Every marry someone and realize they are completely different than who you thought they were?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How long did you know each other before you married.. A lot of times people have conversations, but just tell the other what they want to hear or we only hear what we want to hear early on.

Also, sometimes things and circumstances change. For example my 25-year-old self wanted 6 kids now I'm good with one. 25-year-old me fully believed she wanted 6 kids and said so.

And how old were you when you met and when you married?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How old were you when you married him? I am asking because sometimes when women wait until their 30s they become desperate because they are prioritizing marriage and children and in the process don’t always pay attention to the deep character flaws of their future husbands….

I think either side of the spectrum can be problematic - if you're too young you might not know who you really are or who you want to be and I guess if you're too old you're ignoring red flags out of desperation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A few possibilities:

1) He lied
2) He doesn't know himself
3) You didn't see/hear things you didn't want to
4) Some combination of the above

5) We all change
6) Human nature: we grow tired of things we used to tolerate;
7) An annoying grain of sand can grow into a giant, intolerable pearl.

[Anonymous]

B/c for most people you are only seeing the highlight reel. You get the full picture once you are around them 24/7/365. That's why you need to spend a lot of time dating under various conditions to try to get closest assessment of who they really are and what you are getting into.

[Anonymous]

After 24 years, I've seen my DH go from fun-loving, spontaneous, and flexible, to anxious, rigid, and controlling.

Great father to young kids, to a not-great father to teens and young adults (see "anxious, rigid, and controlling").

The first 15 years were amazing. The last 9 years have gone downhill and now teetering on a cliff.

[Anonymous]

This sounds vaugely trolling. Looking for more novel ideas, Op?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:After 24 years, I've seen my DH go from fun-loving, spontaneous, and flexible, to anxious, rigid, and controlling.

Great father to young kids, to a not-great father to teens and young adults (see "anxious, rigid, and controlling").

The first 15 years were amazing. The last 9 years have gone downhill and now teetering on a cliff.

Agree. I think a lot of this comes with age. Some people just get more rigid as they get older

[Anonymous]

Nope. We lived together for a year or two before we got married, so no surprises.

That said, people do change over the years. So it isn’t always a bed of roses even if you know each other well and are very compatible to start with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:After 24 years, I've seen my DH go from fun-loving, spontaneous, and flexible, to anxious, rigid, and controlling.

Great father to young kids, to a not-great father to teens and young adults (see "anxious, rigid, and controlling").

The first 15 years were amazing. The last 9 years have gone downhill and now teetering on a cliff.

Similar. DW went from fun, cool, and breezy to humorless, cold, nag. I think she really enjoyed being a mom to young kids, but she reacted as if their natural teen rebellion was some kind of betrayal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This happened to me. DH traveled a ton for work and we had met during the intensely structured time while we were earning our professional degrees, so that provided some cover for what was actually going on. In hindsight there were signs here and there that made sense in the context of his lifestyle so I dismissed them. We also didn't spend a ton of time with his extended family while dating but that also seemed normal during that phase of our life.

Anyway, after we married DH became almost immediately different and once we had our child he was completely different than the person he had presented to me. I actually begged him to go to a neurologist because I thought he had a brain tumor or early dementia.

It turns out that he had previously undiagnosed ADHD and high-functioning autism. The coping mechanisms and adaptations he had relied on fell apart once he had the responsibility and challenges of a new baby. It was so ugly. He threw terrible tantrums over really basic things and would go into shutdowns for days. The unpredictability of being in a relationship and parenting made him even more rigid and angry.

I slowly pieced together a lot of stuff in his family that included mental illness (not saying this is related to autism or ADHD, but mentioning it because it was bananas that he never noticed or mentioned the very obvious and diagnosed illnesses- and hospitalizations!- in his family?!) and a lot of autism, including lower-functioning autistic cousins living in basements and never coming to family functions. It's unclear if his family actually realizes what's going on- they are from a culture that pretends mental illness isn't real and I've heard the parent of one of the cousins with more severe autism speak derisively of an acquaintance who she thinks might "be Aspergers".

We stopped at one child and I've considered divorce a million times but won't go through with it because I would not want our child to deal with 50/50 custody and being under the sole care of DH.

It is really isolating and lonely because people are supportive of parents of children with ADHD or autism, but the few friends I have shared my situation with pulled away and have been visibly uncomfortable with the idea of an adult they know struggling with the impact of neurodiversity (even when it explains a lot about that person). I do a lot of covering for my DH now that our child is old enough to have friends and be social, because I can see that how important it is to have "normal" parents who participate in a neighborhood or school community.

At one point I confronted DH with why he would change so much after we married and not show me his real self while we were dating. He said that he always knew he was different and he knew he had to pretend to get friends and get into college and grad school and get the job he wanted. He said that when he was with me he felt like he could be himself for the first time in his entire life.

Great for him, a hellscape for me.

This could be me except in xH’s case, he is adopted with no knowledge of his biological parents and so I can never know what disorders they have. The more time that passes, the more convinced I am that parent(s) certainly have mental illnesses. His adoptive parents 1. Share almost zero traits with xH and his twin and 2. Are near-perfect humans who did a great job raising xH. Like, they’re textbook awesome. It lured me in, honestly, and Im still close to them.

In our mid 20s, xH’s temperament could reasonably be interpreted as intense and common in the setting of his high-esteem career. Around age 40 though, the wheels came off and the challenging traits descended into mental illness

[Anonymous]

People actually do change, sometimes for the worst. .

You know the stereotype of the grumpy old man? He wasn’t always that way. Sometimes life happens.

I also truly believe part of it is just aging. Your face doesn’t look the same from age 25 to 55, neither does your brain. Things like depression/anxiety, impulsivity, executive functioning, rigidity, ability to read social cues, etc… these are not constants. You mature up
to a certain point, but after that it’s not a constant. Some of these things decline, more in some people than others. Sometimes very slowly overtime so you don’t necessarily realize the changes are occurring until one day you wake up 25 years later and don’t know what happened.

Also, to the poster with the adhd/asd Dh… situations time that are probably more common than realized. Masking is real.

[Anonymous]

People ignore red flags until married and become hypersensitive about red flags after marriage. Even if you live with your twin as adults and deal with real life, you find it suffocating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This happened to me. DH traveled a ton for work and we had met during the intensely structured time while we were earning our professional degrees, so that provided some cover for what was actually going on. In hindsight there were signs here and there that made sense in the context of his lifestyle so I dismissed them. We also didn't spend a ton of time with his extended family while dating but that also seemed normal during that phase of our life.

Anyway, after we married DH became almost immediately different and once we had our child he was completely different than the person he had presented to me. I actually begged him to go to a neurologist because I thought he had a brain tumor or early dementia.

It turns out that he had previously undiagnosed ADHD and high-functioning autism. The coping mechanisms and adaptations he had relied on fell apart once he had the responsibility and challenges of a new baby. It was so ugly. He threw terrible tantrums over really basic things and would go into shutdowns for days. The unpredictability of being in a relationship and parenting made him even more rigid and angry.

I slowly pieced together a lot of stuff in his family that included mental illness (not saying this is related to autism or ADHD, but mentioning it because it was bananas that he never noticed or mentioned the very obvious and diagnosed illnesses- and hospitalizations!- in his family?!) and a lot of autism, including lower-functioning autistic cousins living in basements and never coming to family functions. It's unclear if his family actually realizes what's going on- they are from a culture that pretends mental illness isn't real and I've heard the parent of one of the cousins with more severe autism speak derisively of an acquaintance who she thinks might "be Aspergers".

We stopped at one child and I've considered divorce a million times but won't go through with it because I would not want our child to deal with 50/50 custody and being under the sole care of DH.

It is really isolating and lonely because people are supportive of parents of children with ADHD or autism, but the few friends I have shared my situation with pulled away and have been visibly uncomfortable with the idea of an adult they know struggling with the impact of neurodiversity (even when it explains a lot about that person). I do a lot of covering for my DH now that our child is old enough to have friends and be social, because I can see that how important it is to have "normal" parents who participate in a neighborhood or school community.

At one point I confronted DH with why he would change so much after we married and not show me his real self while we were dating. He said that he always knew he was different and he knew he had to pretend to get friends and get into college and grad school and get the job he wanted. He said that when he was with me he felt like he could be himself for the first time in his entire life.

Great for him, a hellscape for me.

Does your child have diagnoses, PP? I'm sorry things are so hard. What he said is kind of sweet in a sad way. A friend found an online support group for wives of DH's on autism spectrum to be helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This happened to me. DH traveled a ton for work and we had met during the intensely structured time while we were earning our professional degrees, so that provided some cover for what was actually going on. In hindsight there were signs here and there that made sense in the context of his lifestyle so I dismissed them. We also didn't spend a ton of time with his extended family while dating but that also seemed normal during that phase of our life.

Anyway, after we married DH became almost immediately different and once we had our child he was completely different than the person he had presented to me. I actually begged him to go to a neurologist because I thought he had a brain tumor or early dementia.

It turns out that he had previously undiagnosed ADHD and high-functioning autism. The coping mechanisms and adaptations he had relied on fell apart once he had the responsibility and challenges of a new baby. It was so ugly. He threw terrible tantrums over really basic things and would go into shutdowns for days. The unpredictability of being in a relationship and parenting made him even more rigid and angry.

I slowly pieced together a lot of stuff in his family that included mental illness (not saying this is related to autism or ADHD, but mentioning it because it was bananas that he never noticed or mentioned the very obvious and diagnosed illnesses- and hospitalizations!- in his family?!) and a lot of autism, including lower-functioning autistic cousins living in basements and never coming to family functions. It's unclear if his family actually realizes what's going on- they are from a culture that pretends mental illness isn't real and I've heard the parent of one of the cousins with more severe autism speak derisively of an acquaintance who she thinks might "be Aspergers".

We stopped at one child and I've considered divorce a million times but won't go through with it because I would not want our child to deal with 50/50 custody and being under the sole care of DH.

It is really isolating and lonely because people are supportive of parents of children with ADHD or autism, but the few friends I have shared my situation with pulled away and have been visibly uncomfortable with the idea of an adult they know struggling with the impact of neurodiversity (even when it explains a lot about that person). I do a lot of covering for my DH now that our child is old enough to have friends and be social, because I can see that how important it is to have "normal" parents who participate in a neighborhood or school community.

At one point I confronted DH with why he would change so much after we married and not show me his real self while we were dating. He said that he always knew he was different and he knew he had to pretend to get friends and get into college and grad school and get the job he wanted. He said that when he was with me he felt like he could be himself for the first time in his entire life.

Great for him, a hellscape for me.

Does your child have diagnoses, PP? I'm sorry things are so hard. What he said is kind of sweet in a sad way. A friend found an online support group for wives of DH's on autism spectrum to be helpful.

So far we are fortunate. My child has moderate anxiety and is neurotypical save for low processing speed. I did have them tested as soon as they were elementary age even though they didn't seem to have any issues because I wanted to be prepared to give them the resources that my DH didn't get.

If anyone else is reading this and in a similar situation, I hope this makes you feel less alone:

I do see my DC affected by DH's behavior and I've been honest in explaining why he's like that in an age-appropriate way over the years (starting with "dad is like your classmate x, except that when he was younger people didn't talk about these things or know to help and so people just said he was weird"). It's a fine line between giving DC the information to not feel like they're going crazy in their interactions with their dad vs. parentifying them. I hate that DC is in this situation. DH loves DC on paper but is so short-tempered and defensive that the daily challenges and failures of raising a child trigger those traits every day. DH doesn't have the executive functioning skills to parent except on weekend days or vacations when there aren't schedules or commitments. I keep DC in a lot of formal activities because DH doesn't like people in the house and won't socialize. I want DC to have a full life and experience lots of other people. I wish they could have a less structured childhood and there were kids running in and out of the house and that we could go to big family parties or on group trips, and I'm sad I can't give them that. DH was really social when we first met but now he uses all of his social energy for work and the occasional friend coming in to town. We aren't part of couple-centric socializing and I've been dropped or excluded by friends because I don't have a husband who is part of things.

[Anonymous]

People change with age, responsibilities, challenges and environment but core of a person doesn't change. An ethical and empathetic person would still be the same in 20 years, if not then you were either dumb or chose to ignore signs because you wanted to marry them and wear wedding dress.