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Back from Fabulous MC#2. She wasn't so fabulous tonight. I specifically asked if we could set some signposts, waymarkers, goals, and instead wound up in a kind of round-robin he-said/she-said. Not an utter waste of time (money), but not even a base hit.

Only "thing" that emerged came in response to FabMC#2's question: "How long was it good?"

My response: Good 7 years, pretty good 5 years, not so good since Iraq.

WAW's response: Good 12 years, terrible since Iraq.

FabMC#2: So what do you think of that?

WAW: Oh my god, it was much worse than I thought. That's a total shock to me. That's an eye-opener. I thought things were great, and he was obviously miserable. See? See? We're total opposites. It's like we weren't even in the same marriage.


Oooooo-kay. Different POVs? Nah. Ignore that part. 5+7=12 good? Ignore that part. General agreement on what made bad become bad? Ignore that part.

No, apparently to WAW a marriage is binary. It's either perfect or it's a catastrophe; you're either matched or you're doomed; you either see everything the same way or you're polar opposites.

*Sigh*

This is gonna be a lot of $150 checks.....

Sorry Fabulous MC was not fabulous tonight.

SP I have read that going to war changes people as you would expect. In what ways did it change you ?

Well, no sh*t Sherlock, when communication is crap or there are no-go areas, it's perfectly possible for two people to be experiencing two different marriages simultaneously.

It's like the thing in PM where the wife gets all bent because her husband doesn't verbally agree with her that this one night was this mind-shatteringly intimate experience. Schnarch says something like, "So you're not only allowing *him* to define *your* experience, you're letting him do it retroactively."

I don't get this expectation of emotional lockstep, really I don't. If that's what it's supposed to be like, maybe newleyweds should just flip a coin then donate one brain to science.

Hormone snarl ceases.

At least you're talking. I figure, the more you do that, assuming a reasonable level of honesty and lack of ad hom, it's going to be useful on some level.

BTW, I finally alt'd up, but I can't find my own profile with a search.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I'm an admirer of Diotima di Mantinea, though. Especially as she appeared in The Princess Bride....

That Assumption of Good Will is good stuff. It's more .... (insert Captain Barbossa voice) ... guidelines. A counterweight to the Assumption of Bad Will we seem to acquire after the slings and arrows of outrageous LTRs. A counterspell against hair-trigger emotional reactivity.

Stop nattering, woman.....

Hell's bells, @Kett, I wish I'd said that! You know how I've been writing that as time goes on and I move on I've been learning a lot about my marriage and ME in my marriage? This is one of the things I've learned (or remembered I'd subordinated, or something) -- this has ALWAYS been the case with WAW. It's either TOTAL AGREEMENT or "something's wrong."

That's been consistent, really, almost since the day we were married. And since it came out last night, in that forum, in so back-a**wards a way (Smiley's Person has to share MY POV, doesn't he???), I'm really starting to think it's one of those FUNDAMENTAL differences between us.

And I'm starting to wonder why I'd ignored / sublimated it for so long, but that's another topic for another day -- why we subordinate ourselves to our marriage (or, perhaps more precisely, to our spouses' framing of the marriage).



Right! But it's even more than that -- she not only lets me (if you will) define *her* experience retroactively, she then essentially punished me for having done so in her mind. Notice the Chicken Little "oh my god things are worse than I thought there's no hope we're all gonna die!" that it elicited.



Love it! But I still would like the thread reference you referred to earlier where that discussion is underway.

Well I was fortunate in that my rank, position, and the nature of some of my duties didn't require me to kick in peoples' front doors and take AK-47 blasts in the face, unlike many of my brothers- and sisters-in-arms.

What it did at the intellectual level is neither here-nor-there. Suffice it to say I pay a LOT more attention to what my government does.

At the emotional-psychological level, after the few years' wandering -- I was re-reading my journal from the first year I was home and it was like reading a stranger's autobiography (Really? I did that? Someone offered me that job? No recollection at all.) -- I actually was *better* than I'd been before.

I take far fewer things seriously -- not in the jokester sense, that was always part of my mojo, but in the the-sky-is-falling sense.

I'm far -- FAR -- more open to other peoples' POVs.

I'm far -- FAR -- less judgmental (except of certain buffoons in the public sphere who shall here remain nameless, though you can call them Rush, Sean, and Sarah if you'd like).

I think I became a much, much better mentor to those I...what is the verb anyway? ment?

With respect to my marriage, I think -- again, after the years of wandering -- it made me (in a negative sense) far more tolerant of the emotional ambiguity in which we persisted. "Ah, well, it is what it is." So that's a net negative.

On the whole, though, it made me damned grateful to be alive. I got lucky, really lucky. My best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, I didn't get shot, blown up, winged, clipped, zapped. I didn't take one, a bit of shrapnel, or get hit. I lost some people, and that sucked, and it taught me I can't go through the next 30.9 actuarial years I have left traveling in this earthly vale getting spun up about things.

Finding a good MC really seems to be hit or miss. We just made a mutual decision to give up on our second. Choosing the wrong one is pretty expensive in terms of both the $ and the lost opportunity.

My w did agree to return to MC if we can find a good one, but the challenge is "how do we do that?"

Maybe I'm just being dense here - but why not try a DB Coach? Ok, I know that semantically, at least, it's not counseling, but they're appropriately credentialed, and they *will* talk to both of you.

A DB Coach is for the DB'er. She's not DB'ing. I may or may not be DB'ing.

Weird thing. Woke up at 0330 this ay em.

As I lay there in the bed, it occurred to me:

I don't miss being married. And I don't remember when I stopped.

A curious sensation.

I daresay that most of us here don't miss being married, with the exception of those who are new to the situation and still in the shock and awe phase. For most of us, more recent memories of marriage are far from pleasant, comforting, or remotely positive for that matter. It is where we lost ourselves, our happiness, our stability, our sense of life as somewhat predictable and at least marginally under our control. I think that what we really want is marriage re-invented, different from what we've become accustomed to, with a bit less of a knee-jerk, stun reaction like a dog with a shock collar.