Aground
So when you've run aground, you need to try to refloat the boat. Sometimes when things are sufficiently bad, it's easier to start again, on a new footing, than to try to steer what you have to a goal that seems unattainable.I want to save my marriage, so I proposed to Mrs Zen that we should begin again. I offered her a fresh sheet, a more positive outlook and a good-faith effort to look at her in the best light possible, without bringing the accreted hostility and animosity that bad times have grown. But of course you can't just keep sailing into the sand; you need the right direction. So I asked her to promise me things that represent the direction I want: that there should be no recriminations; that she should commit to returning to England; that she should respect my privacy and that she should make more effort to take responsibility (this is a woman who won't do any exercise because I won't go for walks with her, who won't diet unless I diet with her, who works as a bookkeeper but whose eyes glaze over if I try to discuss our finances with her). In other words, I asked her to be a grownup.
These things strike me as essential to a relationship. How can one work -- at least in the long term -- if you don't have them? You cannot live with someone who is constantly whining about what you did or didn't do (and I know that I've done it too, and I know it's destructive on my part). You cannot live with someone who just doesn't care that you are withering away in a place. You cannot live with someone who thinks they have a right to spy on you, to read your mail, to try to find out every small detail of your life (and not because they care about you, not because they want to add to your enjoyment of life by sharing your interests, but because they want still more to recriminate over). And you cannot live with an adult who insists on acting like a teenager (a bit of neediness, of course, is fine, as is a lack of interest in some areas of making a home, but trust me, it's impossible to deal with someone whose answer to every bad thing they do is that it was your fault in some way).
Mrs Zen was having none of it. She wants the recriminations. I think she actually likes them. So long as she feels she is the victim, she does not care that our marriage is fucked. All she cares about is that she does not feel responsible. I understand that committing to going to England means not seeing her parents much. I know that's a big thing (although the compensation for her is that she is much fonder of my sisters than she is of her own: my sister S was practically her best friend in the UK). She knows I will never come back here once I've left. I've tried to lessen the load of that by promising her that I will pay for her to come back in the summer holidays each year, and I have tried to paint a picture of a life that will be much more enjoyable for her. To my mind, you have to think about what's best for all in this circumstance. Can she handle living in the UK? Yes. She liked it there, more than she likes living here! But I can't handle living here. I am wondering whether the truth is that she doesn't want to lose her leverage over me. I cannot easily leave her because it is so untenable for me to live on my own here. It would be much easier there. But I'd be so much less likely to want to, and her too. Her commitment would buy effort on my part. It reads horribly clinically on the page, but that is how grownups have to negotiate their lives.
And of course she does not want to promise not to read my stuff. Mrs Zen has a model of marriage in which a couple lives happily together, entirely without secrets, satisfied with each other. Maybe she didn't notice before we got married that I am unsatisfiable, restless, not wholly tamed. She feels that I went off the rails when she was pregnant with the twins. But I've never really been on them. I have never been that ordinary working Joe that is half her model marriage. And there's the rub. She wants me to promise her things too. But I am asking her to promise only things she is capable of. I am not demanding that she becomes a good housewife, an intellectual or any of the countless things I like in people but she doesn't have. I want her to try to be the best her that she can, not to aim for some ideal that she cannot reach. It's incredibly negative to judge someone against a standard they have no hope of meeting, or to hate them for not being what they cannot be. I used to be horribly bitter about my father until I realised that he had done what he could and I was hating him for not doing what he couldn't. She wants me to be a completely different person though, to promise what I can't deliver, what I would have no intention of delivering. She is saying that she wants convenient lies. She doesn't think she is; she thinks I actually could just become who I am not overnight. So she wants to read my mail to check whether I am writing to X or Y or anyone else she can readily identify as a woman. Whatever the quality of my relationship with anyone online, nearly all of my friends in this life have been women. What am I supposed to do, be eternally lonely because Mrs Zen is jealous, because she wants to have me all to herself (even though she is well aware that she is not interested in most things I'm interested in, so she cannot conceivably be enough for me. I know that she sees it as a huge failing of hers but I think that anyone who has their every need met by one person is hopelessly shallow and uninteresting; I'm not able to see how that's even possible).
So I am destined for divorce. It's a pity. I want to fix it in good faith but I can only work with what I have, and I have to accept that Mrs Zen is irredeemable. She simply does not want a working marriage. I was horrified by her reply (I wrote her an email because it's very hard to have a conversation with her about our relationship, because I will not be able to complete the first sentence before she heads it off into the weeds). I realised that she does not want peace; she wants war, so long as she is convinced that I am in the wrong. She wants bitterness, anger, upset. I understand. She feels she needs to get her head straight on all of that; I feel that we need to put it aside. Knowing how I am, I know that her way will not work. It will just drive the boat further up the beach and make it even harder to fix our marriage.
I don't look at the prospect with any joy. It won't be easy for me to maintain two households. I do not know how my children will fare with less money to support them, and more importantly, without me to take care of the things I take care of. I will have the choice of living extremely unhappily in a bedsit here or not seeing my children. (Please do not fill my comments with your ideas on how to make that choice, or how easy you think it is, or how you think I must just be exaggerating, because you don't have a fucking clue unless you live somewhere that you feel is as wrong as I feel Brisbane is for me. I wake up in the night almost in tears because I have been picturing myself living here for good, my days drearily passing until I am cremated and my ashes scattered in a memorial garden somewhere in Sunnybank or some such place. I do not claim it is rational, and others might truly love Brisbane, I don't say it's not possible, but it's how I feel deeply about it. I have tried to be positive, tried to see the good, tried to find ways to make it more bearable. But here I am, in my basement, with the curtains always drawn so that Brisbane can't get in.) I know that it will not make me happy. I will simply be unhappy in a different way. But I have no hope at all of changing that if I stay as I am. My life is so static, so empty, that I find the black dog barks nearly all the time. I can't live like that.
I wanted to be writing about my happy marriage. I do not feel it is impossible. I am capable of loving Mrs Zen. I feel it would be much better for the children if we rescued ourselves. I do not want to be writing about how unhappy she is making me. But what can I do? It's a boat for two; one man cannot row it on his own.
posted by Dr Zen @ 9:14 am
27 Comments:
I'm sorry to read all that. I hope you will find a glimmer of light from some direction soon. Perhaps Mrs Z will change her mind and come around.
Come around? Please! They can't even talk to each other, they have to write e-mails, for fuck's sake. If that's not a sign of divorce-town, I don't know what is.
Well, we can talk. We just have different things we want to talk about.
Perhaps moving out will solve four problems, and only bring three in their place. You can't go through life thinking it's destined inevitably to get bleaker.
But have the two of you tried therapy? I know a lot of it is bollocks, but it can help to clear the terrain for discussion of some sort. I ask because you're doing something in this post that couples therapists usually forbid: you spend the whole time talking about her faults, and hardly a word about your own. And yet your own faults are the only things over which you have any control.
Maybe you need to find some hard-nosed therapist to knock some sense into the pair of you.
boots sez:
When I first asked Mrs Boots to marry me, she refused. The divorce from her first marriage was just becoming final, and it had been ugly. She did not feel comfortable taking that risk again.
I was sick to death of living in California, I'd been stuck there for 20 years and simply put I'd had too much of it. So I packed my things and left. I was driving East, unsure of where I was going or what I was doing, and that was okay.
In the middle of the night I woke up in a hotel in Nevada someplace. I felt a need to call her, just to see if she was okay.
It turns out that when I disappeared she realized what life would be like alone. She had made her decision, and she'd been trying to get in touch with me by contacting those of my friends she knew. There really were no cellphones in those days.
So I went back. We married formally a bit later. Suddenly I was the father of two and the breadwinner for four. I was sick of writing, so I wrangled a job as a tech writer. It paid about half what I'd been making in programming, but there was hope of retaining a bit of sanity.
Life was difficult. I knew dickall about child raising, I'd missed the first few years and was coming into the situation cold. Two years later our youngest was born. A few months later the signs of a life-threatening illness surfaced.
The stress level throughout our child rearing years was monumental, financially and emotionally.
We got through it. Things are different now.
Mrs Boots and I have different values in life. She wants to live here in the mountains. She wants a house. There is very little that I actually want, aside from her company.
So we are here. The winters make me miserable. Sometimes we fight. When we fight, we each know where the door is. Neither has walked out yet.
We both know who we are. We know what things we cannot or will not sacrifice. We have learned those things about each other. We try to work between them.
What's my point? I'm fucked if I know. Perhaps there is a buried clue in it, but I don't know what it is.
Every person will be who they are or they will destroy themselves, that seems a basic property of life.
Your talk about recriminations and being right seem somehow familiar.
Lots of dead people have been right, being right means fuckall.
Excess wittering innit. Best hopes for you Z.
You won't/can't change, but she has too! You can't even discuss the relevant issues face to face. She is very insecure and hurt, but you refuse to do anything to alleviate her hurt, believing that to be unreasonable, yet you want to save your marriage. You just don't like your wife, you want her to change yet scream fowl when such demands are placed on you. Marriage is a series of compromises you appear not to be able to make any of your own. Your only true concern is your children and the fear of how they will develop in your absence, if that is indeed true and i strongly suspect it is, then you are going to have to make changes. The thing i can't work out is how/why you married a person who you feel is so intellectually inferior to yourself, perhaps you felt you could mould and manipulate her in to your ideal? (Subservient/ non-questioning, non-challenging, little lady) You justify all you actions and behaviour by constantly stating that you have your own failing and that you are not and have never been perfect. Its time (for the sake of your children) that you started to address your own imperfections before asking you wife to address hers. I'm sure despite all the recriminations, that she is all to aware of her own and perhaps she would be happy to try and change if your EGO could actually enable you to make a few compromises of your own.
Sometimes my wife and I communicate much better in email than in person, because together, caught up in emotions, we are both capable of driving the conversation into the weeds. Email becomes a useful tool.
But couples therapy is a tool also. Dunno if it's often bollix as SG says, I'll let you know, right.
I think Zen is saying he will accept her as she is except for the part that doesn't accept him as he is, and asks no more of her in return; but the Missus is caught up in the dynamics of power, as is all too common when a woman feels threatened by her husband's female friends.
I dunno, best of luck, that you really care says volumes.
Boots: You live in mountains in CA? Where? I can see the Sierra from here.
you might want to go off on a lone vacation for a week first.
Avalanche
Leonard Cohen
Well I stepped into an avalanche,
it covered up my soul;
when I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn, learn to serve me well.
You strike my side by accident
as you go down for your gold.
The cripple here that you clothe and feed
is neither starved nor cold;
he does not ask for your company,
not at the centre, the centre of the world.
When I am on a pedestal,
you did not raise me there.
Your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare.
I myself am the pedestal
for this ugly hump at which you stare.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn what makes me kind;
the crumbs of love that you offer me,
they're the crumbs I've left behind.
Your pain is no credential here,
it's just the shadow, shadow of my wound.
I have begun to long for you,
I who have no greed;
I have begun to ask for you,
I who have no need.
You say you've gone away from me,
but I can feel you when you breathe.
Do not dress in those rags for me,
I know you are not poor;
you don't love me quite so fiercely now
when you know that you are not sure,
it is your turn, beloved,
it is your flesh that I wear.
Grapes, I have written many posts about my failings. This one was about her reaction to my offer, not about me. And whether I need a therapist or not, the roadblock is Mrs Zen, not me.
anonymous, I have not asked her to "change". I want her to manage the outcomes of who she is, not become a different person. In return, I offer to do the same. She is not in the least aware of her faults, dude. She thinks they're all my fault. And I am willing to compromise. I didn't just issue a list of demands. It's just none of your concern what I'm giving. And dude, I don't think in terms of intellectual "inferiors". People are different, interested in different things, differently motivated. They are not on different rungs of the same ladder. Sometimes, they're not on the same ladder at all.
zero, I went to China for three weeks last year.
efflux, it's a lovely song, but a curious choice. Who knows how your mind works!
don, you are spot on. I'm not asking Mrs Zen to change, only to manage who she is. Obviously, I offer to do the same. It's not so much the dynamics of power, as a problem she has with responsibility. I'm offering her work, a shared burden. This is why anonymous and grapes are so far off the mark. I am not criticising her faults, or ignoring mine. To the contrary, I'm saying I will ignore them so that we can move on. I'm not asking her to ignore mine, just not to recriminate endlessly, because it's fucking annoying every time we have a conversation to hear "yeah, but you did x three years ago" and be left saying "yeah, but how the fuck does that buy the children shoes?"
Sober up and read your second paragraph.
You are patronising and condesending, you are making demands and offering nothing in return.
"I offered her a fresh sheet, a more positive outlook and a good-faith effort to look at her in the best light possible"
Thats like a slap in the face!
You need a reality check.
I think you both have borderline personality disorders.
And I think no one is ever going to pay you to work as a psychologist, dude.
"I'm not asking Mrs Zen to change"
You are asking her to change her expectations of what her husband should be, and that is much harder to accomplish than learning to cook.
"yeah, but you did x three years ago"
If what you did three years ago was fuck around on her while she was pregnant with your twins, it's bound to come up all the time until she either forgives you or leaves you, and the latter scenario is much more likely.
Dude, her expectations are fucked. They're not in touch with reality. She's perfectly capable of changing them.
And dude, yes, if that was what I'd done, she should take that option.
Is it like clueless fuck hour or am I asking for it by allowing comments on this subject?
"And I think no one is ever going to pay you to work as a psychologist."
You don't need a psychologist you need a psychiatrist with lots of meds.
If you truly want to save your marriage you have to do everything she demands of you. Thats the only way. Then in time you can negotiate with her and then slowly regain some of what you have now. She's never going to accept your terms. Its hers or nothing. Unless you can get an arbitrator but i think you won't enjoy hearing what they have to say. You also of course need marriage councilling.
I was right. It's fuckwit hour.
"If you truly want to save your marriage you have to do everything she demands of you."
That may be how your marriage works, dude, but I'm just not that into it to need to do that.
"I was right. It's fuckwit hour."
Welcome, captain. Is it all aboard, then?
Aye, lad. If you think you're going to get an argument from me over whether I'm a fuckwit, you can think again. I'm just smart enough not to kid myself that I'm not one.
;-)
I'm thinking supportive thoughts.
Much appreciated, monkeybrain, and good to know that you're still around.
There are three people that have been largely forgotten about in this avalanche of comments, zen, your kids. I'm not accusing you of forgetting them, but the issue has got side-tracked in to is it your fault, is it her fault, why did you do this or that three/six/twenty years ago?
SG is spot on that relationship counselling might help - that's relationship counselling, not therapy for you as an individual. Mrs zen might be resisant to that, or she might not be, but would she be less resistant to talking to Relate or whatever the Oz equivalent is about co-parenting, how to do that effectively if/when you separate? The emphasis is external and a clearly shared responsibility, so it may be less threatening to her (and to you, I sense some resistance from you), and it might be a good introduction to the process that could take you on to a place where you can mend your marriage if that's what y ou both decide you want.
Whatever you do, give a great deal of thought and commitment to how you are going to parent your children- both of you. I might intrude into your mailbox with further thoughts,
john
"If you truly want to save your marriage you have to do everything she demands of you."
That may be how your marriage works, dude, but I'm just not that into it to need to do that.
No that's not how my marriage works, because i have a marriage that "does" work yours doesn't, in fact right now you don't have a marriage. It needs fixing and going by the way your wife appear to be, the only way to fix it is for you to give in. But your EGO and narcissistic leanings will not allow it. You complain about fuckwit comments, do you believe your situation is that unique that others have not seen (lived) it all before. Its you that's the fuckwit! Right now you are doing what you are accusing your wife of doing, you are not prepared to compromise and you are putting all the blame on her and making impossible demands. FFS what do you think this sounds like? *effort to look at her in the best light possible* It makes her sound like a turd.
john, my comment was considering the kids, among other things.
and it seems to me that Zen is perfectly capable of self-reflection and mutual relationship tweaking if he so desires.
one wonders what the success rate is for couples' therapy. i suppose the willingness to subject onself to it at all is indicative of some sort of level of fixability on its own.
I used to be horribly bitter about my father until I realised that he had done what he could and I was hating him for not doing what he couldn't.
This stood out to me, perhaps because I can identify with it so clearly. Very nicely said, and an angle I hadn't considered.
On the other note, I wish you the best with the Mrs. Whether you guys stay or split, there's still a lot to go through, and I hope you guys find the clarity you need to make it work.
Zen, I'm sorry to hear this.
For what little it's worth -- and that's very little, I'm afraid -- it seems to me that expectations of change in the other partner are usually unrealistic. You can only change yourself -- not just your treatment of your wife, but your reaction to her treatment of you -- and hope that whatever change you can effect, plus time and an eventual reduction in economic, emotional, and parental stress, will let the marriage heal.
Which isn't really fair, particularly when the other partner won't meet you halfway -- but which can nevertheless pay off in the long term, since marriages so often recover if the partners can make it through the tough times.
That might mean sacrifcing some of your privacy, however unjust that may be, to assuage your wife's concerns. It might mean putting up with some nagging, finding a way to negate your response to it.
As I said, probably worthless, but what the hey.
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