Your post really struck a chord with me. I wanted to take you up on your offer of talking about this subject.
My H has an OW that he has been intermittently living with... they are very involved. Unlike your sitch, my H IS ambivalent. I suspect he could define the term, actually.
But what struck me is that--like many of the WAS described on this board-- he told OW many of the same things you write here.
Quote: Over the years, he increasingly questioned the marriage, tried for a while to encourage common interests, but never really able to find any. She’s a morning person, he a night man. She’s a social person, he’s a loner. There was a big gap in their respective IQs and education. They literally had nothing to talk about. When he came home from work, they’d cook dinner, and then she’d go to bed. She wasn’t affectionate towards him.
My H said many of these things... and when I heard them, frankly I was stunned. That picture was vastly different than the marriage I experienced with him.
I guess my question is how much of these stories are reality? How much of this stuff is really justifications for walking away from a conflict that requires them to look inside at themselves? Or projecting their internal unhappiness, depression or self esteem issues onto the marriage?
Michele talks about "differences" in her books quite a bit. And when I look around, most of the happily married couples I know could also fit a lot of this scenario.
I hope I'm not offending here because that isn't my intent. I'm trying to understand my H's choices--ones so many others have made from the posts on this board-- and I really don't believe these kinds of differences are the crux of it.
Quote: He thought it a bad marriage, and believed she felt the same way. I don’t know how “hard” he tried to find an emotional connection to her before calling it quits – I wasn’t there...Let’s assume he has tried all he could.
I'm using your story as an example since it's the one posted here, but this is a generic question.
Doesn't not knowing that your spouse doesn't agree with your assessment of the marriage mean: 1. you didn't ask but assumed you could read their mind (or didn't really want to know the answer)
or
2. you asked and received a false answer?
In some cases, maybe the LBS suddenly becomes emotionally invested in the marriage when the WAS is walking away-- but my experience was that I began looking at the things my H was saying about our marriage when he began SAYING them-- it was not that he was leaving... it was that he was sitting there telling me that he felt neglected at X or Y time, that he wanted more time doing A and B-- and initially I was in shock, but I was very eager to deal with it. It was throwing out things like "morning person/night person" that made me feel like one or both of us had gone crazy.
Quote: is it sufficient to say “I am and always will be incompatible with this person” to leave?
One thing I have come to believe is that every marriage without abuse can be saved and made good-- because a marriage is what you want to make it-- but to do it is a choice and there is work involved, most of it on ourselves not our spouse. But who can say what is sufficient? That's a very individual decision that we have to make based on what we believe in.
My values about marriage are that marriage is a responsibility and a committment to love someone and protect them and work for and support each other's growth as well as our own, not an arrangement of convenience, a whim, or a vehicle to provide me with happiness. That has weighed heavily into any decisions I've been faced with.
Through DBing, I came to see how many of my interactions with my H during the beginning of our S were more about not dealing with the pain I was feeling over his A than anything else.
I suspect the same is true of his actions and choices-- that it's more about his own pain than about me. People who are not dealing with their own hurt tend to hurt others. So what seems sufficient to me is to work on myself and strive to live what I believe in.
Thanks Pen, for bringing up this subject and for wanting to discuss it. It's something I think about often and hope I've added something to the dialogue.
