[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
I think her point was that marriages aren’t always as they appear to outsiders. Some couples that don’t appear from the outside to get along well actually do, and some that appear to get along really well don’t.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. Although I didn’t say the second part, but I have an example of that, as well: my parents had a fairly miserable marriage for 14 years and divorced, and in that time period had exactly 2 fights. One was in private; I was the only witness (age 6). From the outside, they had an idyllic marriage; from the inside, it was horrendous, apparently. Not that they fought all the time - but because they didn’t. They were both quiet seethers who couldn’t communicate to save their lives (or their marriage). Everyone who knew them was completely caught off guard when they announced they were divorcing, because they “got along” so well.
My marriage looks rocky, but is as strong as any I know; my parents’ marriage looked solid, but was hollow and friable. From the outside of a relationship, you just don’t know.
See, one of the questions was something like:
“When is sex best?
a.- In the morning
b.- At night
c.- After a fight
d.- When the kids are out”
And option C is my maternal grandparents. Their two surviving daughters (the eldest died at 3yo) grew up seeing fights at every meal any time he was home (he was a traveling salesman), but not knowing about the chocolates (grandma would scarf them up) and make-up sex. The constant fights contributed a lot to making their childhoods and teenage years hell and to my aunt’s first “flee home” marriage.
They’ve been married 70 years, still fighting any time both are awake, and were still having sex at ages most people would find unbelievables.
[QUOTE=Squarebubble1]
Question: What happens when the kids are grown and out of the house? Seems to me that it’s (at best) a temporary fix…
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What’s to guarentee that the couple with the perfect relationship at the moment of conception still like each other 20 years later?
Picking up my broad brush for a moment, many people get divorced when the kids are grown and out of the house. This timing is common for two sets of parents–those who knew they had a crappy marriage but hung on for the sake of the kids, and those who didn’t think they had a crappy marriage, but when the kids were gone really looked at each other, and decided they had nothing left between them but the partnership for the kids.
Speaking from experience, it could be that the relationship didn’t go to hell until after the kids came along, due mostly to disagreements on how to raise said children.
People are not rational in general. I know more than one couple that couldn’t get along while dating and so decided to get married (the marriages are thusfar what one would predict in such a case - miserable). People make all sorts of life decisions for reasons that make no apparent sense.
Sometimes I think in cases such as the OP, the woman is getting her identity and vaildation from being a Mommy. Her role as a wife has taken a back seat to being a mother. Therefore if she is unhappy with her marriage, she can expand her mother role and let the marriage finish crumbling while she’s busy driving the soccer van.
In the interest of not being sexist, this could happen for the husband, also, but I see it less often.
[QUOTE=mnemosyne]
I know a few people (mostly young women, 20ish) who still hold a fantasy idea of what marriage is. For them, they want to be married, and they convince themselves they are in love with the first guy that shows any interest.
So they marry young, and things go to hell once they realise that they actually have to spend time with this person, and it isn’t about the dream dress and reception anymore. For some of these, the “I want to be married” craziness is strongly accompanied by “and have kids!”, so having kids seems like it’s part of the fantasy as well, and if they don’t have kids, then that’s why everything is going wrong. So they pop out a child or two, always blaming their relationship problems on things like “well the kids are still young, and we are always tired, so that’s why we yell at each other”.
Sooner or later many of them get a clue and get divorced. Either that or they graduate from school, get a job, get a sense of the “real world” and their desperate “need” to get married seems to fade as new ideas and experiences get introduced into their lives.
Ok, so that’s a generalization, but it does describe fairly well the lives of at least 2 people I know, and I’ve heard my sister say stupid stuff like “I want to get married!” a month into a relationship with a lying drunk.
[/QUOTE]
Makes sense to me - I see that in at least 75% of the couples I know…sad.
[QUOTE=red_awning]
Let me add to this one “Why do people who live like trash and fight and have too many kids and can’t afford to make ends meet…get a puppy or a cat?”
A woman I know is on the brink of divorce has the rest of us holding our breath waiting for the end and she’s constantly crying about how its not going to work and how she’s trapped…
then she shows up with the "We’re trying to have another baby " crap.
My opinion? Because they’re selfish.
[/QUOTE]
Couldn’t have said it better - not to mention that more often than not, most of these women end up on my dime via direct Welfare and/or the plethora of government handouts they get for themselves and the kids.
[QUOTE=Solfy]
In the interest of not being sexist, this could happen for the husband, also, but I see it less often.
[/QUOTE]
The traditional role for the father is that of breadwinner. Some of them delve more deeply into that, by spending more time at the office and stuff like that. I think that’s more common than getting their identity and validation from being a Daddy.
[QUOTE=WVmom]
Speaking from experience, it could be that the relationship didn’t go to hell until after the kids came along, due mostly to disagreements on how to raise said children.
[/QUOTE]
So why didn’t the couple discuss this, say, before they even had kid #1?
[QUOTE=NightRabbit]
I never understood it myself. One friend of mine, married with two kids, and at the edge of divorce, both partners cheating on one another, recently revealed to me that his wife had aborted what would have been their third child just a few months beforehand. He was very upset and emotional about it. This is the same one who told me that getting married was the biggest mistake of his life. I thought, “huh??? then why would you WANT to have another kid with this woman??” I didn’t ask him about this b/c it would have been insensitive. But seriously.
[/QUOTE]
He might have been upset because his wife terminated the life of a child.
[QUOTE=Squarebubble1]
So why didn’t the couple discuss this, say, before they even had kid #1?
[/QUOTE]
Assumptions. Even if there hasn’t been a case of “horny and no more condoms left,” sometimes people think that they mean the same when they use the same words, when they actually don’t. Maybe both had said they’d want to send the children to a Catholic school - but one meant the co-ed Jesuits in town and the other meant single-gender Opus Dei boarding schools (I’ve had at least one classmate whose parents went through that fight re. the fistborn).
Before you have kids, it’s hard to know everything you might disagree about. I think we all know that one ought to discuss things like religion and what kind of schools you want your kid to attend (although, as mentioned, the conversation might not be as detailed as one would hope - plus, people have been known to change their minds about such things), but it’s really the day-to-day stuff that wears down a marriage. Should the kid be forced to wear pajamas to bed if he doesn’t want to? Is Friday “the weekend” if video games are allowed only on the weekend? Does a Fruit Roll Up count as “healthy” when preparing lunches? Is it okay to wear the fancy Christmas dress just for hanging around the house in March? (That one came up for us yesterday. I said, as you might expect, Why not? My husband took a little longer to come around with a rationalization he could accept - “Well, I guess since she’ll outgrow it before the next dress-up family occasion, it’s okay…” It wasn’t an argument, but it could have gone that way if we weren’t both in a good mood.)
These things might seem petty, but they add up. And they’re more likely, IMHO, to wear down a couple than the big issues you might foresee and forestall.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I think there’s another possibility: you’re deciding what “don’t get along” means. My husband and I quite often don’t get along. We communicate very differently, he’s short tempered, I’m long suffering, he’s an anal-retentive bitch and I’m a slob. We bicker a lot and rarely have sex. And yet it’s the best relationship I’ve ever had. Despite our surface “don’t get along”, inside this relationship, where you don’t get to see, we get along great. We’re aware of our foibles and our incompatibilities and we’re working on them together. We love each other and support each other and we’re growing as people together.
Having a daughter (intentionally) was another step on that path growing together. We didn’t have her to “save our marriage”. We had her to add to our family - this group of imperfect people growing together. We needed another catalyst in this great enzymatic reaction known as Life, and she was it.
I think another reason why people have kids in a relationship which perhaps even they themselves consider rocky is that it’s something to do. It’s a distraction, and it’s a joy, in a life that might not be so joyful. Even when we’re going through a rough spot, she makes us laugh together. Even if we got stuck in that rough spot forever, she would bring joy into our lives - and given a joyless marriage, who wouldn’t want to bring joy into the house?
[/QUOTE]
This is the most misguided and depressing thing I’ve ever read on this board, and that’s saying quite a bit.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Ah, I take it you’ve not had the pleasure of reading posts by the poster formerly known as **VC03 **then?
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Knock it off. If you want to snark, take it to the Pit.
[QUOTE=Squarebubble1]
So why didn’t the couple discuss this, say, before they even had kid #1?
[/QUOTE]
Even if you’ve already discussed it, kids add a huge amount of stress to a marriage. Hell, in the two years since our son was born (and we have only the one) I’ve argued more with my husband than I have during the previous five years we were together.
When he was tiny, most of it was sleep deprivation. Now that he’s older, our disagreements are usually related to time (as in we have no personal time, with each other or by ourselves), the way we respond to certain things (do we even react when he shrieks for no reason or not?) and discipline (what do we do if he deliberately breaks something, hits someone, etc.?).
We discussed all this first, sometimes in nauseating detail, but as noted earlier, nothing can prepare you for the reality of having a kid. Of course, I think we’re very lucky. All these things mount up to occasional irritations now because we worked through them, but when our son was first born I thought I’d go batshit crazy from the lack of personal space alone. Raising kids is really hard, even if you agree on everything. If you find out later than you don’t, it can make things much, much harder. And you couldn’t possible think of every scenario before they’re born since every one is different and responds differently to certain stimulus.