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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's fascinating to me that the people who are responding in disagreement think this is about letting the husband off the hook and letting him act like a man-baby.

To the poster who's got it all figured out 4 years in, congrats!  Talk to me in 16. . .
[/quote]

There were a number of posts about people asking how to apply it in exactly those kinds of situations.

As someone else alluded to, there are two themes running through this thread:

-- not caring in the sense of not being dependent on your spouse to validate you or soothe you (in the words of the Passionate Marriage book, which I too would recommend to anyone interested in this thread), and not doing for them those things that they can do for themselves. This is always a good thing, whether it's applied to spouses or children or friends or anyone else. It's not actually about not caring about the spouse though; I would instead call it becoming more differentiated/mature and self reliant, and expecting the same from them. If BOTH spouses still care enough about each other and having a relationship together, and both take care of themselves when appropriate, then this can be a springboard to greater emotional connection.

-- not caring, or trying not to care, what the other person does or doesn't do, in general. Maybe just one person becomes more differentiated/mature and self reliant, and the other person doesn't. Or they both do but find that without the emotional fusion (that enmeshed, co-dependent state) there is nothing holding them together. It doesn't lead to greater emotional connection, and instead leads to emotionally checking out of the marraige. Maybe they each take care of themselves and become two ships that pass in the night, just sharing a house and children. Then they might really not care what the other's doing, as it's no hair off their back. But if they don't both take care of themselves, and one underfunctions and the other overfunctions (here's where the man-baby part comes in), then it's not surprising that the overfunctioning spouses are having trouble not caring. They DO care that they don't like what they have going, but feel stuck -- they consider the alternatives to doing all the extra work worse, because they consider the alternatives to their marriage to be worse, or are not confident enough that they'd be better off without it to end it. [/quote]

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