My wife's midlife crisis

[Rita]

Thanks for the clarification, ciluzen. It all makes more sense now and a lot of what you say about them needing to be heard seems very helpful and gives me some ideas for future conversations!

I have been working on myself for five years now and I do think that a point does need to come where you accept that they are too broken to work on anything with you or you will die from the feelings of rejection. I don't think seeing them as broken is the same thing as saying there is nothing wrong with us LBS's. But we generally spend at least a year or two trying so hard to fix ourselves that we forget that there is nothing we can do to ourselves that will bring our spouses back. That decision has to come from them when they decide to heal. So I think we are saying the same thing in different ways, but I know for myself I need to accept that my spouse is broken, separate from working on my own brokenness, in order to heal my broken heart and let him go.