This is actually a great combo! Put it to good use. Revitalizing your relationship will take some effort. So would building a new life as a divorced person if you choose not to make that effort.
Consider yourself lucky: you’re already doing all the chores, just like a divorced person must. You won’t be one of those people who abandons a relationship only to suddenly experience what it really takes to run a life, a home, your children’s lives, your aging parents’ lives.
Those poor folks often leap into a new relationship with anyone they can. And I must tell you, from being widowed so young: the new relationship marketplace is not filled with people looking to help you with your chores, only with people expecting you’ll help with theirs.
You still have the option of a new relationship with someone who already knows you, loves your children, has some good memories of when your parents weren’t yet in need of help, someone you deliberately chose, someone whose love you celebrated with your friends and family.
Forget the chores for now. If you need help with them, hire someone. Or find a smaller, newer home. Let some of them go by the wayside for a year or two. (Again, I speak from the experience of being a 34-year-old widow with a grade school child: you really can do this.) Focus on rediscovering and strengthening the great parts of your relationship. It could last a lifetime. And believe me (I’m old now and I’ve been married for a total of 36 of those years to two very different men): which chores need doing and who does which ones changes a lot over the course of a lifetime.
