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"LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.
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This was a fascinating piece. I don't think many people (myself included!) have the maturity needed to do what this woman did. I know she stresses how difficult it was to give her husband space, but she kept that up for months! Kudos to her.
many ideal marriages are really huge pretty carpets with a mountain of dirt underneath on which we stand and smile for a long time. the partner that was getting the better end of the deal is devastated when the doormat stands up and walks out.
in most cases its a pure question of boundaries & self care, it got trampled to death with "we" statements.
Last edited by Huckleberry3911948; 08-10-2009 at 08:53 AM..
When you see one spouse going beyond the call of duty to make the other happy and is beyond exhaustion they are ready to go.
Oh yeah, you will see the other spouse saying how happy they are. They sit with their drink filled sitting in their favorite chair, watching their favorite program. Meanwhile the other spouse is switching laundry, cleaning and filling drinks. Yeah, that gets really old.
How about both doing the cleaning and such together then watching a program together and then doing "Rock, paper, sissors" as to who will get up to switch the clothes and then laugh when one loses. Afterward the loser coming in and jokingly dumping the laundry basket on their head saying you get to fold.
Great story. What a strong woman. Can't say I'd put myself through it, but it does make sense. It wasn't about her. But she loved him through it and that says a lot.
I don't find that story inspiring in the least. So he fixes the porch. But he still doesn't love her. And have you noticed, "the midlife crisis" is an entirely male phenomenon -- not because women don't feel like acting up at the tail end of their youth, mind you, but because only men are permitted to behave like a-holes while wives are expected not to let a little thing like their dignity get in the way of putting up with it. It's disheartening to see a woman who has been led to believe that she and her children are the proverbial ball-and-chain. This leads me to believe that this problem didn't just arise out of thin air one day -- rather, she was conditioned to think throughout the duration of the marriage that her and the children's existence was invading her husband's "space". This explains why she concluded it was okay for her husband to treat her and their children like trash simply because he felt like it -- and that they had to submit to it because his feeling that he needed to be a jerk was a perfect justification for being a jerk. I doubt he would be equally patient had she told him that she didn't love him and started spending her evenings elsewhere -- and I doubt the posters here at CD would be as quick to praise him if he chose to put up with it.
The story is instructive, however, when it comes to all those complaints about how us evil women do most of the filing for divorce. I've responded to those threads, and this particular story is a case in point. Here is a man who deliberately humiliated and hurt his wife and children, abandoned them, and psychologically tortured them. He informed his wife that he wanted out of the marriage. Yet he apparently expected her to file for divorce -- presumably so we could then say the divorce was her fault.
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