Sorry everybody, I was out sick on Friday and missed a lot of stuff.
BF, I used to have a BMW GS, but alas, no more. But I’ve always dreamed of riding to the southern tip of Chile. Maybe one day after the kids are grown…
Lou, your post about working brought up several points. W has worked at a couple of jobs during our M and has been very successful each time. (She hasn’t worked enough to qualify for social security, though.) I’m sure W could get a job and support herself. She couldn’t afford to keep the house. She couldn’t afford to keep her menagerie. But she could support herself. I recognize that.
The other thing you bring up, something that others have jumped on is this:
Quote: About the SAHM thing, I think that is part of your W's problem. She might benefit and improve her social skills if she is forced to interact properly with more people that she has less freedom to abuse without consequences that might affect her negatively. (The dog thing does not count because volunteer jobs/people put up with a lot of crap. What are they gona do, dock her pay?) She knows you won't fire her but maybe her employer will and that might shape her up a little.
HP nailed my response to that – as I’ve seen with her past jobs, she’s a model employee, she just takes her stress out at home. Like she said, the problem is that W thinks it’s acceptable to treat us like dirt.
I also need to point out here that it’s easy to look at the spouses here in black and white. It’s easy to see them as only their bad points. In public, W is nearly always quite gregarious. If you were to meet us socially, you would never guess what things are like at home. Unless you were extremely perceptive, and I do mean extremely, you could be her best friend and it would probably still take you months before you began to recognize the things I’ve described here. She has a series of best friends that would back that up. But none of them seem to last more than a year at most. By that time, either they’ve begun to see the real W, or more likely, they’ve said or done something that made her mad and she’s cut them off. And I can tell you from experience that she never sees it that way. In her mind it’s always the former friend who ended the R.
But the point is that W is not this horrible, unbearable ogress. Quite the opposite. Most people really like W. She’s very successful in both work and social relationships. It’s only as the relationships grow closer that the problems begin to surface. It’s only then that she drops the mask and the real W starts to show through.
