Ha! Sometimes it feels like blackmail. You are absolutely correct, of course. I can make more. However, I’ve supported him (and more recently, his children and his mother) for a while now; he’s no longer employable (biting my tongue here), so yes, a redistribution of marital assets that would leave me with zip point doo dah, plus I’d have to pay a metric buttload of spousal support.
I’m 10 - fuck, make that 9 years from retirement. My current options are:
1.) Bite the bullet and DTMFA and, well, work until I’m 85 to recover my assets
2.) Stay with him and live comfortably, if unhappily
In summary, I’m just too mean to pay him to go away.
For some people, I think they think it’s almost rude to do anything but bitch in their small talk, like if they aren’t bitching, they are bragging/gloating/being selfish. For other people, I think they’ve lost track of what “normal” is like–they can’t imagine life any different and they truly do not realize how unhappy they are or how much they bitch.
I finally had to tell a woman at work that it’s uncomfortable for me to be around her husband because all she’s done for 7 years now is bitch about how he’s thoughtless and incompetent and unreliable. When I am around him, I feel so awkward because I’ve heard so much about him that’s none of my business and which may or may not be true/blown out of proportion.
I avoid social situations with groups of women for much this reason. Too often one women starts bitching about her man and everyone else joins in. Women with good relationships who love their partners wind up bitching about them just so they can fit in or join the conversation. Ugh.
I know exactly what you mean, and I think some women learn early that that is really how you talk to other women, so all their conversations stay like this. Worst of all, it helps convince them that their terrible is normal and that there is no point in changing because all relationships suck.
In this particular case, we work together and she really is a pretty good friend in other ways. But the marital epic is draining.
And also, telling your spouse/partner SO about the good stuff is easy to do and therefore doesn’t require another outlet.
My husband has a few behaviors that bother me. I may have mentioned them already once or twice to him, but beyond that it becomes nagging and I don’t want to do that. If I complain to someone who actually knows him there’s a chance it will get back to him. Here I may freely vent my spleen about the wet towels left on my side of the bed (his closet’s on that side, it isn’t malicious, he’s just ALWAYS in a rush, but it still makes my side of the bed cold and damp).
Another contributing factor is that “Today my husband scraped the ice off my car and made me tea before I even woke up.” isn’t an interesting thread.
My best friend betrayed me, disobeyed her mother, and dumped a very nice guy in order to date my crush. Almost immediately the relationship devolved into a mutually verbally- and physically-abusive trainwreck, but she stayed with him for almost four years. Their relationship was legendary in our class-- they shared classes, and if they were fighting (they usually were), they’d glare at each other across the room and have silent arguments, mouthing words and shooting nasty looks and making violent hand gestures, not even bothering to conceal it from other students or the teacher. Everyone knew and whispered about them. It was quite a fall from grace for her; she’d been a teachers’ pet for years and well-liked because she was cute and friendly and smart.
I sometimes wondered if she stayed in part because she’d lost so much as a result of that relationship. I dropped her as a friend. She used to be close to her mom, but their relationship suffered because she’d often stay out late and lie about her whereabouts to be with him. Her ex-boyfriend was devastated, and I don’t think they ever spoke again. Her grades fell, probably from the stress and distraction of the relationship, and her reputation suffered as well. Physically, she was almost constantly bruised and aching, and she looked older and tired all the time. I think maybe she felt that if she dumped her boyfriend, then she would have lost what she’d lost for nothing, and she would truly have nothing left.
See, I don’t get that. I know some people who are or were in very unhealthy relationships. One friend was just completely miserable and was getting worse and worse because his wife has some psychological issues and refused to get help.
Really? When I tied the knot I didn’t see anything in the vows about “if I consider you haven’t kept your part of the bargain, I don’t have to keep mine”.
Fortunately, despite any imperfections in the **Malacandra **household, things aren’t as bad as all that.
I *totally *get that. That’s sort of the *point *of a vow.
I’m not saying that it’s necessarily the “right” way to see it (please see my above post), but I wasn’t even married, and still, just having promised to stay was enough to keep me there. I’m only as good as my word, after all.
And we had none of the complications common to long-term relationships. No kids, no joint finances, we didn’t even live together! I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been to end it if we had.
I’m a huge proponent of DTMFA when DTMFAing is a viable option, but I recognize that it’s not really that easy for most people. Money, kids, fear of change or being alone, all have been mentioned here as though they’re ridiculous reasons to stay together. They’re not. Divorce is messy and expensive. For a man, it almost always alters his relationship with his kids in some unfortunate ways. And the idea of starting over romantically is, I imagine, much more daunting at 50 than at 30.
All that said, I think it’s usually worth it, if you’re really unhappy. What finally turned it around for me was realizing one day that I wasn’t doing either of us any favors by staying. Staying with someone you don’t love not only makes you miserable, it deprives them of the chance to find someone who DOES love them.
I know a married couple who make me uncomfortable to be around them. The disdain she has for her husband is palpable, which is almost understandable given the way he treats her children. (He’s quite the asshole and will try to start arguments for no reason except his own gratification.)
The only reason I can think of that she would stay with him is because to leave and divorce would be admitting failure. Also, like Dr. Woo, their financial lives are so intertwined that they’d both be losing a lot.
Ugh indeed. About 18 months ago, I had a truly broken heart and 3 girlfriends came to visit me and take me out for the day. We went to a museum and then to a pub for lunch. Talk came round to their partners, and they ALL started moaning about them, including such gems as:
“X says he never wants to get married, but I do, so I’ll change his mind”
(Um, if you’re not gonna change *your *mind, he’s not gonna change his).
I was furious, because I felt that the relationship I lost was so much better, had so much more love, humour, respect, than any of theirs, and still he ended it, and my friends still had theirs, and I was alone, and these *bitches *were sitting there bitching!
So I dealt with it in a very mature fashion - by becoming a snidey, passive-aggressive, manipulative horrible cow for the rest of the day and absolutely laying in to them later on the phone to my brother, who talked at least some sense in to me. But not much because I still think I’m right and most of my behaviour was justified
I try to avoid conversations with groups of women bitching about their spouses/partners. I end up wanting to ask them the obvious question of why they’re there if it’s all that bad, and whether or not they feel even the slightest bit disloyal to him by discussing intimate details about him that way with people that know him. It also makes me uncomfortable to be around the men because I know far more about them than I ever wanted to or that they would want me to.
It’s also annoying to be pushed to complain about something and I don’t have any complaints about him. His boots leave scuff marks on the floor and he gets fingerprints on the walls - that’s all I can think of. It takes 2 minutes to wipe them off again. This is not the kind of complaint that makes for bonding with unhappy women.
Sounds a lot like the ‘I’m so fat’ conversations of yore (yore being high school). I didn’t take part then and I wouldn’t take part now. Not that I’ve ever been in the midst of that kind of conversation. Not once. Certainly my girlfriends in relationships have problems, and if one of us has had a fight with the SO there may a little blowing off steam, but most of us are pretty realistic.
My grandparents have an active-agressive relationship: no beating, but hearing them talk to each other is like having someone use an Acme “Scape Special” File on your ears.
Once when my mother pointed out that all Grandma would have needed to do in order to get rid of him is not get married the second time (1), Grandma looked at Mom like Mom was growing horns out of her eyeballs and said “and miss the chance to make him miserable?”
(1) they got married shortly before the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. A lot of marriage papers from that period got lost/destroyed, there were also lots of very-short marriages, often with no paperwork involved (Gramps reports “8 hour marriages:” get married by the sergeant or the union’s representative late at night, get divorced by the same guy in the morning; apparently this was enough to satisfy the lady’s need to be “a good girl,” although it was clear from the start and condition of the marriage that they would divorce in the morning), many people who “went for tobacco” and never came back (either because a bullet found them, or because they didn’t want to come back). So people were told, “if you got married and don’t know where your papers are, just come on in and do it again so we have the paperwork straight,” and my grandparents were among the couples who did this. By that time they had already established their pattern of “can’t live together, can’t stay apart.”
A friend of mine was sitting in his living room and bullets started going through his door,window frame and and the side of his house. He called the cops and a guy living down the street perpendicular to his home was chasing his wife down the street shooting at her with a rifle. The cops caught him .
Two days later the wife came over and begged him not to press charges because he really didn’t mean it. So we all have different thresholds of what we will accept. Most would find that a bit over the top.
Well what’s the point of vowing if people get to break it without real repercussions? “Hey, I said I’d love and cherish you but I have no intention of actually carrying it out; now you’re stuck with me!” Forget that. I told my husband straight out that if he ever treated me the way his father treats his mother, I was gone. (Fortunately, I didn’t even need to finish the sentence because he and several siblings grew up in hellish childhoods under their father’s abuse; he understood.)
Wow. I’m really sorry to hear that. I suppose in your situation it would be really hard to DTMFA.
and absolutely laying in to them later on the phone to my brother, who talked at least some sense in to me. But not much because I still think I’m right and most of my behaviour was justified 