Am I Creating a SSM Part II

[Burgbud]

Hey, Heather! Hope you're getting a good start to your new week.

It's been awhile and it was my (rainy) weekend with the boys so I pondered your sitch a bit while they were absorbed in video games. And, no surprise, a lot of stuff bubbled up out of that and I'm going to plop it all down in your thread because that's what I do (not nearly as much as I once did, of course, but still). You may want to grab a beverage before starting to wade thru the rest of this. And let me get this disclaimer out of the way: it's all theories, speculation, projection and wild a$$ guessing. You know that I've always been able to relate a bit to H and a lot of what follows will come from that. Utilize anything that seems helpful and discard the rest.

It's clear to me that H is what I've seen described as a "married single". He's not invested in your marriage and has never really been required to be. When you guys met you were a little out of control and he provided your life a rudder that you needed. Your way wasn't working for you and he was more than happy to provide you with his way. He gave you guidelines and rules on how to act and behave and he enforced them. In some aspects that was positive for you and you reacted well to it. I'd say he went a little overboard in controlling your jewelry and what you wore. But the point is, during this time he wasn't having to think about what you wanted and he wasn't investing in your happiness. You got your happiness from being with him; that's what you wanted.

Eventually you grew beyond that but you were already married. You're basically happy with yourself and the life you've created but you don't want to be a married single and you don't want to be married to one. You want to be married to someone who cares about your feelings and who sees your marriage as one unit instead of as two units that conveniently overlap in some areas (sex, childcare, meals, etc). He hasn't changed though. Everything points to this. His drinking in the past and his refusal to totally give it up, sticking at least to the O'Douls. The porn. The fact that he's basically not unhappy with your current arrangement. The fact that the most important thing to him is that the two of you are civil. The fact that he sees you as the key to the emotional temperature of the marriage. He sees himself as basically single and all he wants is for you not to bring him down.

He's willing to meet you partway in the areas he sees as fair. But being a married single makes one *extremely* prone to scorekeeping, because you're not "all in" with the other person. Their happiness is only important to the extent that when they're happy, they don't bug you. But if the things you want me to do to keep you happy bug me, then it isn't worth it and you'd better be doing things that bug you as well. It's like living with a roommate. A married single is willing to accomodate the M to some extent...putting the toilet seat down or not drinking directly out of the milk carton. But a married single doesn't want their day seriously interrupted. We don't want to be bothered at work. We don't want to make an extra stop when we're out running errands and we sure as hell don't want to make *two* extra stops. We don't want you taking extra Christmas pictures that we've already told you we think are stupid. If you want to do that stuff on your own time then fine. But don't drag us into it; we have other stuff we want to do. When there's something extra we want you to do we kind of expect you to do it because we don't often ask, right? We try very hard to totally take care of ourselves but when it would be *much* easier for us if you'd just help us out a little...well, there's supposed to some benefit to being married, isn't there?

We also don't want to mess around much with feelings. You deal with yours and we'll deal with ours. If you're sick then that's a real an tangible thing that we can relate to and we'll try to help you out. But if you're sad or worried...well, that's really your issue to work out, isn't it? There's nothing we can really do to make you feel better; we've learned that from hard experience when we tried to explain how you really shouldn't let the stuff that's causing those feelings bother you. You don't listen when we tell you that anyway, so why are you pestering us?

One way of dealing with a married single is to be a married single yourself. Makes sense, right? You both live your own lives and make yourselves happy while enjoying some of the important benefits of being married: sex and children. I always think of NYS's OM when I think about this because he seemed so good at it. He didn't seem to mind if K went and hung out with NYS for an afternoon. He seemed perfectly happy to live his life while K lived hers and when cooperative recreational activities were available he was willing to participate. But for a lot of us, it's not so easy. The scorekeeping makes it hard. And at a certain point, our spouse's independence interferes with our singlehood. A married single wants the advantages of having a family but doesn't want to do more than our fair share of the crappy "work" part of it. Plus, if you're out having fun and being energetic and doing karate and meeting people and laughing with them...eventually you're going to find someone better than us, aren't you? And then what's your reason to stick around? Hey, we don't go out and do all that stuff! We're content to wake up, go to work, come home and watch some TV. As long as you stay out of our hair, that's all we need. If you start living an interesting life, though: 1) we may have to watch the kids more and cook more of our own meals and 2) you're going to see us as fairly boring. So yeah, if you want to go to karate once a week, we'll support that. It's only fair. There are things we want to do sometimes, too. But twice? Three times? Your life is starting to be more about karate than it is about our family, don't you think? When there are only a few things on each side of the scale to balance, the married single life is easier to balance. When our partner starts to add things to the mix, though, it's harder to balance things and we get cranky and unsettled.

So building on LFL's question about what are you standards for your marriage, I think you're in a bit of a tight spot. You can't bear the thought of only being with your kids half the time. I think you can avoid that by becoming a married single along with H. Just be civil and stay out of his hair and he'll like you. He'll be affectionate sometimes. If his "single" life meshes well with yours, you guys might even have a marriage that rises above tolerable. When he was doing all that drinking his single life was making your life miserable so that wasn't working at all. Now, things are probably better than they were then. Maybe good enough?

If you want a true marriage, though, you've got a long row to hoe. Because right now I don't think his vision of marriage matches yours. He doesn't want the emotional involvement. This is a poor analogy but it worked for me: my aunt and uncle live in College Station, Texas, and are huge Texas A&M fans. But their son went to the University of Texas in Austin (A&M's hated rival) and he lives there now. So my aunt and uncle described how they went thru sort of a process...at first they wanted A&M to beat UT just like they always had and they were bummed if they lost. Then they got to the point where they could accept it if UT won, because at least their son would be happy. Now, while they still enjoy an A&M victory, they would kind of rather see UT win because having their son happy means more to them than a victory for their football team.

When they told me that story it was nearly unfathomable that I'd ever want *my* team to lose so somebody else could be happy that their team won. And I'd guess H would see that situation similarly. I'd say a struggling "married single" relationship is when you're really upset if your team loses to your spouse's team. Maybe a fairly successful "married single" relationship is when you don't mind that your team lost because at least your spouse's team won and that made them happy. And perhaps a true marriage is when you secretly kinda hope that your team loses because you like it better when your spouse is happy than when your team wins a game. That may seem simple and obvious but it took me awhile, even post-bomb, before I could really buy into it.

I don't know what H's parents marriage was like but it doesn't seem that he sees marriage as the giving of one's self that you see it as. He appears pretty entrenched in the married single version; maybe it's all he knows. If he doesn't understand the "all in" version and what the benefits are (feeling really loved and important is a powerful thing), it will take a lot of work before he'll be willing to buy into it.

And here's one other thing I really wanted to say: he may *never*, *ever*, buy into it, Heather. One of the things I kinda worried about when I found out you'd switched forums is that maybe you were still thinking you could control this R. Like maybe if you just got some new and better ideas, you could turn this boat around. Sure, if you change yourself you'll change the other person in the R. But that doesn't mean they change into what you want or even what you need. Even if you molded yourself into exactly what he wants, that might not be what he wants. He may never be happy or satisfied. A truly successful relationship takes two people participating. End of story. One person fighting for it can keep things afloat for some time, maybe even a long time. But you can read every book and apply every theory and make yourself into exactly who you want to be but none of that means he'll ever get onboard with you. At some point he has to want to make your relationship work. Right now he's working at making your relationship what he wants.

Well. I don't know if any new ground was broken with all that. There's something else in there about the tipping point between when individual independence makes the relationship better and when individual independence means there's not much of a relationship at all. I think a key point is that we try to make ourselves individually happy but in a successful R the other person's emotional well-being is important to our individual happiness. Maybe we can thrash that stuff around later.

Good luck, Heather! I can't think of anybody who deserves success in all this more than you.