Well ... LL,
Looks like your "last" thread finally locked up and of course it happen over the weekend, so I couldn't get my 2 cents in on your closing posts. Funny thing is I could have made mention of it at any prior prior time before the conclusion of this thread if I had just remembered it sooner.

Quote:

that tony, is exactly what I'm trying to avoid...
if I simply go about making myself happy and enjoying the family with my children and h stays just the breadwinner and sometimes partner and father then eventually will I tire of this m? will I reach a point where I say enough is enough...I've put in my dues...I raised the family now it's time for me to have a full and involved r with another adult? will h by then have grown and realized there's more to life than work and football? or will he stay the same and I'll just move on and away from him?

I don't why I hadn't thought about this sooner, maybe because it wasn't up to now that I needed to look at my sitch in a similar light ... but when Andy use to be around, he would say (and lets hope I can repeat as well as said it) , that thruout one's life, each person, either by his own awareness or not, shift thru phases in attitudes ... and with each attitude there's a shift of what becomes personally important. Each individual is unique, so there are no two that go thru the same combination of the number of phases and their duration. So for two people who come to live together, they usually start of in sync (phase) like sprinters in their starting blocks, but over time like sprinters jumping hurdles, we become out of sync as we enter into diffrent phases of our own and we tend to no longer see things like we or our spouse use to. Different things become important to each of us ... but in time, those phases will shift again and could quite possibly come back in sync again.

I have only recently seen how this is true between CAW and me. At first we seem as were paying attention to our interests we were in sync and so we seemed to bond very closely. Then our interests began to shift and we no longer saw eye to eye as much and even our actions in M became out of whack. When she wanted to put effort on "fixing" on M, I didn't think there was anything needed fixing. (Sound familiar?) I tried to give her some concessions on what she wanted, but because I didn't see them as important, I really didn't put my heart into it and eventually she just gave up. Then the tide shifted again and as she developed other interest, then I began to want to put attention into "us". Short version, LL ... years later we're still out of sync. CAW is in a phase where for at least the past two years, she wishes to escape into a fanatsy world ... but I'm still hoping that we will survive until the next time-phase where we may re-align ourselves back into sync once again.

Right now your H may be happy with just concentrating on work and football and may seem like he's stuck there and won't change (was over ten years for me) ... but it is a phase and at some point will start to see things differently and his interests / attitudes will change. NOBODY stays single-minded on one track for their entire life. Who knows what it will take for the shift to happen ... maybe it you finding a radically different path to take with the way you interact with H ... maybe it will only take the kids getting older and their interest change to another phase ... maybe some irate customer to go "postal" on him ... maybe it will take the planets being in a totally different alignment. It really doesn't matter because while you may be able to influence it, you do not control your H's phases. So the question now becomes, how long are you willing to wait for you and H to get in sync?

... and I know you said you did your last thread, but technically this is not yours since you didn't create it, but I got the feeling it will take more than a post or two to come up with an answer to that question and until you do, I don't think you're quite done here in piecing. So feel free to hijack this thread and take it as far as you need to go with it ...

... another words, I gave you a loophole here just in case you changed your mind about the last being your last thread ... afterall, what are ole DBing pals for if not to find more ways to give support?!

'til later,
KAW