(I've been trying to get my wife to go for relationship counselling for nearly 10 months, though she refuses because she doesn't want several painful personal issues between us dragged up).Reads to me like somebody who has given up on her marriage. Work stress is tough, of course, but the fact that she'll accept all your sympathy but refuse your affection, to me, doesn't speak well. That's really unfair.
When a relationship gets subsumed in negativity, it's not only theposted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:20 PM on June 24, 2012 [3 favorites]
couple's present and future life together that are put at risk. Their past
is in danger, too. When I interview couples, I usually ask about the
history of their marriage. I have found over and over that couples
who are deeply entrenched in a negative view of their spouse and
their marriage often rewrite their past. When I ask them about their
early courtship, their wedding, their first year together, I can predict
their chances of divorce, even if I'm not privy to their current feelings.
Most couples enter marriage with high hopes and great
expectations. In a happy marriage couples tend to look back on their
early days fondly. Even if the wedding didn't go off perfectly, they
tend to remember the highlights rather than the low points. The same
goes for each other. They remember how positive they felt early on,
how excited they were when they met, and how much admiration
they had for each other. When they talk about the tough times they've
had, they glorify the struggles they've been through, drawing
strength from the adversity they weathered together.
But when a marriage is not going well, history gets rewritten for
the worse. Now she recalls that he was thirty minutes late getting
to the ceremony. Or he focuses on all that time she spent talking to his
best man at the rehearsal dinner--or "flirting" with his friend, as it
seems to him now. Another sad sign is when you find the past
difficult to remember--it has become so unimportant or painful that
you've let it fade away.
Hi everyone, thank you so much for the responses so far. I'll address the oft-raised and general points first:posted by mathowie at 12:17 PM on June 26, 2012
- I realise I was being unfair, and thank you for calling me on it.*
- Thank you, too, for calling me on the guilty party / martyrdom complex. This was the result of something my wife said (along the lines of "you're the bastard that's breaking my heart" and I guess it stuck in my head as I was writing the post).
- Re: my wife's job. As bquarters guessed, she's a teacher. And whilst I do view the summer break (currently 4 weeks away) as a time where we get to decompress and iron out all the kinks from the last year of stress and work, it's occurred to me that this cycle - highly stressed term-times, working breaks at Christmas and Easter, decompress over summer - has continued for three or four years now. My wife readily calls herself a workaholic and will work until one or two in the morning (I usually stay up with her at her request; if I don't, she'll frequently forget to come to bed and I'll find her curled up on the sofa in the morning).
- There's no option for her to take part-time hours at this stage in her career, nor does she want to. She does want to move to another place of employment, but she's also working on getting a promotion, so whether her effective working hours would change is up for debate.
- I, too, strongly suspect that my wife is depressed, and have done so for a while. I've been trying to get her to see her GP since the start of this year, but with no success (during a similar depression last year where she admitted to thinking about letting the car drift off the road at high speed because she was bored her GP told her it would "blow over". As you can guess, this hasn't inclined her to go back about this issue). I can't force her to go and see anyone about this, so I'm a bit stumped here.
- We have no children.
- A trial separation is not an option at the moment. I could afford to move out, but I couldn't afford to do that and contribute to the rent on hour current home. My wife couldn't afford this home or any nearby alternatives on her own. We do have some apart-time coming up, and also a two week vacation in a place completely out of reach of the internet and, indeed, mobile phone service. I'm hoping that this will give us some time to reconnect.
Specific answers now:
- @DarlingBri: My wife and I get along very well most of the time. We started out as good friends and have remained that way for our entire time together. The "really good" comment was a reference to "Too Good to Leave..." in which the author points out that if, at its best, your "really good" times are poisoned by arguments and suchlike, then they're not "really good." That's the criteria I'm particularly responding to - we've had wonderful times together and still rowed horribly and painfully almost every day. Each day of our honeymoon, for example, had wonderfully romantic moments, but also had massive rows. I have spent over ten years thinking this was normal, and I'm now starting to come to the conclusion that maybe it isn't.
- @Elysium, @AugustWest: I've not already decided. I'm very confused right now, because there is a huge temptation to leave, but I'm well aware that that's the "easy" thing to do. I don't think it's fair to either my wife or my marriage for me to give up without trying. I am concerned that without my wife joining me in counselling, as @Llama points out, I may be on to a non-starter.
- @SidheDevil: I don't trust my own rationality because I'm in the thick of it all - I can't see the forest for the trees, and whilst the book seems to point in a given direction, I don't know how I actually feel about that. I intend to re-read the book and try and nail down some more concrete answers to some of the questions (I have lots of notes from the first reading).
- @DarlingBri and @benbenson: When I say "no real sex" I mean that we have had occasional penetrative sex, but not regularly, except for in bursts of a week or so whilst on vacation. As I stated in my original post, most of our sex life is of the me-bringing-my-wife-to-orgasm variety.
Addendum:
Shortly after I submitted this question my wife and I had a huge row (though quietly, because we were staying at a friend's house for a party, and it was late). She couldn't sleep, convinced I was about to walk out on her, and was researching places to live - none of which she could afford - on her iPod. She made basically the same point that @AugustWest and @Elysium made above: that I was using counselling as a way to get someone else to tell me to leave (and, later, that she was afraid that that's what a counsellor would do). When I reassured her that I wasn't about to walk out, that I want to try to work this out, she pretty much jumped me and we ended up having make-up sex for the first time in nearly a year. This has confused matters more; I'm glad that we're on intimate terms again, but I don't want to lead her on - I'm still very muddled about our whole relationship at the moment and I understand perfectly, in light of this thread, why she didn't want to be on intimate terms with me in the first place. I don't want to push her away and cause yet more hurt. And my first counselling appointment is still over a week away, so navigating through this time is getting ever trickier.
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Not sure why you are taking the martyr role "of being the bastard in this". At the moment your marriage is broken and it doesn't seem to be one particular person's fault. It just seems like you presently have more time, energy and motivation to address the issue.
I would really try to get her to go to counselling with you, talk over term break time and decide what's going to happen re her work hours, stress level and your marriage in general.
posted by bquarters at 7:22 AM on June 24, 2012