Passionate Marriage

[eyesopened]

Cathy,
Wow, you really know about this. First, I'm very sorry about your husband. I watched two family members do something similar despite the rest of the family trying to show them they were hurting a lot of people, mostly their children.

You and your son have great insight, and I think you're right. I've noticed that when I'm in my seething stage (dredging up old hurts or brooding over a recent one), my husband's very attentive and loving and on his absolute best behavior. Unfortunately, I'm getting what I wanted (such as him being home for dinner), which makes me more angry (as in "do you have to be afraid of losing me before you'll do what's important to me"), and eventually things either escalate into a full blown fight or eventually cool back down.

He does need lots of reassurance, and again I have to take a lot of responsibility for that. I've been going back through things he's written to me and old conversations and taking his accusations at face value. One thing that he repeats is that he always felt as though I had one foot in and one foot out of our marriage whereas he was the more committed one. The hard to face truth is that he's right.

I'm the one who's left a few times for weeks, sometimes months, at a time, who expects our marriage to fail and is always making plans for leaving (not even "change or I'll leave", but "I'm surprised that we lasted this long, and I'm not happy, but we should stay together for the kids" and the latest "the kids are almost all grown now, and I don't see any reason for us to stay married once they're grown and gone"), and who actually filed for divorce many years ago.

But, I don't really want to leave him. What I really want are ironclad guarantees and proof that he won't leave me, that we can weather whatever happens in our lives together, that he won't stop loving me, that if he knows how much I love him and want him he won't use it against me, and that he even won't die before me. And there's no such thing in life.

You are absolutely right, too, that he (and I) need to learn to fight fair. If I can put aside my pride and resentment and give him the reassurance that he needs, perhaps we can both learn to fight fair. At least last time, things didn't escalate, and we did ML later that night. Maybe we need to do something I read about in one of the relationship books. The husband and wife agreed to take their clothes off when they started fighting, so during their next fight they stripped. It worked for them to defuse the tension, maybe it might work for us (at least for those fights in private, probably not a good idea for fights in the car).