until I went to bed. I was miserable.

There were still a couple months of the school year left when we decided to split, and we didn’t want to upset our child, so Kevin and I went about life as if nothing had changed. We ate meals together, hung out as a family and continued to share a bed.

About a month into this arrangement, however, sleeping in the same bed felt too awkward. I knew it was time to tell our child and move on to true separation, whatever that looked like. Because I had initiated the divorce, Kevin felt it was on me to find a lawyer and investigate what steps we had to take to start the process. I needed him to at least move out of our bedroom.

We told our child together, and Kevin set up a bed in our basement rec room—a decision he made and with which I didn’t argue. Housing has become increasingly expensive in our city over the past decade, just as it has across Canada. How anyone can afford to move out on short notice is beyond me. Still, at first I had hoped that I could buy Kevin out of our house. However, when we got our own lawyers, his counsel advised him not to move out. But really, neither of us had the money to pay rent in addition to our mortgage.

We figured out that he could cover the mortgage and I could handle the bills, so it was a roughly equal financial split. I went out and bought my own car because our car was in Kevin’s name, but also because I needed something that was only mine. It felt like an act of rebellion.

Since the pandemic, Kevin had been doing most of the grocery shopping and cooking, and he continued to do that after we separated. There was no kitchen downstairs, so we shared and separately bought groceries for ourselves. If one of us was making dinner, we still made enough for all three of us, and we generally ate together.

We’d always divided the other chores, but once Kevin moved downstairs, he basically disappeared after dinner and left me to make sure our child did their homework wasn’t on screens all night and went to bed at a decent time. And I was still doing all the general administration—figuring out PA days, scheduling appointments—around parenting. So, when our lawyers worked out a parenting agreement, I insisted that we start the official schedule immediately: full duties for seven days while the other parent is hands-off, and then we would switch.

During his weeks, Kevin was responsible for feeding our child and getting them to school, bed and activities on time, and feeding and walking our two dogs. I still slept in my room and he slept downstairs; our child stayed in their room upstairs, and Kevin and I kept our distance from one another when it was his week with our kid. Any holidays were spent separately. It worked for all of us—even the dogs. But Kevin was embarrassed to tell his family; I think he felt ashamed about getting divorced.

Scheduling aside, our arrangement wasn’t always smooth, especially around parenting. Kevin and I parent differently, and it was hard for me not to intervene when he and our child encountered challenges. Otherwise, we talked very little. It wasn’t that different from the way things had been since our child was a baby; we were pros at avoiding conflict. Because I was happier than I had been in years, it was tolerable.

It helped having the free time to think about what I wanted the next stage of my life to look like. I knew we couldn’t live this way forever and I accepted the fact that in order to afford two separate homes we had to sell our house. It was both scary and exhilarating. I was going to live on my own for the first time since 1996, when I was 21.

Our house sold quickly, and Kevin and I made plans to move out to our own places. He remained resistant to divorce and even weeks before moving out, he said he didn’t want one. I was ready to start the next chapter of my life, though, and nothing he said would change my mind.

With my share of the sale proceeds and some money from my mom, I was able to buy a home close to my child’s school. If it wasn’t for her generosity, I’m not sure what I would have done. I do know that I would still have found a way to leave. Kevin rented an apartment not too far away.

Living with my ex-husband for almost a year while we negotiated our separation and divorce saved us some financial hardship, but more importantly, it was best for our child—even though the truth of our family changing was difficult for them to accept at first.

My new home will be all mine. I’m looking forward to making my own decisions about what to eat, what to do, where to go. I’ll pay more attention to my budget and be more selective about how I spend my money. I want to reconnect with my friends and get back to some old hobbies. I’m optimistic about the next phase of my life.

*Name has been changed to protect privacy.