I understand what you are talking about and I genuinely empathize with you. Having a child in the Northeast and two working parents is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. People differ in their opinions, but I truly believe it gets a whole lot easier as the kids get older. Parenthood is a cruel game. It starts off on the highest difficultly setting and then goes down after that. I am pretty sure the game designer screwed it up.
I don’t want to deal with constant life support but I can do discipline and fun easily for older kids. Teenagers have a bad reputation but I can deal with them. They won’t die if I need to leave them alone for a couple of hours.
A two year old is cute but useless from a practical standpoint but a 9 year old can clean their own room if you give them a dollar. I love kids in general but I could never withstand the strain of raising and paying for a new one again in this environment.
Just by the by, since the subject has kind of been brought up, I have already resolved that, if I ever get remarried, it will not be to a woman who has minor children. Which has become less of a problem for me now, as I have begun to reach an age where it’s reasonable for age-appropriate women to have grown kids. I just gotta fix all the other things that would make me a bad prospective husband, and I’m good to go!
But… again, that’s not a problem with the institution of step-parenting; that’s me acknowledging my own shortcomings. I’m not as good a man as my dad is, and I know that I don’t have in my heart what it requires to be able to take another man’s seed, and raise them as if they were my own. My dad has that. There’s not a doubt in my mind that I don’t have it.
We have a Kanban board in our house. Seriously. And whiteboards all over the place.
We have not moved to two week sprints and developing stories. Yet. I suspect that particular process improvement to arrive within my marriage the minute my husband can figure out how to communicate that way without watching my eyes roll over like a slot machine.
Over the years, I’ve encountered a few women who believe that any woman who says she is happily married and her husband is a good father are either lying or in denial. Interestingly, all of them were older women in long-term marriages, albeit not happy ones.
In one case I’m thinking of, believe me, it wasn’t all his fault, and in the other, she believed that her very obviously gay husband had molested their daughters even though the daughters themselves denied it. :eek: This woman had grown up in a time and place where, if a girl had a boyfriend when she graduated form high school, they got married whether they wanted to or not. I mean, if you’re THAT unhappy, your marriage is NOT worth saving. I found out a while back that the second one died a few years ago, and her survivors included her husband of 56 years. Go figure; that’s a long time to be that miserable.
Children are a deal-breaker for my sister, but it’s not because of the kids; it’s the prospect of having to deal with the ex and her family, or her family if he’s a widower.
To me my spouse is my best friend by default, the one person I want to do most everything with. The term best friend is so juvenile it is foreign to me as an adult (way) over 20 something. I have my wife and then I have my friends, none of the friends would I place above the others. If I want to fish I call Craig and/or Dave, hunting would be Paul, golfing would be Ben, Scott and/or Mike etc…
I also find it odd that someone would be shocked that best friend spouses get divorced or are currently unhappy. My best friend from age 5 to 10 or so, my group of best friends from age 10 to about 15, my high school best friends and my college best friends are all different people and we have long gone our separate ways. We did not always get along. So why wouldn’t some spouses who were once best friends also find that they have a need to go their separate ways?
That’s nothing. At 18 months, my son was already pretending to talk on a cell phone and giving his Fisher Price Little People what appears to be performance reviews (which I can only assume were negative since he then fed them to his toy hippo).
Another interesting hypothesis to test would be whether people with happy marriages are more or less likely to be overly positive about the ‘normal’ level of marital happiness than people with bad or failed marriages are to be overly negative about the ‘normal’ level of marital happiness.
I tend to think (no scientific evidence) it’s biased on net in the direction of being overly negative. People with happy marriages probably have less tendency to project their own situation onto what’s ‘normal’ because more likely to feel their own marital happiness distinguishes them from others. OTOH it’s clear IMO that people with unhappy experiences would like to think this is the normal state of things.
But I really don’t know exactly what’s ‘normal’ or how common very happy or unhappy marital situations are. Flux in societal norms is part of the reason. As has been mentioned, people of older generations still around or remembered might have stayed in unhappy marriages people today would not. OTOH people now might not have enough commitment to repair salvageable marriages. Also one theory of family breakdown below the upper middle class (where marriages succeed at a significantly higher rate) is that today’s less secure employment makes it more difficult than it was. Some feel the welfare state has a similar effect, making marriage less economically viable further down the economic scale. Happy compared to what? Economics aren’t irrelevant to this.
