Retreat

[Marylov]

Our story…as best I can summarize:

We dated 3 years, got married 6 months after our engagement, had our daughter at 2.5 years married. We have always had a volatile relationship, as we are both strong willed/aggressive people. I tend to instigate more upfront and cause our arguments, but then he has a very bad temper so he causes them to get out of hand. I am religious and come from a home where my two parents have shown that two imperfect people can make it work if you just stick with it. It isn’t always rainbows and butterflies but we had a stable home life. His parents fought all the time and he has almost zero good memories of when they were together. They divorced when he was about 11, and since then his father remarried and remains married to the same woman for about 15 years. His mother has remarried and divorced three times. I was always a goody goody, and responsible. He was a total rebel, dropped out of high school and joined the marines at 17. We met at work, right when I had finish college, and he was making his way into the professional world after leaving the marines.

Our issue has always been that he doesn’t believe I respect him coupled with his temper. Early on we had many fights about me talking negatively about him in public, and I fixed it. But he won’t let it go that I used to do that. He doesn’t think I make him a priority, and I haven’t, especially since our daughter was born since I also work full time. I always meant to focus more on him, but it was one of those, important but not urgent things. I am not outright rude to him, or malicious, but he just thinks I constantly disrespect him with the choices I make, how I spend my time on my phone and not listening to him. His opinion is that there is nothing left to fix, that we are beyond repair. He is so miserable that the only thing he can think about is getting away. My opinion is that this has come to a breaking point because he is stressed about money and work, and the responsibility of being a father to a young child has overwhelmed him. His own father hated being home, and I believe that he thinks he is not wired for this type of life. One of the things we have struggled with most recently is that I have been wanting to do what I think of as family oriented activities, like going to a friend’s child’s birthday party, and he wants to go hang out at a bar to watch football with a divorced male friend.

I love him and he says that he will always love me, but that he is depressed and miserable. He does struggle with depression, and in his own words, he can’t go a night without drinking.

I am absolutely not ready to walk away from my FAMILY, because of how we feel in this one moment. He claims he has felt this way for two years. I don’t buy it. Yes of course we have had bad times over the past two years, but there have been great moments as well. I think he is just trying to convince himself that he has “tried”.

I am in the process of reading DB, and also have DR. I have also read... which shook me to my core, because now I feel like if I was given the chance, I would approach my married life very differently.

Any and ALL advice would be welcome. And PRAYERS. Lots of them!