" My happiness, my mental health, and my very life were not a consideration as she charted the next phase of her existence. "

"In the end, she cast all of that aside as if it never meant anything and I was left figuring out what was next for me. She got to pick and choose what was next. I had to find my way out of the smoldering wreckage of what was left behind, something I am still doing. I didn’t get any say in the situation."

"rarely considering me in any decisions that were made despite the fact they directly impacted me."

See, my original comment was against these above feelings of the writer. I wrote that I know these feelings come naturally and are very hard to deal with, but having a way of of a marriage is every person's human right, so his ex-wife was not wrong at all to put her happiness first, and how was she expected to look after his happiness, curbing her own? He got to do that for himself!

Now coming to your comments:

"his critique was about the way she went about getting the divorce with disrespect to his agency and with no empathy or even simple compassion": Thanks to you, I went through this article several times. But where is a mention of this? And please explain to me how is a spouse wanting a divorce disrespecting the other spouse's agency? And, how can someone be more compassionate about it and still get the divorce?

"If a distraught wife had posted an article about how poorly she was treated by her husband": He mentioned that she lied to him several times in their marriage, no more details of any other bad treatment. And, I don't know about the lies, neither do you, so how can we measure how poor

she treated her?

"emotionally abused, cheated on and gaslit during the divorce": no mention of these in the article, please don't put words of your own here.

And, how would I react if this same post was written by a woman? Well, this is a beautiful post, the writer is processing their emotions of being suddenly left after decades of marriage, I'm empathetic and sorry for them. I'll be sorry if a woman wrote this too.

Then I would tell the woman to be strong, it's damn tough, but literally our own happiness is our own responsibility. I would also tell her to consider not giving away the responsibility of their happiness in the hand of someone else, completely.

Lastly I would acknowledge its really impossible for me to gauze the emotional turmoil they are going through, but I'm just sharing my perspective there with her.

And, me writing "I can understand it hurts, but nobody is to be blamed" does not invalidate his feelings, neither is that lacking empathy. If I am not blaming the person who went for the divorce, it doesn't mean I'm invalidating the feelings of the person who got the news out of the blue, it doesn't mean I'm not being empathetic. It means I am not willing to witch-hunt the woman and bring her head to him as a consolation for the divorce. It means I'm level-headed, and not affected by negative emotions and illogicality.

And, although not the topic of discussion, let me quickly question your empathy and seriousness about this matter too. In the first comment, you write that me pointing out no-fault divorce is human right means I'm saying men are guilty until proven innocent. In your second comment, you become my spelling teacher out of the blue. It takes 2 nonsense comments of yours, and me addressing them as much as I can for you to finally come somewhat on topic. So, are you really empathetic of this person or you are here for gender war?