Marital Miss

Posted by fxckfeelings on May 21, 2012

A healthy marriage is a lot like a healthy person; one can have nagging injuries and superficial imperfections, but if there are no major malfunctions, consider yourself fit. Your partner may make a good spouse despite a roving eye, or your partner may admit that his/her version of perfect love is actually deeply flawed, revealing that your healthy marriage has actually had a malignant tumor the whole time. If you want a love that lasts, find out all you can about what your candidate has always been like as a partner before you tie the knot. Then, even if your relationship is occasionally under the weather, it still has the stuff for a long life.
–Dr. Lastname

I don’t want to get hurt again by my wife’s infidelities. We’ve been married for 30 years and she’s been a good mother to our kids and a hard worker, but every few years she gets over-involved with someone she’s working with or meets socially, and crosses the line, and then she’s immediately very sorry. Last time she did it, it took me a year of therapy to get over the pain and start to trust her again. Now I see signs that it’s happening again, and I just want to withdraw and spare myself the hurt of another episode. My goal is not to be repeatedly humiliated and angry.

Of course you never want to feel humiliated or betrayed by your spouse, and her behavior definitely violates your wedding vows (or at least the implied vow to keep it in your pants).

On the other hand, people have their weaknesses, which means bad behaviors that they don’t recognize or control or both. The bottom line for you then is not how much you’re hurting, but whether the value of your partnership outweighs your hurt. It’s the Carmella Soprano/First Lady conundrum.

If it’s worked well and lasted 30 years, you know you can count on her most of the time and not fear that she’ll leave you, goof off, or spend the family fortune. You get along well when she isn’t screwing up and you make a good parenting team. Plus, divorce is expensive and will narrow your retirement options.

Yes, if the pain is too great, you can’t stay together. You know, however, that her flirtations are never permanent and aren’t meant to hurt you. Looking at the overall pattern, you can see lots of good in your relationship and good reasons not to split up.

You probably know now that an honest, feeling-filled talk will not solve the problem and probably make it worse; sharing your anger and hurt may make her feel guilty, but it won’t stop her from slipping into flirtatious behavior and you from feeling more personally betrayed when she slips again. It will also make her irritable if you question her about her behavior, since she’ll grow tired of explaining herself and dealing with your paranoia. Long story short, discussing and identifying the issue won’t lead to a “cure,” just friction and probable divorce.

Decide for yourself whether her infidelities are superficial, compared to her commitment as a partner and friend. If you believe they are, then ignore conventional notions about marriage and instead trust your own experience of your relationship and the importance you have in one another’s lives.

You may find that the value of your partnership allows you to accept your spouse’s weakness because you know she loves you and you trust her in more fundamental ways, and if she’s a solid partner overall, than she’s keeping the only vow that really matters.

STATEMENT:
“I feel betrayed and embarrassed by my wife’s flirtations with other men, but I see no sign that she doesn’t love me or remain committed to our marriage. I’ll try to keep my negative feelings from forcing her away. I’ll remember what I value in our marriage and take pride in the sacrifices I make to preserve it, if that’s what I decide to do.”

I thought my husband and I were very happily married and that we worked well together as parents, so I was totally surprised when he said I’m a domineering bitch and he feels crushed by our relationship. I know I tend to be overbearing, but he has always seemed very happy to go along with my decisions, and our friends would have said we were the happiest married couple they know. I thought we were best friends, particularly since he had never been that close to anyone else and he was super-responsive to me. Now, I’m trying to be less domineering, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. My goal is to restore my marriage to what we had before.

When a friend or partner is too nice and easy to be with, you sometimes don’t have a real friendship or partnership. That’s because some needy people force themselves to be what they think you want them to be, because that’s what they do in close relationships. You can imagine lots of reasons why they might have that problem, but it doesn’t matter, because insight doesn’t change the fact that, when it happens, you’re fucked.

In retrospect, you may suspect that your partner’s lack of other close friends reflects a deep lack of comfort with relationships. Maybe he’s done a similar flip-flop before with a friend, lover, or relative. In any case, what you will usually find is that it has everything to do with his character and not much to do with anything you did or can now undo. It’s unfortunate, but, considering how much he was hiding his character to appease you, it’s hard to blame yourself for not seeing through his personality camouflage.

In retrospect, you may also recognize that good friends who sometimes irritate you by being needlessly grumpy or disagreeable strike you as more trustworthy, because you’re sure where they stand; whereas you may not be so sure you know the real feelings, thoughts and self of someone who is eerily and constantly a pleasant to be with.

In any case, your inability to link his rejection to anything you did wrong or to change how he feels means, good news, that you probably didn’t do anything wrong and, bad news, that you’re running into a flaw in his character that you can’t change. So, at some point, there’s no point in apologizing and every reason to plan out a single future.

If you try too hard to become less over-bearing, you may become that much angrier when he doesn’t acknowledge or respond to what you’ve done. If you try too hard to get through to him, he may just feel that you’ve become more overbearing. If you try to do right, things will just get more wrong.

Instead, be friendly while you build up your independence; don’t push him or express your anger. If you’re a model non-nagger and non-critic, and he still feels pressured and controlled, then you’ll know in your heart that the problem is his and that it’s time to move on instead of restoring a relationship it now appears you never had.

Your goal isn’t to restore your old relationship, but to see if you can create a real relationship for the first time, now that he’s declared his real feelings and you have a chance to calmly respond to them. Be prepared to meet a very needy person who no longer wants what you have to give.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like my controlling nature has driven my best friend away, but I haven’t been a jerk lately, so I doubt that my actions have caused any harm. I’ll be careful to respect my partner’s boundaries and see if he can become more comfortable with our relationship. If not, I’ll face the loss without making it my responsibility.”