According to the co-dependency books…. Maybe we were too emeshed but this separate, my way, your way model is not working for me as well as it does for some people.
I agree with you. I think there are some good points to the codependency model, but a lot of it goes to far as is just a bunch of bull. I like Harley’s rebuttal to codependency (see here). Common sense should rule.
Funny that she say’s you are controlling over her money. Does she have any of it left? If she decides to spend her part of the retirement savings, what happens latter, when she needs a place to stay and food to eat? Does she dip into your share of the funds? If you two are together, I hardly see how you can tell her that she ran out of money and doesn’t get to eat anymore. So her spending “her” retirement funds cannot be separated from spending “your” retirement funds. To me, this would be the line in the sand, a point of no negotiation.
So if she’s spent “her” money and her mom’s money, where do you go from here? Has her spending been sufficiently satisfied with this latest spree to put home improvement on the back burner (assuming you finish you half of clearing out unneeded items)? If she wants to buy something else, will it be with credit cards in her name only, requiring her to get a job?
I still feel she has a “welfare” mentality at work here and it will not change until it has to. I think that is why change in the relationship has been so slow – because it has not had to change. You only said that you would like for it to change, but you never did anything to make it change.
I think there are times with some people when change needs to be forced. Otherwise you may end up leaving the relationship, and that is no different than forcing change anyway. To me, you can either do it sooner or later. Doing it sooner has the benefit of occurring when some warm feelings still exist. Doing it later may be when all these feelings have been exhausted. I see this pattern repeating all over this site.
The conventional wisdom has it that you cannot force someone else to change. That is true, but often the other will change, only at a sufficiently high level of pressure (such as divorce). The problem is you never know where the critical point is. How many times has a spouse conceded to working on the relationship after the other is walking out the door. If that act constitutes a 10 on the scale of force, maybe a 9 would have been enough.
But if you only work on yourself and do the right thing, you may only be putting forth force on the level of a 5. If the other person is conscientious, this level 5 incentive should work. But not everyone is like this. Some people care more about themselves than the relationship or the contentment of their partner (this lack of empathy is almost always FOO driven). So once you’ve done everything you can to fix yourself, to address all the complaints of your spouse, and change is not occurring, I see only two explanations – either more time is needed or more pressure is needed. And time is something that affects you. There is no need to put up with glacial change that occurs over decades. So why are so many people reluctant to up the ante?
