LD + HD; Does It Ever Really Work?

[Burgbud]

(Kett) The problem is that you are refusing to acknowledge or address the problem, which is, you are being inconsiderate in a *shared space*.

Yep. That's sort of the direction I got to thinking in...I'm pretty independent and mostly happy, so if I got involved with a woman who was also pretty independent and mostly happy, about what kind of thing would I say, "Sorry, that's just me, you gotta deal (or not, as the case may be)" and about what kind of thing would I have to consider altering how I live to accommodate a mutual sharing of day-to-day lives.

(Lil) To me this ability to respect a pov that is different from your own is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reaching a solution (and chances are, that solution will be a compromise).

Right. I think you have to be willing to consider a pov different from your own even if it makes no sense to you. You MUST accept that the other person's pov is valid. My mind boggles trying to consider doing that in my M because my W could come up with a seemingly endless string of problems that "had" to be handled. Once you accept that their pov is valid, you can choose to work with them in hopes of finding a mutually acceptable accommodation of pov's or you can shake their hand and say, "You're a good person, but I can't find space in my head to fit your pov in so if that's a deal breaker for you then hey, no hard feelings if you want to go your separate way."

If you decide their pov isn't valid and you tell them they're wrong or treat their pov with scorn or even just ignore it, you're no longer married to another person. You're married to some vision in your head of what an acceptable partner is and your spouse is just a person standing between you and a fiction you've decided to believe in.

I tend to find myself thinking about this situation as that other person no longer existing, they've just become an extension of me. It's a significant problem I have because I assure everybody that if you'd just play the roles I've assigned we'll all have big, big fun! WHY WON'T YOU COOPERATE? You must not be very bright. Obviously this thinking is related to being in Corri's Center of the Universe chair.

Look at MrsHD. Does anybody think she's married to Hairy? She seems to only be vaguely aware of the HD those of us here know. We know him as a flesh-and-blood man who wants to get laid every once in a while. Huzzah! She knows him as a guy who would enjoy celibacy if he'd just give it a chance. Who is she talking about? Guys like that exist, obviously, but their name isn't "Hairdog." Definitely in my M, it had been a very long time since I was married to whatever separate individual my W actually was. If I'd acknowledged that individual I might have had to do something. Whatever that something may have been, I either didn't know how to do it or was unwilling to do it so I had a marriage with an extension of myself instead, right up to the moment that arrangement became untenable and blew up in my face. I have a pretty good feeling that in the long run it wouldn't have mattered but who knows? We might have learned to work out problems instead of fight over them. I know that I would much rather have dealt with the sitch as adults and, if need be, dissolved the M as adults instead of acting like morons and just letting the d4mn thing spin out of control until it was a complete disaster.

So this, I guess, is my point. My advice to those here assembled is, if you aren't already, try being married to your actual spouse for a while rather than to an extension of yourself. See where it takes you, even if it takes you somewhere scary.