I take my hat off to you for acknowledging that your childhood and your wife's had and is influencing your behavior constantly when it comes to relationships. I did learn it myself after meditating and thinking about it for a long time. It's a like a machine takes over our bodies when we are under heavy stress and we make the same decisions that our fathers, if we are men, or our mothers, if we are women, made when we were little. I wish I had parents that got along very well and that showed me how healthy relationships work, instead I had very litigious parents who never divorced as of today. What can we do about it? Maybe the midlife crisis is not the problem, maybe it's the cure. Maybe separation is the cure, maybe divorce is the cure. By becoming individuals again we can see who is really the source of the problem, is it ourselves or is it our partner? I think that people like us who came from troubled families should live separately, I think it's best because we need to heal from the wounds we received during our childhood and because we don't want to hurt our partner. I think that LAT (living apart together) is best for people who come from troubled families like you and I. This is what I would like to achieve with the mother of my children at some point, a loving relationship where each one of us has his own space and we live separately.
