Journey Continues

[Accuray]

Just checking in on you ballast, you seem to be at a low, very sorry to see that.

"Most wives DO express their feelings...but often their complaints -- especially for emotional intimacy, conversation, recreational closeness, more sex -- are ignored, pretended away, I suspect because the husband does not really know how to "fix" those types of things.

For others, it is that their presence in the marriage is more-or-less taken for granted. Men seem to feel that they've "done all the work needed" during dating, courtship...and they stop being the man and doing the things and treating her the way that helped the woman fell in love with them in the first place. The woman just ends up being sick of feeling, being treated like part of the household furniture. It accumulates over time when her trying to talk about it is ignored and "her" problem(s) pretended away. Then, when she's done, she is done. It takes a LONG and lonely, painful time to fall out of love and want to leave one's marriage. There is nothing "walk-away" about the process of falling out of love with one's husband or the difficult, painful decision to end one's marriage.

This is a one-sided description of the dynamic that's going on. The presumption is that the husband is happy and having his needs met while this is going on, but that's rarely the case. Both happiness and misery are contagious.

Relationships generally fall apart for one of three reasons: (1) One partner becomes emotionally unstable for a variety of reasons, which may include mental illness, addiction, issues related to a bad childhood, etc. (2) One partner has a momentary lapse of judgement and cheats and the other partner can't forgive them, or (3) the relationship slowly degrades over time for both people.

In the first case, sometimes people have latent issues and they either temporarily get better (an addict stops using for a while, a person with a mood disorder pursues treatment, etc), *or* the partner knows the issues are there and chooses to ignore them initially, fooling themselves or falsely believing that things will magically get better in the future.

This "fooling yourself" phenomenon is a lot of what goes on -- you fall in love with who you want the person to be versus who they really are. Over time, your veneer gets stripped away, you see them for who they really are and its no longer acceptable.

The tragic situation is when someone who was emotionally healthy when you met and dated them has a breakdown after you're married and just becomes unlivable due to their issues. That's rare but it certainly does happen, people just "go crazy" sometimes.

The third scenario is really what the quote above is about. Chances are if the husband is ignoring the wife's complaints, its because he's not very motivated to respond to them. The reason is generally that he's not having his needs met either, and his complaints are likely also being ignored.

That's the vicious cycle that tends to land people here -- your needs aren't being met, so you're less motivated to provide your wife with what she needs. Her needs aren't being met, so she's not motivated to give you what you need, and that spinning wheel eventually drives you apart until one person (or both people) decides they want out.

Sometimes the scenarios are combined, you could have all three things going on.

My point is, unless you "went crazy" after you married W, this is in *no way* your fault for not responding to her complaints. She is equally if not more culpable than you are in that regard. Don't let her off the hook for that, and don't shoulder the blame.

It's good to be aware of these dynamics so that you can identify and avoid them in the future, but you're not guilty.

Acc