I feel suspended. Powerless.
It feels impossible to me to even convey what is going on within, let alone to solve my problems or take a new direction.

The people on this board are the ONLY people who understand what I am going through. My fiance is so riddled with his own issues and desires concerning this debacle, that he both requires my input and ignores it. If you took all the time we have had together and subtracted the time/energy devoted to discussing his divorce and the custody of his daughter, we've really had very little time devoted to US.
He went and made a MAJOR decision that went against our agreement. Agreements forged over long and arduous hours. And the thing is that if it were simply a matter of him disregarding my input on the issues, I might be able to be okay with that - afterall, it is the dissolution of HIS marraige and the custody of HIS daughter. He has a right to make whatever decisions he wants to.
What makes this unbearable to me are the implications of the decisions he made. What it means for the future. MY future as well as his and his daughter.
His own attorney told him that if there would be a time to fight for custody, this would be it. BM weakened her case significantly by taking daughter out of country w/o proper immunizations. I feel he should have stood UP to her. For us all.
Instead, as the agreement stands, his daughter will reside with her mother and my fiance will have the option to see her whenever he is not working so long as there are no extenuating circumstances. Added to this is the right of first refusal for both BM and BF. All communications are to take place through email.
I go over this again and again in my mind.
The tricks here are manifold. What does it mean? It means she got away with her antics again, without a fight. It means all the hours we spent talking about it were wasted. It means she will simply need to come up with excuses when she wants to refuse him his daughter. It means constant email communication whenever mood and whim strike her, and her communications are devistating to him. It means she now has a legal vehicle for her veiled thhreats. The right of first refusal protects her more than him because daughter doesn't tell us when she is with a sitter or a friend, but reports to mother when she is left with me because that is pattern forged over two years. It gives her the right to refuse that her daughter and I have ANY individual relationship, forever. It means that we will have to live near her forever now. It means that he will have to ASK HER PERMISSION for what is his legal RIGHT. It means years more discussions over her F*&%D up behavior with less chance of doing ANYTHING about it than we had BEFORE. It means suspension and powerlessness.
And he feels HOPEFUL from this. My fiance says that he holds hope that a divorce will come quicker so that it will mean we are able to get married soon. And that, he says, is why he chose this route.
he says that it is all for me. All for us. I cannot see how this could be possible. I do not understand his hope. It baffles me how he can suddenly hold out any hope at all that this woman will a) not abuse her new ability to email him - in fact she already has b ) not abuse the artful terminology needed to find an excuse to refuse him visitation and still have it be legally sanctified c) not withold information rendering the right of first refusal useless, c) find every possible way to use these new rules to abuse me and exclude me from her daughters life d) STILL find a way to prolong the divorce so that we cannot marry.
I can't fathom it and I feel distrustful. I feel suddenly distrustful of everyone. I feel I have no one looking out for me, and he claims I am the ONLY one he is really looking out for. How can either ONE of us be so far off???
And even if this is just a huge mistake on his part, how do I handle it when the inevitable occurs???? How do I proceed from this point on? What am I to expect about aggreements we reach in the future?
He can't seem to even stand for me to disagree about it, and percieves it as criticism - becoming defensive. What about when the time comes for me to say I told you so. Because I don't WANT to have him come to me six weeks from now and ASK for my thoughts on something related to them, for at this point I feel it would be a futher waste of my effort.
And if I say, "okay then this is YOUR business, and I will simply defer to you on issues concerning your wife and daughter" what is my involvement supposed to look like emotionally? financially?

It is like agreeing to love someone who you know will never love you back. Who will bring you all the heartache of fear, worry, loss... and who you have ZERO influence over, ZERO right to discipline, control, shape, or for that matter zero influence over how this person and her place in my life affects ME.
And it's not the same as making a choice to be in a romantic relationship, because there you have the right/option of asserting boundaries, and there is an inverse romance involved whereby if that person doesn't love you you have the right/option to refuse them.
I do not want to leave my relationship with my fiance. Not yet anyway. I don't really think we have even had the CHANCE to form ways of dealing with decisions. Early on, his relationship with his ex and daughter were obviously more his business. We were just forming our bond. Progressively though we have become more and more entwined, and his decisions affect me and my life more and more. Indeed there have been small compromises, but this is the first very real problem with regard to making a joint decision.
We have a limited ability to discuss this as his daughter is here until tonight and then there will be out of state work. But in the course of talking we have reached a stale mate. He cannot tell me why, in the moment when the choice between taking the route we had agreed on, and taking the one offered to him in negotiations, he did not call to consult me before making a decision.
Instead he keeps saying that he thought I would trust that he was taking everyone's position in mind.
To me, that means he ultimately decided that he was going to make the decisions FOR us and I would have to trust that he did the right thing.
When I pressed him on it, he got defensive and answered that from now on he would just take me to court or attorney meetings with him and let ME make the decisions.
In his mind, it seems that compromise is impossible, and it will either be all my way or all his.

And yet, he feels hopeful in that he has compromised with his ex.

So how do I move forward?
How do I establish a way where this can WORK in the future? How do we reach a way to compromise?
Afterall, I feel like my entire time with him has been a compromise. Other people's relationships get to start out being all about them and then move out in concentric circles. I compromised from the get go.