Possible WAW?

[Rose888]

I think about this a lot. Although I mainly blame myself for the deterioration of our M, I know she absolutely has things she needs to work on and change too. There was a situation the other night that really shed the light on this for me: W and I were in bed drinking some beers. She had set her beer on the bed. I was actually laying the opposite direction from her and as I moved to lay the same direction as her, the bed was shaken and her beer spilled.

She was furious that I had moved and in doing so her beer spilled on the bed. She crossed a boundary I have made clear and was talking to me angrily and with disrespect. About how it was all my fault. I told her not to talk to me like that and that she shouldn’t have put the beer on the bed in the first place.

This got me thinking, if the roles of this situation were reversed, how would I have reacted? I am positive that I would take the blame for putting an open can on the bed and would have apologized and cleaned it. Her behavior in this situation was unacceptable to me. I haven’t really seen any changes for the better in her yet. I really hope she is able to look inward and improve herself because after this situation I was really thinking that I deserve better than this.

Your situation is still very young. One of the key principles of Divorce Remedy is that if you focus on changing yourself, you can change your relationship, and you've already seen evidence that your interactions are changing as your behavior changes.

Personally, I feel that marriage is rarely 50-50. Sometimes one spouse is pouring more into the relationship than the other, and then in another season of life, it will be the other spouse giving more. It's expected that if a spouse is not sure they want to be in the marriage, they might not be interested in improving as a spouse. Again, it goes back to DR. One spouse can make a difference, even if the other isn't interested in working on things.

For me, there are two questions spouses should ask:
1. Am I committed to this marriage and to my vows?
2. Do have the emotional strength to stay in this marriage without damaging the core of who I am? (Living with a spouse who has a mental illness, or is highly critical, or struggles with addition can sometimes exceed the capacity that the other spouse has to deal with trouble and start to take down the other spouse. Leaving might be necessary in those cases.)

If the answers to those two questions are Yes, then stop worrying about whether your spouse is changing. Focus on improving yourself and your own relationship skills and being the best spouse you can be.

That doesn't mean pursuing when pursuit isn't welcome, or becoming a doormat, or being a Mr. Nice Guy. It means healthy emotional detachment, GAL, 180s, validation, just without an expectation that just because you are ready to work on the marriage now, that your spouse has to have the same timing. Maybe there has been (or will be) a time when she is working on it and you aren't.

Even now, years past our crisis, I find that if I start focusing on this thing my husband said or that thing he did, our marriage gets bumpy, whereas if I turn that energy to working on improving my own behaviors as a spouse, things get better. Stay on your side of the street.

(As for sex, in the absence of an affair, and as long as she is living in the house with you, I wouldn't avoid sex if she seems receptive. Sex and touch (if welcomed!) release hormones that encourage bonding.)