Marital Diss

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 15, 2018

Usually, when you’re talking about anything from cakes to windows and printers, smashing something apart is a lot easier than putting it together, but the opposite is true when it comes to marriage. It’s not only difficult and painful to divide your shared resources and responsibilities, be they finances or kids, but it’s also hard to face the humiliation, conflict, and loss that comes with giving up on a massive commitment. That’s why, as bad as your marriage may be, you may still look for any reason to avoid splitting your marriage—and life, and possibly sanity—apart. Regardless of habit, commitment, and belief, however, you must be ready to ask yourself, in an objective way, whether your partner is really as married to you as you are to them and whether there’s anything positive you can do about an imbalance, if it exists. Never doubt that there is a way to be objective about this issue and that, even if the answer to both questions is no, there’s a positive way forward through the very negative separation process.

-Dr. Lastname

My marriage has been pretty shitty over the past few years— sex has pretty much stopped and my wife’s been either hostile towards me or withdrawn. She went travelling on her own in January, so I decided to take dance lessons when she was gone (I’ve danced for a while, but decided to get better at it). When my wife returned, she demanded I quit the lessons immediately. I said no, as I had signed up for the month, so she then moved out of our bedroom, stopped eating or socializing with me. A couple of months later she separated her finances, than went away three more times for a total of three months. Early September she told me she wanted to sell our house, and if I didn’t sign to sell she would sic her lawyer on me, so I signed and the house sold right away. We then saw a couples’ counselor (she had been seeing her own therapist) who told us to live apart and date with no sex between us, so we bought separate places and move in another month. I’m willing to go along with it and try to make things work for financial reasons, but our recent past has been so filled with arguing, recriminations, etc. that I’m not sure it’s worth it. My goal is to figure out whether I should give up on this marriage (after over 40 years) or go along with the couples’ counselor’s advice and try to save it.


F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship
From shared religious beliefs to the needs of their children to unabashed gold digging, two people can get and stay married for any number of reasons. So you can’t be sure about whether your marriage is worth saving until you figure out your own reason for staying married and what your marriage must offer in order to be worthwhile.

You and your wife did manage to live under the same roof for forty years and have shared a life together, so it’s easy to see why you wouldn’t want to give it up this huge emotional investment. Unfortunately, regardless of your wishes, it appears you have no control over what happened to your marriage. And what’s happened has not been good.

Your partner has been mainly on her own for the past year, insisted on separating your finances and selling the house you shared, and has avoided physical contact with you since Obama’s first term. So the major contribution marriage makes to your life now, as you describe it, is nothing more than an income tax deduction and an antagonist for couples therapy sessions. Whatever you expect from a partnership, it’s hard to see how your current relationship could possibly meet your criteria since you’re essentially divorced and now dating a woman who can’t seem to stand you.

If, as you describe it, you didn’t do anything basically wrong, new, or different to be a bad husband aside from rekindling your love of dance, that reflects well on you. But it doesn’t reflect well on the future of your marriage, because if you didn’t do anything to cause her feelings to sour, then there’s nothing you can do now to change her mind or stop her from leaving. In fact, there’s always the possibility that her change of feelings is due to a depressive illness that put negative thoughts about you and her marriage into her head, causing her to forget the good parts. In that case, her feelings towards you and your marriage may be distorted by her illness and out of her control, as well. Either way, her mind is beyond your power, and trying to make things work will only make them worse.

Instead of trying to fix yourself and your marriage in order to hold onto your decades-long emotional investment, accept your helplessness and stop blaming yourself for not being able to restore it. You can’t become a new person in order to please her. Assuming that you have no control over her change of heart, however, there is still one thing you can do (aside from preparing for a single life alone).

Think of all the best reasons for staying together, in terms of both your own priorities and your wife’s; determine all the good things that your marriage brought to your life and hers and the advantages it could offer you both in the future. Then, without sentimentality, write her a letter that lists those things and express regret, not just about the change of heart she’s experienced over the past year, but about your subsequent mutual discovery that there’s nothing you can do, in terms of couples therapy or changing your communication, to change her feelings. Finally, let her know that, unless she’s willing to consider why her feelings might have changed (and whether depression’s played a part), you don’t see anything else that is likely to change, including your personality, so if she doesn’t want to be married to you as you are, it’s better to move on and you wish her well.

No matter how important your marriage has been in your life, don’t make yourself responsible for holding it together once you know there’s no fault you can correct in your own behavior and no reason to expect a change in your wife’s. Respect all that you and your wife accomplished in that marriage and all you’ve done to try to keep it together. Then accept the fact that the reasons for staying together can be as arbitrary as the reasons for coming apart, and move on.

STATEMENT:  

“I can’t stop caring about my marriage, which has been a huge part of my life, and I keep wondering what I did wrong to bring it to an end. But my wife’s reasons for disliking me have not identified a fault I can change, so it’s time to focus on the good we accomplished and my goals for the next stage of my life.”