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Marriage crises
FinalBoss
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm having a rough time with my marriage. My spouse and I met before college, we were 17 and 18, 15 years ago. We've been married for 8 years. The magic is gone.
We were one of those couples that was head over heels obnoxiously in love.
We've been arguing and fighting for close to 8 months. She has a very passionate personality, that turns to angered when she's frustrated. She says a lot of awful things when we fight, and as a result, I'm very distant.
She says. I'm distant and she feels neglected. Things are strained even when we aren't arguing and pouting any more.
She wants kids, I don't. I have several nieces and nephews, and they're fun, but I like to send them home.
I have fun with nieces and nephews, but I'm happy to send them home. I have zero interest in raising children.
This was a thing if discussion years ago, I said maybe two some day. She wanted four. But now I don't want them. My life is very comfortable, aside from the arguing and doubt and self loathing.
We're in our early 30s now.
She said she'd give the idea up to keep me, but I don't know how to react. She holds that up as a weapon. I cannot measure up to that.
She wont go to counselling.
What should I do? I still love her. But I feel trapped.
We were one of those couples that was head over heels obnoxiously in love.
We've been arguing and fighting for close to 8 months. She has a very passionate personality, that turns to angered when she's frustrated. She says a lot of awful things when we fight, and as a result, I'm very distant.
She says. I'm distant and she feels neglected. Things are strained even when we aren't arguing and pouting any more.
She wants kids, I don't. I have several nieces and nephews, and they're fun, but I like to send them home.
I have fun with nieces and nephews, but I'm happy to send them home. I have zero interest in raising children.
This was a thing if discussion years ago, I said maybe two some day. She wanted four. But now I don't want them. My life is very comfortable, aside from the arguing and doubt and self loathing.
We're in our early 30s now.
She said she'd give the idea up to keep me, but I don't know how to react. She holds that up as a weapon. I cannot measure up to that.
She wont go to counselling.
What should I do? I still love her. But I feel trapped.
FinalBoss on
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You've been fighting for 8 months now and have basic disagreements that you can't seem to get past. That's pretty much the back of the box quote for counseling.
That being said, want kids vs don't want kids doesn't seem like a subject matter with a lot of room for compromise.
I know two marriages that ended because one of the partners wouldn't go...
She says counseling is a waste of time and money. It's supposed to open communication, she says. She thinks we communicate OK, we just don't agree.
She says I care more about my friends than her.
It sounds to me like she wants to end the marriage without actually having to sack up and admit it.
When your car breaks down, you need a car expert to fix it. Maybe you're an expert and can fix it yourself, in which case yay, but otherwise you either take it to a mechanic or you say fuck it and buy a new car.
You need a marriage expert. Presumably, neither of you are marriage experts. So your choices are to go see someone who might be able to help you fix the marriage, or say fuck it and go your separate ways.
Or you can stick with it and drive that marriage until the wheels fall off, but it sounds like you might not have a lot of miles left. Especially when you're dealing with something as fundamental as whether or not to have kids.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I'm not sure that this is a necessary judgment. If they used to talk about having kids and now he has zero interest, this isn't exactly her changing her mind out of nowhere.
I think we needed counseling before the kids issue resurfaced two weeks ago.
We had a huge fight last August. And never really recovered. There was a slap to the face, accusations fired. And counseling was suggested then. But we tried to fix it ourselves.
If you've already had an escalation to physical violence, and the antagonizing agent is that she really wants children and you don't (so a compromise isn't really possible), and she will not go to counselling to see if somehow things can be salvaged? Yeah, it's probably time to end the marriage. She can hopefully find someone else who also wants kids, you can hopefully find someone else who is happy without them.
It's great when you can mend an existing relationship that you've sunk so much into already, but I don't see a realistic path for that given what you've said.
It's entirely possible that dispatch is correct, minus his attaching the moral judgment to it. Divorce is hugely stigmatized, and even beyond that there's also a falacy-of-sunk-costs aspect of it, where you just devoted a huge chunk of your life to this arrangement, and ending it feels like you just wasted all that time. As well, it's rarely the case that someone just decides they suddenly hate everything about their spouse - generally, they still like the person, or at least feel affection for them, and they recognize all the things that are still positive about the relationship. It makes it harder to accept that maybe the negatives have grown too prominent.
So even if it's true that she does want the divorce but is afraid to be the one to come out and say it, it doesn't make her a shitty person. Failing relationships can make good people act bad, or strong people act weak. All it means is that it's rough for everyone involved.
Right now, it's important to get everyone's cards on the table and figure out what needs to happen to make the marriage work. If what needs to happen is feasible and everyone's on board with making those changes, you want to get started on that quickly so you can start to repair things. And if that needs to happen isn't feasible - if the child question can't be negotiated, or if one party just doesn't want to fix things - you want to get started on a dissolution that's as amicable as possible, because you both deserve to be with folks that can make you happy.
And hey, maybe you can work as friends someday. Divorce doesn't have to mean "I hate you and never want to see you again."
Have you asked her straight up, "Do you want a divorce?"
It may be time for that conversation if all other avenues of discourse are being closed by her voluntarily.
Edit: Has she been receptive to comments by close family and friends? Does she have anyone she can ask for advice that isn't directly involved in this relationship? Could someone be poisoning her to the idea of counseling? While the desire to have or not have children isn't something you can really negotiate, were your marriage to end in a divorce it would be much much much better if you could have an understanding and not hate each other during the divorce process. It's rough enough.
Or you could even try building a robot together. Now that AlphaGo exists, we aren't all that far from raising/parenting AI's anyhow.
Some humans just have the procreation drive more than others. You could even consider forcing the issue by getting a non-reversible vasectomy.
That's how I interpreted his post. You both need to sit down and have a frank discussion about how important this is to her. She's likely starting to feel like the Clock is ticking. It's completely okay if this is a deal breaker for your marriage, and she needs to honestly admit to herself if she'd be okay with giving that up to keep you or if that would just breed further resentment.
Ya , this seems insane, don't do this
I have one and it's something people I date have to be on board with fundamentally from the start. It also saves on the use of birth control (which isn't great if it's hormonal).
Getting surgery to win an argument? yep, must be religious craziness?
But I'm just bowing out because None of this is relevent to the question being asked
To the OP:
If she doesn't want to go to counseling, then you might want to consider going by yourself. At the very least, you may learn some coping tools to help you with your marriage, assuming you still want to keep it together.
However, based on what you've said, I would echo what others have mentioned in that it doesn't sound like you are compatible over the long term. Wanting to have children is a pretty big deal, and if she does and you don't, then that might very well be a sign that you should no longer be married. Trying to convince each other differently is just a recipe for a lot of arguments and resentment. Especially since she is responding to a primal biological desire which has, for lack of a better term, an expiration date.
Divorce doesn't mean that there has to be a bad guy and a good guy. It can just mean that you realized that you are not compatible life partners, and decided to move on.
Things are kinda OK lately.
But I have a hard time letting the accusations and insults go.
We argue and bicker in front of our close friends, and one of my friends have noticed and spoken about it to me privately, and I've confided in a few people, and called an employee assistant program.
Our families don't know, not really. Her sisters have asked her what's wrong with me, becuase I'm very withdrawn, or so she says.
I'm not perfect, but I feel smothered and stuff and manipulated. If I don't go along peacefully with her planning, she sulks and brings up the "I gave up kids for you!"
It doesn't matter that the slap didn't hurt you, it's unacceptable.
And add my voice to the side about kids versus no kids being a serious disconnect. There are some issues where compromise is possible, but this ain't one. You need to really think this over, because this is a fundamental incompatibility.
2) Dude, she hit you. Why are you still there? Flip that shit around. Think anyone in this thread is telling the wife to try and work it out when her husband only hit her twice? Yeah it's nice that she's smaller than you and getting slapped didn't hurt but if you think it will stop there I've got a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you.
3) The kids issue will never be settled unless you split up. If you stay together and don't have kids she'll be miserable. If you stay together and do have kids you'll be miserable, and you'll have custody agreements to add to the fun of divorce proceedings if you can't get your marriage back on track.
4) You sound profoundly unhappy. I'm sorry, that sucks.
In light of all this I'd say it's probably time to get a divorce lawyer. Don't make the mistake here of talking with her before you get a lawyer or thinking you won't need one. From everything you've posted here you're gonna need a really really good one. If you talk about divorce with her and you find a way to work things out, great, all you're out is the retainer. If you have that same talk and it ends with you deciding to get a divorce, you don't want to be the last person to have a lawyer. Never ends well.
Good luck and godspeed.
It is relevant in the desire to have kids though. Spousal abuse has a scary high correlation with child abuse.
So, you look forward to doing what you're doing now for the next 30-50 years?
My first wife and I had a pretty fun time in our 20s. Not amazing, but good. Things started to go downhill as we got close to 30, and big things, such as disagreements about our overall future, our interests, and so on, led to us realizing that we had become, or always were, incompatible in key ways. It sucked. But now I'm married to someone else and I have an amazing, awesome son. She's off doing something else; I don't know.
Thinking back, it seemed like I'd put 11 years of my life into something that I was throwing away. The past doesn't work that way, though -- you lived it, and now it sounds like it's time for something new.
A relationship needs to have something to sustain both people for the length of the relationship. For many, it's nurturing a child. For the long-term ones, regardless of children, it's a shared desire to better each other. You have to both want to be together and be, well, *nice* to each other.
I know people who have gone to marriage counseling and had things work out. Sometimes it's simple stuff, like sex, or ladies/guys nights. Often, the reason you hear people getting divorced after going to a counselor is that they are already having problems, and the counselor essentially just rips off the bandaid. The counselor can pretty quickly cut to the chase and say if something is fundamentally broken, or identify what may need to change (and if people don't want to change, well...). Someone who actually wants to fix a relationship should take the advice of seeing a counselor seriously.
Someone who thinks seeing a counselor is a waste of money and who then says they will "fix it themselves" but puts no effort into fixing anything is just prolonging the inevitable. What's the point of that?
I think it's completely unacceptable for her to use this as a weapon to guilt trip you into doing what she wants.
Based on everything you've posted, I think it's time for you to lawyer up and start forging a better life for yourself. It can be a painful process, but in the end you'll both be happier for it. I mean, I understand your hesitation: we tend to be reluctant to initiate major life changes, even when our current circumstances really suck. But chances are you'll start feeling better pretty soon after you make the decision.
Also, I'm going to echo what ElJeffe posted above: try not to think of divorce as a terrible failure on your (or her) part. It's very common for marriages to end. It's especially common when the relationship started at a young age, because sometimes when people grow up they also grow apart. The time you spent together hasn't been wasted even if the relationship ends. You get to keep everything you've learned along the way, and all the good memories.
I'm just not sure if I'm ready to jump.
The good times are OK. We're best when we avoid the elephant in the room, it's almost like the good old days.
It's still in the room. Problems aren't solved by avoiding them. If you keep sweeping things under the rug, it gets pretty hard to walk on that rug.
There are TONS of people out there with anger issues who would naturally spend most of their lives dying to slap the shit out of something. The ones who care work their asses off to make themselves into tolerable people so they don't hurt their families and loved ones.
But even without all that she wants kids and you don't. You can be miserable with kids or she can be miserable without them, but either way somebody is miserable forever and this is your life. You only get one of these. Why on earth spend it this way?