So Confused and Conflicted (7)

[WshIKnw]

I'm surprised you'd ask this question after all the feedback you've gotten.

What do you think the biggest lesson you have learned here, is?

Can you tell us what you have learned, without then saying your W should have told you or made it more clear, etc.

I've learned that I can't rely on a woman to explicitly tell me how important things are to them. When they complain about anything, I need to find out for myself how important it is, and assume everything is super important until I can safely determine otherwise. If it's a deal breaker, it's very important that I know!

This kind of baffles me. You didn't "do just about anything to keep her."

She made her needs known to you more than once on more than one issue, and you did not meet them.

I didn't know how much she needed those things. That's the fact of the matter. I was a clueless husband. I had very little relationship experience before her, and it's now a wonder to me that she stayed with me for ten years.

She'd have to use the Divorce word for anything important to her? That seems so extreme. And it builds tension and resentment.

LOL. No. All she'd need to do is tell me she has to have it in her life, whatever it is she is asking for.

She would complain about things....what do you think that means?

That she wants something to change. But it's important to know how much she wants it, when determining whether I want to give it. I mean, the only alternative to that, is for me to just give her everything she wants, right? Who knows? Maybe she would have been very happy and attracted to a "yes" man, but I don't think most women are.

What good would it do her to say she was unhappy to you, when her complaints were ignored?

It would let me know how important those things are to her. Even our marriage counselor (that she agreed to one session with) told us that it's very important to know how much things matter to our spouses.

Plus, it seems as if you are saying that because she "took it', you kept dishing it out.

Heh. Come on. You must think I was the biggest jerk husband. It wasn't about not changing because she would put up with not changing. It was about her acting happy all of the time (when she wasn't stopping to complain for a moment), regardless of what I did or didn't do. I wasn't very motivated to make her happier when she already seemed happy. I can't believe this seems like such a foreign concept to some people. Well, they do say that men and women seem like they come from different planets..

In her mind, by complaining and seeing no change, you were warned.

Yep. That is the unfortunate truth, probably. She said all the times she complained were my second chances. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how important those things were to her, and that our marriage was in danger. I thought those things were much less important to her than they actually were. It is what it is. All I can do is learn from it. But maybe it shouldn't be all about the man understanding the female brain, but also should be about the female understanding the male brain. It's a two-way street. Women give up, and blame the man who didn't understand her needs, and everyone looks at the man and says, "Why didn't you get it?" Well, why didn't the woman understand how the man thinks, and communicate to him her needs, differently, in a way he better understood -- or explain to him how to better understand her?

"Unfortunately, I had gotten so comfortable that I had forgotten how I had to ask her how happy she was once a month or so."

Is this^^ the lesson you are taking with you? I'm sincerely asking.

It is one of very many lessons that I am taking from this situation. It's a lesson I learned before, and worked very well for me for a long time, but a lesson that I had forgotten, because I had gotten too comfortable and thought everything was fine.