| You're welcome. Glad to hear you and your wife are talking about improving the situation for everyone. That shows bravery and dedication -- and also some love by both of you. Something funny/ironic but all too often true about marriage -- and why everyone needs to work at it:
"Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person"
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-wi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCS6t6NUAGQ
"We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition." Another issue especially for raising kids is changing male/female social expectations in the last few decades. And there is also the socially isolating infrastructure we've build around ourselves (especially suburbs). That infrastructure makes it harder to be part of a face-to-face community as you have indicated has been a challenge for both yourself and your wife. See for example:
"How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult"
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends... So even if our parents were perfect role models for a happy marriage, what worked for them may not work for us given different social and physical circumstances a generation later. And social isolation (in a face-to-face sense) caused by many modern trends (even before the pandemic) is a key aspect of stress and depression that can make everything else harder because it puts too much pressure on a marriage to be everything where in the past there were multiple sources of social support See for example: "Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions" by Johann Hari. https://thelostconnections.com/
From the last chapter of the book: "You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated." It's a long haul, but an "upward spiral" for marriage and also personal life is possible and is a worthwhile accomplishment to look back on someday. Finding just the right amount of self-reflection (not too little to be reckless, not too much to be paralyzed) can also be part of that challenge. Best of luck on your continuing journey to building a better life for yourself and everyone you care about around you. |