SBJ... don't mean to hijack your thread but something in John's post really resonated with me.
John... my sister's marriage is like that two (minus the broken stuff). When she and her H got married, I gave it a year because they bicker at each other a lot. It will be 24 years this July. My H and I rarely argued about anything so I mistakenly thought that that was a good thing. I have come to realize after all of this that it was, in fact, the opposite. My H is EXTREMELY conflict avoidant. On the outside, he looks like his is fine but on the inside, he could be seething and you would never know it...at least you wouldn't if you were in an R with him. My H has apparently been angry at me for years over various things, most of which I have no memory of. In my MR, if I was upset about something, I would tell him or I would decide whatever it was wasn't worth the conflict and I would let it go. My H, on the other hand, never confronted me on anything AND he also never let anything go. He would just add it to his bag of resentments and use it to justify his eventual decision to leave. In our original BD (2014), he actually told me about some of the things that he was mad about. Some of those things had happened eight years before and I could not even remember what he was talking about. Pretty hard to defend yourself if you have no memory of the offense. Anyway...if I am ever in another longterm R with anyone, I will remember this experience and make sure I check in with my partner often and not always take "fine" or "it's nothing" for an answer.
