Reply to How do you know if your marriage is dead beyond repair

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I answered this question before, OP. I actually went and found what I wrote because it still makes sense to me.

As someone on the other side of marriage and children and family, I will give you a bit of insight. Yes, there were YEARS when I seriously considered getting divorced. Yes, these were the same years when we had small children or financial struggles or health issues. I didn't and I didn't because I don't view marriage as solely a romantic relationship. It is much, much deeper to me. It's family. It's taking someone and making them your person. And while we never veered into true toxic territory (abuse, adultery, etc.), we had the kind of rough patches that sent many, many of my friends into divorces. The difference? We worked through them and after each one, we were stronger, closer, more intimate. We had a mutual respect and fundamental kindness that was the ethos of our marriage. We went through fire together (or alone, pulling the other on their backs). And I say looking at three grown kids, an empty, sold house and a retirement, our next phase strangely feels like the first one. We travel, we have fun, we have time, we nap, sleep together, have long talks about the meaning of it all, and if it was a recording or a text of our days, we would sound strangely similar to those two 24 year olds who lost their jobs and decided to wonder around Europe together for a year (where I spend equal parts crying and feeling more alive than I ever had). But we're 65 and it's a lifetime between those points. Three kids. A grandchild. Five different careers (yes, I mean careers, not jobs). A flight attendant turned speech therapist. A journalist, turned attorney, turned high school history teacher. A house that some other young family is now raising their children in. My gray hair. His long departed hair. We are so much more than those difficult years when I was a stressed out working mom and he was a stressed out working father. A blip. But I didn't know this at the time. I felt it, I felt that there was a long game to be had when it comes to marriage. But I didn't realize how long and how great the payoff could be.

I don't know how other people define love and marriage. But I think my deal was worth making.[/quote]

OP here. I do appreciate your post...but I am not in this situation. If I felt the love was there from the beginning, I would stay. There wasn't. It was just a mistake but now there are kids involved. I wanted to leave within a year of marriage and had doubts literally walking down the aisle. We also married later (early 30s). Also, we do not have this: "We had a mutual respect and fundamental kindness that was the ethos of our marriage." We don't even like each other. It is all pretend. [/quote]

OP I can't help but feel like you're rewriting history. I believe you that you had doubts even early on in your marriage...and TRUST me, you are nowhere near alone in that. But I think you're stuck in a very negative mindset and you're only letting yourself remember that things have always been awful, when logically that just doesn't make sense. You're telling me you met some guy who you had nothing in common with and couldn't talk to at all, but he continued asking you out and you continued saying yes, all the while feeling nothing but blah and disconnect? I doubt that. And if so...then the problem here is YOU and I seriously suggest you seek a lot of counseling to understand why on earth you would do something like that. More likely, it seems, is that you're stubbornly blocking out the happier things and the good times, because you don't WANT to remember them or to believe you could work to fix it, because you made up your mind long ago and you just want to give up. Which is your prerogative...but like PP said, there is no easy or guilt-free way to do it. If you walk out on a decent marriage, that's on you. [/quote]

OP here: I am not rewriting history. I am very self-aware. I knew I did not want to be trying on wedding dresses. I knew we should have broken up at the 4-month mark of dating. I knew why I tried to break up before getting engaged. He convinced me not to break up with him. I new exactly what I was doing...I was trying to get over someone else who was a total jerk to me. I was with my DH only because he seemed nice and that seemed to be enough. I knew I was wrong and did it anyway.[/quote]

Why'd you stay, then? Why'd you have two children? Why are you thinking of staying now? I feel like the story can't be as simple as the story you're telling or you would have left in the first year of marriage.[/quote]

OP here: I moved after the wedding and was giving it a year. Right after the year is up I stupidly stopped the pill and got pregnant the first time....I thought I was going back on birth control during the act itself. I got pregnant and lived out of state. I could not leave due to possible custody issues. Took 8 years to get back here. Now I can actually consider leaving because I am in the place I want to live permanently. I could not even consider leaving when I was in another state. [/quote]

These were all choices. That's what you aren't getting, OP. You didn't have to have that child. You chose to go off birth control. You moved.

Stop being a victim and own it! If you want to go, then leave. No one is forcing you to do anything. Stop whining.[/quote]

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