SomeWhere over the rainbow 2

[stubborn]

joie - tell me about "husband has minimal contact with OW"
My spouse lives with the fantasy that they can be "friends"...Disneyland would be cheaper and less destructive for fantasy...

How do you cope and under what situations is the contact?

or if Husband minds a "highjack" you can come visit me in piecing. Haven't touched my thread in a while....

[Sara]

H and everybody else,

I had an interesting conversation with a divorced woman about this very subject today. She lived as roommates with her husband for a long time and then got divorced. She said something to the effect of, "Once you realize that you are married to the wrong person, you can either decide to make the best of it and stick with it for the rest of your life, and that's not a happy choice. Or you can end it, but you have the children and you will always have to live with the aftermath, so that's not a good choice either. Really, there are no perfect choices anymore, you just have to do what you think best and live with the consequences." I thought she was very wise. She said she's been divorced 4 years, and she dates, but she doesn't know if she will ever marry again, because she is so much more cautious now.

[fightingirish]

sara,

That is an interesting perspective. I guess there will always be fall out, which ever way you decide to go.

And of course once you'be been burned, it will be hard to trust again.

~sara---youve got mail



tal

[Sara]

Yes, I'm not even sure if you need to realize that you are "married to the wrong person" to have the lack of perfect choices. I think people idealize marriage too much, and then are disappointed with reality. I think none of us ever have the choice of perfection. It's just that we don't accept it.

[cw68]

I found this quote somewhere and love it:

"I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person, but I do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I'll be the first to admit that it's possible that you did marry the wrong person. However, if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all. On the other hand, if you marry the right person, and treat that person wrong, you certainly will have ended up marrying the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to be the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person. In short, whether you married the right or wrong person is primarily up to you."
- Zig Ziglar

[Sara]

That is very true. Where can we post that in big letters?

[fightingirish]

cw,

That is great! Love it..

[cw68]

Here's another favorite of mine:

"In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage. Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture—to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs."
-Bill Doherty

[Sara]

Very true. But not as resounding as the first quote. But please, keep going. These are good.

[cw68]

Those are the big ones, but here's another little one I like:

"More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse."
- Doug Larson