my "model" for husband/marriage experience was my dad naturally. my folks were 50+ years married so was W's folks. neither my mother nor her mother can make sense of this. for their generation as you all allude to, divorce was not considered. as my mom said in those days who else would we marry/where would we go. absent social media/tech of today, if those Ws left they had WAY less chance of finding OM. so my "insight" is molded based on the prior generation, but clearly what i'm finding is that my generation of ladies is WAY different from their mom's and THAT means to me i was woefully unprepared to meet those increased expectations.
one of my sister's is D'ing her H. 15 years together, great father, provider, but she says he can't meet her emotional needs. says he's a great man, she doesn't deserve him, but can't stay with him. smh. ask her why/what he does not provide, she dodges. simply can't answer the question. now i have lots of buddies, all good men, love their wives and families, but pretty much every single one of them would blank face me if i asked them if their emotional needs were being met. not saying that's an excuse, but i do believe it's a reality. so then as Sandi once said "men don't understand regular women's actions, so no chance at men understanding a WW"...so if she's right, now we have a guy who's not inclined to his emotions, plus doesn't "get" women, he just knows he loves her and tries his best...for sure like dang near every man at some point, he slips/screws up/stops courting, etc...after some time he's BD'd and of course has no idea what happened. so then he goes to MC IF he's lucky and it's either too late, he's wrong, he'll never change/can't change, etc. that fool likely never had a single clue he had a problem nor did his W give him a single chance to fix it/change it. he was supposed to know all along and she's closed/written him off. the kicker to me these days is that these ladies who walk away and pick up another guy...we're not all that much different, i mean at some time that new guy is gonna fail in your mind just the way the one you left did.
like i say i have learned much of what i'm guilt of. i did not do a good job of continuing the courtship, i did not focus on giving to our relationship as i should have, i should have spent more time talking with her buildling the foundation of safety and comfort for her in me, there's a TON of ways i have learned more about what i could have done. in fact if i had the lifetime vow between the two of us i could have implemented much of that. BUT feelings/needs for ladies of today seem like a constantly moving/infinite loop of contradictions. if a guy went right and she says you should have gone left, go the other way and you'll still be wrong.
i dunno...i plan to implement a whole bunch of things in myself, things that i have learned i didn't do/ways I could have been a much better spouse. but i really do wonder if i will ever be able to satisfy the needs of a modern lady. relationship needs/wants of today's women just seem so completely higher, confusing, perhaps unattainable to me and as is exhibitied herein daily, many W's have no idea exactly what they want even to themselves. again i love ladies, would love to be in a forever relationship, but i just really truly worry that no matter how much effort i put into their feelings/emotional needs/you name it, good chance i'd still fail and not have a clue why nor how.
sorry again if i rambled, bottom line i'd like to believe that the work i'm putting into myself would show tangible results in future relationships but for many various factors i'm really questioning if any of it would make a difference anyway.
