[Blarg]

There is no shortage of messed up kids from intact marriages, and I've seen kids who were raised very well by parents who separated but kept actively involved in the life of their kids and didn't use kids as pawns in games of revenge against each other. So it seems clear it can go either way for the kid.

I also think that although your kid is a huge priority and you owe him a lot, you don't owe him a perfect world. And if you aren't good with your partner anymore, you can't provide one anyway. It will wind up telling on the kid one way or the next -- if only by setting up poor role models for the kid, as you note, bernie. What you owe your kid doesn't include sacrificing your own chances for happiness in an adult relationship in this life. You don't owe him coming back to an unhappy house for the rest of your days, much less 10 or 20 years. You don't owe him never having any respite for your spirit or never fulfilling the normal adult need for the love and companionship of a partner. There are a lot of sacrifices you do owe your children, but when you sacrifice love, you've denied the whole point to life, and that's too much. You will have a lot less love to give your child if nobody loves you and you can't even try to make it better.

If anything, you might come to resent the child himself, and find the atmosphere of the home spiritually poisonous regardless of your love for the child. What kind of home is it if you inwardly recoil from it? What benefit can a happy father provide as compared to a loveless one trapped in his loneliness, seeing his life's energy trickling away wasted every year? I'd guess that the longer a man stays in a loveless marriage, there is a real danger that it's the less likely he is to want to come anywhere near the kid when the marriage finally breaks up, or maybe be a part of his kid's life when he grows up. He has spent too long trying to smother his emotions, and after breathing free at last, he may remember the feeling of years of smothering and at least unconsciously, instinctively dread his family, even if he feels consciously far different toward his child. If the feeling of family comes to be internalized as one we dread, we've stayed around too long and nobody has been done any favor.