Well, another weekend has come and gone. I'm starting to really wonder in my GAL is hurting my sitch at all. One of the bigger issues in our M is the inequity in our roles and opportunities. My W has social anxiety disorder, and I have always respected her decisions with respect to dealing with this. When we had our son, W decided that she would stay home with him - and I agreed because I thought it best for our son, despite the fact that it would be more difficult for us to make ends meet, etc, and she wanted to. Well, now I'm blamed for "enabling" her. Her friend told me with a straight face that I should have pushed her to be a better person, and the fact that she's not now is because I enabled her. I responded by telling her that she was really insulting my W, that she is her own person and responsible for who she is in life. Ok, so over the years we've been through some difficult financial times, and we decided to go to one car because it would be cheaper than payments, insurance, and running costs on two cars. We decided on a car that I liked, that happened to be stick - which my W didn't know how to drive at the time, but told me she would learn. She used to ride a motorcycle with a manual transmission, so it's not a stretch to think that she could pick it up quickly. Well, she took a total of about 2 lessons and then every time I asked her if she wanted to try she turned it down. She doesn't like to drive as it is and I so, so she really has no problem letting me drive her where she needs to go. We live close to a shopping center, easily walking distance (I've done it many a time) where there are a lot of stores. There's a playground about a block away. We don't live in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, my W blames me for keeping her in a prison. She claims that she can't do anything, or go anywhere because I have designed it that way, or at the very least, I am happy that it is the case. I tell her that I would love it if she would go out more, and I support her in anything and everything that she thinks makes sense or would be beneficial to her. It seems to me that she uses this as an excuse to justify her giving in to her fear of interacting in the world. Back to the GAL point: she now resents me that I can go anywhere when I want to and she can't. I have tried tell her that I want very much for her to get out and do things, but that it is not something I can push her to do - she needs to be the driving force here (early on in the A she told me that I didn't give her the "tough love" she needs, and that she didn't think I was capable of it - to me this sounded like she wanted someone to step in an run her life for her, to solve her problems and make her proud of herself). So now I don't want to rub it into her face that I can go out while she "HAS" to stay in. We can't afford to buy another car now - she does fairly often have opportunity to borrow her mother's car for fairly long stretches, so it's not a completely hopeless situation, but I do want to be considerate and not make things worse. Oh, and something interesting that happened this weekend - I said something about being focused on myself and how I have things to work on. She replied to this by saying "I think you think that working on yourself is going to somehow make this M work, that I'm going to come back." I replied that I had to do this for me regardless of where the M was headed. She then told me that because I told her that she would be happier in our marriage if she worked on herself and her life (things I told her when she first told me about how she was realizing how unhappy she was in our M at the start of the A) she thought that I was trying to "lead by example" or something. Well, I think it's a fact that if she were to do more in her life (changing roles, etc) that was fulfilling she would be much happier in our marriage. I can't give her this, I can only support her when she chooses to do so. But this really seems to be a hangup of ours (mine because I have spent too much time thinking about what she could do to improve her life - things I don't have much, if and, control or influence over.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
