Everyone thinks you have the ideal marriage and recovery. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. I can’t find enough information to tell one way or the other.
I sincerely doubt that anyone who has been married for more than 2 years believes that ideal marriages exist. And should you presume to speak for "everyone"?
*Good* marriages can exist.
And most marriages can do with improvement.
And I cannot imagine that you can point to anything that I or NOP have ever posted that even hinted that we believe our marriage was an/the ideal that should be emulated.
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And until I can get a better feel for your dynamics, I take your R advice with a certain grain of salt. There are cracks that I see. You two do a good job of patching each other’s cracks, which is good from an R standpoint, but I am not convinced yours is the model to follow.
One of the last go-rounds you had with this NOP posted the following to you:
"My marriage was essentially dead, and needed some intense attention. That was MY marriage. While the approach I took to begin to recover our marriage may be similar to that needed by others, it is most assuredly not the only approach, and in fact, could be very damaging if misapplied."
It appears to me that you create some sort of strawNOP and then go forth into battle against the strawNOP of your own creation.
As to your "There are cracks that I see. You two do a good job of patching each other's cracks,..."
You keep hinting of things that sound so dire on the face of it. ~Our foos are leaking, we're hiding our foos, our cracks are showing~ - what are you so desperately trying to figure out about us? Neither of us pretend to be anything than what we are - two people in their fifties, who had a marriage go very wrong, and who in recent years started working on making it better. We are no different than any other participant on this forum in that regard.
I've talked about my foo and my issues about as much as anyone else here. I don't dwell on it because at this stage of my life it is immaterial to me. In my 20s, I realized that I had a difficult childhood that had impacted me in some ways. I started then and continue to assess my behaviors and beliefs that may have been skewed by that background.
I start with this premise "is this behavior, attitude or habit healthy/productive?" I can see where sometimes it has roots in my foo and I can see where some of it has roots in my personality AND IN THE END IT DOESN'T MATTER - because *I* do my damndest to take responsibility for *my* behaviors, attitudes and habits.
I can and do look back at my parents with mercy and grace - they are no longer responsible for me and my choices. To continue to point the finger at them is to avoid myself in the now.
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There are some very good points that can be incorporated, but exactly how and why your marriage works is still a mystery to me.
:shrug: Exactly how would knowing how and why MY marriage works be of any benefit to you?
