It's a sad fact some marriages, unfortunately, do not last very long. This can be for a number of reasons, from cheating to simply falling out of love. Although sometimes, the reasons can be a little unusual. Just ask these Redditors.
Divorce lawyers on Reddit share the strangest reason someone has filed for divorce. Content has been edited for clarity.
How Was She Going To Prove This?
“I had a woman call and say she needed an annulment, but couldn’t find her husband, and hasn’t seen him in years. I corrected her that it would be a divorce, not an annulment. She told me they never consummated the marriage so it couldn’t be a divorce.
I told her that hasn’t been the law in a long time, and she fought me on it. I asked her how exactly she intended to prove to the judge – with evidence – that her marriage wasn’t consummated, and that got her upset enough to hang up on me.”
A Lot Of Drama Here
“After seven years of marriage, a husband (unbeknownst to the wife) started trying to convince their nanny to have a threesome, telling her his wife would be really into it.
He was a Wall Street guy and she was a physician, and the nanny had been with them since their first kid was born four years earlier. The nanny finally made a move on the wife, who told her it was inappropriate. But a few months later, they got smashed, and they had that threesome.
It turned into a regular thing. The husband was totally happy—until the wife said she and the nanny were in love with each other, and she was leaving him for the nanny! During the custody proceedings, the husband tried to argue the nanny was an illegal immigrant, which was ridiculous. In the end, the wife got primary custody. Three years later, the wife and nanny are still together, though they hired a new nanny.”
He Didn’t See That Coming
“She kept crying while I was filling out some papers, I was trying to calm her down and she was yelling stuff like ‘I’ll never do it again!’ and ‘I’m so sorry, I love you so much!’
So I was curious and I just asked ‘What won’t you do again?’
She just looked up at me and said ‘I broke his Batmobile thingy.’
I just looked at the husband like you’re an idiot, but I can’t stop a divorce so they just filled out papers, the women crying the entire time.”
A Toxic Situation
“The wife files for divorce because she believes their daughter has celiac disease, even after going to multiple doctors that tell her the daughter does not have celiac disease. The husband wouldn’t accept the wife’s ‘diagnosis’ and thinks it’s wrong to tell the kid she’s sick and restrict her diet. So, the wife decided to file for divorce and sue for sole custody.
This was a long, painful case and we represented the husband. The wife is also the type that used the ~religious exemption~ excuse to delay vaccinating the daughter as well. Long story short, husband got sole physical custody of the daughter in the end. He’s one of my favorite clients we’ve ever had and we both cried when we got the final judgment of divorce.”
Made For An Entertaining Case
“I did maybe five divorces. I had one client who, after I met her soon-to-be ex-husband, stated, ‘Do you see how stupid he is? That’s why I have to divorce him. If I had known how stupid he was, I never would have married him.’
The guy fired his lawyer once a month and constantly tried to file obviously fabricated or altered documents when he was between counsel. Eventually (very favorably for my client) we settled since he couldn’t find someone to take his case and was looking at felony charges for all the fake documents. I loved that case because it was just such a circus and my client was very reasonable.”
Her True Colors Showed
“Not a lawyer, but happened to a friend. He woke up really early one reason because of middle age. So while he makes coffee, he checks the lottery numbers and he didn’t get a single number. Realizes he needs milk for the coffee and runs to the corner store. Starts to buy lottery tickets for the next drawing, and comes up with what should have been a funny idea. He buys another ticket and plays the numbers that had already won the night before.
He goes home and puts the ticket on the fridge where the other ones were thinking she will have no reason to pay attention to the day they are for. An hour later, his wife gets up and makes some coffee and he yells from the living room that he hasn’t checked the lottery numbers yet and for her to see if they won anything last night. He hears her use the laptop to check the numbers and then she is quiet for a minute. He said he had this big grin on his face waiting for her to start yelling they won and thinking how funny it would be (I actually think fake winning lottery tickets, and the prank he was pulling, are mean, but that is beside the point).
She yells from the kitchen that they didn’t win anything. She heads back upstairs and 15 minutes later she comes through the living room with both their elementary-age kids in tow and says she forgot to tell him she had to go to her moms for the day and was taking the kids and just leaves.
He was shocked. Went and checked, the lottery ticket is gone, not in trash or anywhere else. He realizes she thinks they won the lottery and she is trying to run off with the winnings.
She won’t return calls or talk to him and when he calls the house the grandma will confirm she is there, puts the kids on the phone, but that is it. She finally shows up with the kids a couple days later and just walks in the house and says ‘Forget You!’ and walks into her bedroom and won’t talk to him!
Kids confirm that mom thought she had won a ton of money. Realizing what kind of person she is, and that she also isn’t very smart to think she would have gotten away with it, he divorced her. Probably not a ridiculous reason to divorce someone, but ridiculous behavior that would cause you to divorce someone.”
She Easily Could Have Switched
“This happened to a good friend of mine. Her brother, Kevin, married a woman that started using Snuggle fabric softener. Kevin ended up having a crazy allergic reaction to the Snuggle, but his wife refused to stop using it because she liked it so much.
Even when he washed his own clothes without it, it being used on her clothes still caused a reaction so badly he had to be hospitalized. Still, yet, she refused to stop using Snuggle. So, they got a divorce over Snuggle.”
High School Drama Never Dies
“I work at a divorce court, and a high school friend came in with her stepmom and ex-boyfriend from back in high school. Apparently, the stepmom was finally divorcing the dad after 14 years of cheating on the dad with her stepdaughter’s boyfriend.
The entire interaction was super weird because I wasn’t helping them(conflict of interest) but was sitting in the clerk’s booth right next to them as the guy flirted with both of them.”
A Special Ingredient
“Had a soldier stationed at Guantanamo Bay that met a local. Fell madly in love. They decided to get married so she could come with him back in the states once his tour was done.
She was working on American dishes and was making spaghetti. He comes home from work one day, and she’s making it. She puts the meat in, puts the canned sauce in, and then pulls an unlabeled bag out of the freezer and adds it to the sauce.
At this point in the session, she’s hysterically crying with broken Spanglish. She’s trying to explain she didn’t know any better. Through the hysteria he informs me her mother and grandmother told her if she wanted to keep her man, she needed to put her menstrual blood in his food. It was so hard to keep my composure. I was trying to hard not to gag.
They both described they were madly in love, but he couldn’t let it go. They ended up getting a divorce. Having done this for 14 years, I have found it 100% accurate that truth is stranger than fiction.”
He Didn’t Deserve Angie
“My mom has a friend (we’ll call her Angie) whose husband filed for divorce because of Angie getting a paralyzed arm from a car accident. Angie had just lost her brother in the exact accident which paralyzed her arm.
Her husband only wanted a divorce because he’d just met some other woman, but couldn’t find a reason to get one. Bear in mind, Angie loved her husband with all her heart.
What a terrible person.”
Sounds Like A Truly Horrible Person
“My dad had a breakup with his egoistic girlfriend for a while. We were on vacation with our family, and we had a rule: if you buy food or drinks, you share them with everyone. So she bought some juices, and my brother and I asked my dad if we could have one bottle. He said yes, we drank it, and his girlfriend came storming over to us.
She was enraged, told some lies about my dad’s’ true’ salary, said cruel stuff to us, took the car she had shared with my dad, and drove home. We traveled like 400 kilometers to get to this place, so of course, we had to take the stuff off my dad with us.
They are sadly together again, just fighting nearly every day. Nobody likes her.”
A Fallback Plan
“Hockey. Their son was a budding hockey prospect. Under the provincial rules, he could only try out for the rep team based on his residence. Mom and Dad had a second home in a different district.
They divorced, each taking one home so that junior could have two residences and could try out for the rep team in the other district if he didn’t make it in the first district.”
Everything Is Not What It Seems
“I worked for a judge. Two prominent local news people had a divorce. They filed mutual restraining orders against each other for ‘violence.’ The filings were vague on details, but still somehow conveyed a sense of Shiloh or Antietam levels of blood.
When it came time for the hearing, it turned out the ‘violence’ was spitting. More specifically, during a heated argument, flecks of spittle managed to touch the other party.
The judge denied the restraining orders, and both parties’ attorneys probably bought new yachts.
Such is justice.”
At Least Nothing Happened In Real Life
“One of mine that sticks out is that the husband and wife both played some sort of online role-playing game, sort of like the Sims I think but a little more elaborate and adult (‘Second Life’ maybe?).
The wife got heavily involved with the game, like 10 hours a day, and wouldn’t reduce her time playing no matter what he said. What tipped things over the edge however was that he set up a fake profile/ avatar and went online to stalk her in the game and found her avatar making love with some random guy’s avatar.
Nothing ever happened in real life (neither of them were exactly oil paintings to look at) but that was enough for the guy to initiate a fairly acrimonious divorce.”
He Thought He Found A Loophole
“Guy came in saying he was going to be indicted for many things (the list would have been impressive if it wasn’t also sickening). So, he wanted to marry his accomplice because he saw on TV that your spouse can’t testify against you without your permission and the accomplice had cut a deal.
He just needed to get this pesky marriage to his current wife dissolved.”
He Duped Them All
“I spent six months costing Legal Aid cases for solicitors in the early 90s. This included many divorces.
The most notable one was a woman divorcing her husband because he discovered he could talk to the dead on their honeymoon, and then later spent all their money on spiritualist groups.
That wasn’t what made it notable. During the divorce, the woman left the house. At some point, her husband approached her and claimed that as he was letting the house fall into ruin, it would be better for both of them if he sold the house and split the proceeds with her. She agreed to this without consulting her solicitor.
A few weeks later the husband gave her $5. She asked what it was for. It was her share of the house. He’d sold it to his sister for $10 and kept living there. When she went to complain to her solicitors, she found they’d done the conveyancing for him. He’d deliberately used his wife’s divorce solicitors and nobody at the firm had realized.”
It’s A Good Thing He Got Out Of That
“My mother-in-law divorced my father-in-law after 36 years of marriage and him caring for her with a chronic illness and being a great father to her two sons from a previous marriage, as well as his own son with her (my husband). Her reason was that he didn’t pay attention to her (he is on the autism spectrum and was working three jobs to pay for her shopping addiction).
Her real reason? She met a guy at a bar, started sleeping around, got approved for disability, and moved out the day her back pay was deposited (about 20k). Needless to say, my father-in-law was completely taken off guard by this. She’d never told him anything that was wrong. He thought they were happy.
She doesn’t talk to my husband or me anymore. When we found out she’d been cheating on my father-in-law (we found out because she demanded hubby meet the new guy after the divorce, hubby said no, and the guy yelled at my mother-in-law for making him look stupid), the new guy yells at her, and she begins to tell us things about him that make us worry a bit.
She was in an abusive relationship when she was 16 – 22 with a guy that almost killed her. She has scars on her neck from it, and she met my father-in-law a year after she’d finally left. We point out that the new guy seems abusive and encouraged her to be careful.
Yeah, but divorces suck. My father-in-law is now happily married to a lady from his hometown in Mexico, while my mother-in-law is no longer with the guy she left him for.”
The Odds Were In Their Favor
“Almost filed for divorce because my husband claimed our kids on his insurance, and so did I in an accidental miscommunication. Then, we were both unfortunately outside the period to make changes. So we were looking at having a year at least of him having to pay the family rate for his insurance, and I would too, for the same two kids.
The divorce was less than the overpayment we were looking at, and if we divorced, the life event would trigger a reopening of the enrollment period and we could fix it.
Luckily, he just begged the people at his work, and told them he was an idiot and they eventually fixed it.”
He Dealt With A Lot
“One guy had his wife served with the divorce papers while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment. She had no idea he wanted a divorce.
One guy wanted a provision in his divorce that said his sons couldn’t watch NASCAR because the wife’s new boyfriend was into NASCAR.
In the same case, the property division was so contentious that the judge had the parties list every piece of furniture in the house and try to work through who would get what. The guy made sure that he wanted everything she did, down to things like lace doilies her grandma made and some trophy she won in a women’s shooting competition.
‘I bought her the loaded weapon, so it’s pretty much my trophy,’ was his argument.
Another guy wanted no custody and no visitation with his four sons until he learned how much child support would be. Then he wanted full custody with no visitation for the wife in the hope that she’d have to pay him child support.
I only did divorces for about a year before I moved on to mortgage foreclosures. Those are far less depressing.”
The Judge Wasn’t Having It
“My parents divorced was finalized in September 2014, but the separation of assets is still opened. The short of it is that my dad has always been really jealous. About two years ago my dad got it in his head that my mom was cheating with a baker/police officer in our hometown (Mexico).
He hired two guys to watch her 24/7, they confirmed that she was cheating and said they had a video. Well, $8,000 and my dad’s sanity later, there’s no video and my dad is mentally ill. He hired someone else to kill this baker/police officer. Thankfully, they took just took his money and did not kill him.
He started going to brothels and harassing women. He said he would leave my mom on the streets and has attempted to pay off judges. My dad was always a good hard-working man, now he is someone I don’t know. Some say it’s a mid-life crisis, but the guy is 65 years old. I feel if it was a crisis it should’ve happened years ago.”
She Desparately Needed A Divorce
“I didn’t handle the divorce, but I was working in a legal clinic and had a client seeking a protective order from her ex-husband. We had an initial interview and I got paperwork filed. Between filing and the scheduled hearing, she called me. She started rambling and when she calmed down, she told me her ex had been arrested. For murdering his brother.
Even with bigger fish to fry, he insisted on attending the protective order hearing while in custody (which is his right but a terrible idea because anything he says on the record can be used by prosecutors). He shows up in his prison jumpsuit and handcuffs and takes every opportunity to talk about how my client would get smashed and start fights with him, and he had to ‘give her a slap to shut her up.’
He’s currently serving a life sentence after being convicted of second-degree murder and several other felonies.”
A Waste Of Time For Everyone
“My grandparents’ divorce. I refused to help them with it or get involved. I think my only advice was to burn all of their possessions.
It was truly awful. It went on for at least four years. My grandfather was a shopping addict and hoarder, and step-grandmother left the minute that they ran out of cash. They then proceeded to fight about every object in their horde all while both being in the middle of dying. She was dying of cancer and Alzheimers and he of diabetes and kidney failure, so it wasn’t like they had some grand plan about how someone was going to use any of these objects.
They owned basically nothing of actual value. My grandfather was just awful and wouldn’t let her go (did she know she was leaving? Not sure…) and wrote her nasty letters weekly. After my grandfather died, my family threw away or donated virtually every last hammer, hat, and a book they fought over. What a waste of time and energy their whole divorce fiasco was. I’m sure they greatly annoyed their respective attorneys greatly.”
Things Went South
“I just had lunch with a lawyer friend of mine and he told me this crazy story: when he was an intern, there was this divorce case where the woman was demanding her husband for child support. It was in a small city in Bolivia’s highlands and both the husband and wife were shepherds.
Anyways, the husband asked the judge for a medical examination of his genitalia, turns out the ‘husband’ was actually a woman. She was raised by her grandparents and they respected her preferences, for the rest of the community she was a boy. After her grandparents died she inherited the land and after some time, the neighbor offered her to marry his daughter (without knowing the guy was actually a girl). She accepted and once she was married she came to an agreement with her wife: they will be married but they won’t make love.
After a while the wife got a lover and had three kids; the husband took them as his/her own. Some years passed and the relationship got really deteriorated so the husband asked for a divorce, things got ugly and she ended up telling the truth in order to avoid paying child support.”
How Did He Know?
“One crazy story is while a lady is in her counseling session, her husband comes in and says to the receptionist that he’s her husband and he won’t be able to pick up the kids because he has to go into work right then, and could the receptionist let the client know when she gets out of the appointment?
The receptionist says yes. When the client comes out of her appointment the receptionist passes along the message.
The client says ‘Are you serious? He isn’t supposed to know I’m here. We’re in the middle of a divorce and he’s crazy.'”
Different Hobbies
“Last year I came across a couple in their early 30s with a peculiar misunderstanding of choice. The lady loves to experiment with cooking. She usually expects her husband to be the taster of those and make some remark. But the man was too dull to taste. He prefers the same course of meal he’s been having from last fifteen or twenty years. His ideology is ‘I’m eating to live, not living to eat.’ He made a lot teasing comments about her hobby.
On the other hand, the husband was fond of painting. He had all instruments at home. But he could never make her enthusiastic about colours and brushes. The lady very often made jokes of his hobby in front of friends and relatives.
I interacted with both of them one to one. What I understood is an ego problem between the two. They were loyal to each other but couldn’t resist themselves from passing embarrassing comments on each other’s hobby. A typical mental rivalry flowed in their thought process. Both of them even admitted that they want the other hand to surrender first.
All of a sudden they started arguing on each other’s bad habits. The exchange became so heated at a point of time, I started feeling irrelevant in that interaction.
Gave them idea of staying apart from each other for at least a month so that they can feel the void of partner’s existence in daily life. Heared they maintained distance for fifteen odd days, then went on a trip, but couldn’t discard prioritizing their self in every other sentence.
Situation turned even worse over time and they couldn’t stand to be in each other’s presence. Heared that they got mutually separated a month ago.”