Having dated my fair share of recently divorced or seperated men (and at a certain age, a lot of the men you date will have had at least one marriage behind them), I do sympathize to a certain degree with the LW. She clearly feels very strongly for the man and has made a significant emotional comittment to him and their relationship. It's entirely understandable that she would expect a certain payoff (as in marriage) and feels a certain frustration that her expectations are being curtailed. An unfortunate truth is whether the man is divorced or seperated, the fact remains that the first wife will often continue to be a factor in his life for an extended period, something many women involved with divorcees are not prepared for.

We don't get the full story here, and a lot of things the LW was saying don't make a great deal of sense. If his wife is unemployed and broke, what sense did it make for her to not have sought joint accounts with her husband? I would think she would have wanted as much access to his money as possible. The LW says that she abandoned her husband for several years to attend graduate school, but she is still unemployed and broke. Well, there are certainly plenty of people with degrees who are recently unemployeed with the economic downturn but one would expect her to have at least a few assets of her own as an adult woman. Checking down the list the LW provides, you have repeated infidelity, abandonment, emotional abuse - a veritable laundry list of offenses that would make a healthy marriage impossible. She certainly made it clear that she hardly thought that they had a marriage at all.

Yet he is still married to this horrible, manipulative woman. Which brings us to our next question - why? The health scare is certainly good reason to hold off on a divorce and if the guy is worth having at all, I certainly wouldn't want him to leave his sick wife just for my convenience. If everything the LW said is gospel, you could certainly argue that this wasn't much of a marriage in the first place. But truth is never quite so clear and we are left with two possibilities. The first is that this guy is a sap and is easily manipulated by his evil wife who will never stop using and abusing him. The second is that the LW is not telling us everything, or doesn't know everything about their relationship. If this woman is so completely horrible and uncaring about her husband, why would he stay with married to her? I really do get the feeling that the LW doesn't know the whole story, or is being manipulated by her boyfriend.

Either way, this is not a healthy situation to be in. Ex-wives rarely just vanish without a trace from a man's life once divorce papers are signed and the LW needs to accept that this woman will be a factor in their lives for quite some time to come. The LW must ask her self if this is something she could tolerate. The LW must also accept the fact that for all his professions of love and wanting a future with her, he has not divorced this oh-so-horrible wife of his. Which means that he probably won't anytime in the near future. Either her boyfriend or his wife is manipulating the situation, or both are. Either way, this is not a fight the LW can reasonably win.

The sane thing to do would be to cut her losses now, before she gets in any deeper. The boyfriend is either an easily manipulated sap, or a manipulative jerk - neither of which makes great husband material. And the wife is either a cruely manipulative bitch, or has a husband screwing around on her with another woman and is as much a victim as the LW. Where ever the truth really lies, the fact remains is that he is not divorced and will not be divorcing his wife anytime in the near future. He has not "comitted" to the LW and if she really does believe the line he's been feeding her all these months, I've got a bridge available to sell her.