Interesting analogy Lou. Now let me try one. MMJJ has mentioned a trip to France (where she would presumably be having hot sex with some big-biceped guy named Hanque), so I’ll work with that.
Suppose you’re a serious francophile. You speak French, and you just love the whole French culture. You love the language, the cities, the countryside, the food, the wine, the Riviera – even those goofy-looking Citroens. Given your choice, you would spend every vacation in France. But, alas, your H likes the occasional glass of wine and doesn’t mind ogling the girls in St. Tropez, but that’s about the extent of it. He doesn’t speak French, doesn’t like to fly, and he just feels uncomfortable and out of place in France. He doesn’t like cities and in spite of your love for Paris, he thinks it’s too big, too crowded, too dirty, has too much traffic, and is just plain miserable. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, he’ll take steak over quiche. He feels stressed in a foreign culture where he doesn’t fit in and would really prefer to just stay home and relax.
Your H could categorically refuse to go to France, or more realistically, he could agree to an occasional trip to France. You would be happier with an occasional trip than with none, but that occasional trip wouldn’t even come close to fulfilling your desires. And in either case, you wouldn’t be happy. So have you ceded control of your happiness to your H? No, of course not. But he still does control it in some measure, not because you’ve given him any control or responsibility for your happiness, but simply because it’s a natural result of your partnership.
You could still go to France by yourself. But we both know that going by yourself wouldn’t be the same as going with the one you love and with whom you can share the experience. Your H could agree to go along with you, then spend the vacation being tense and uncomfortable and wondering just what it is you see in the place. But again, we both know that it wouldn’t be the same as going with your H if he really enjoyed in it and reveled in the experience like you do. You haven’t given him responsibility for your happiness, but by the very nature of your R, he does affect it. In the extreme case, he could even come close to sucking all of your enjoyment out of your trip to France.
So what to do? Well, H can agree to more vacations in France. And you can agree that you’ll only spend three days in Paris and the rest of the time in pensions in Bordeaux or the French Alps. Maybe you can skip the beach at St. Tropez and go with H visit Utah Beach instead. And you could find things that make you happy during the vacations when you don’t go to France.
The point of all of this is that by virtue of being the spouse, each partner does have some control over the other’s happiness. That’s not a weakness and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would say that it’s good. It’s certainly much better than the alternative of being blissfully happy in and of yourself with no regard for the wants and desires of your spouse. What kind of wife would you be if you took every vacation in France, did exactly what you wanted, went exactly where you liked, and stayed as long as you wanted, all without a twinge of unhappiness or regret that your H didn’t enjoy it as well?
The other point, the one about Paris and Utah Beach, is that you should strive to reach some place where both of you are attending to both your own happiness and the happiness of your partner.
