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In my mind it's simple: it was not ideal for her to buy the strawberries, so I'm alerting my wife to that so she can correct whatever process led to her buying them. Does that make sense? The only way she ever buys extra strawberries is if something goes wrong. We aren't perfect and mistakes will happen, but that type of carelessness from her happens all the time. So I don't get angry over it--I married a carefree person--but a part of me feels like not acknowledging it at all is acceptance of an objectively bad habit. So is it a genuine psychological issue that she has where she can't process the bad behavior or is it that she doesn't value money or food?

I bet if you look closely at yourself you do things that aren't ideal too. I am "cursed" with being a very rational person and also being guilty of extra-strawberry purchasing. I track my money down to the penny and yet there I am, spending $4 unnecessary dollars. $3 unnecessary dollars on pasta just the other day. Yet I'm generally rational. I have exactly the amount of gas on hand I will need to mow my grass three more times before season change makes it unnecessary to mow again because I don't want gas going bad in my garage over the winter. Yet, strawberries will happen. Now if she really is just irrational with money in general, that's a hard problem. My first husband was that way and it would drive me nuts at times because we literally couldn't pay a bill due to it every few months. Are you paying all of your bills without stress? Is this money what she earns? Are your bills divided up evenly? If so, maybe just let her be herself on this one. You say you have no anger over it, but it sounds like this bothers you a lot.

You may just be a bad match. Your goal is to stay together for the sake of your children, but that isn't always the best thing if you're a bad match. I'm not getting from you that your marriage has ever been particularly happy. Kids need to see their parents happy more than they need to see them together.

I don't think so. Generally a person who wants to cheat will create the reasons. The justifications come after the decision. I've been in bad relationships before him and never contemplated cheating. I just left. My marriage with my XWH was pretty good from what I could tell. He couldn't resent me for nagging or lack of sex or even financial disagreements. There just wasn't any of the typical stuff. So he decided to resent me for him choosing to marry me. I wasn't concerned about whether or not we got married. He proposed, he even worked harder on planning the wedding than I did, he was all excited and had all these dreams. Yet somehow the resentment was that he felt that he had to marry me to keep me. I never have been able to make sense of that particular rationalization. His other big rationalization was that I fixed things myself instead of asking him to do it and therefore he felt unneeded. He needed to create justifications in his mind and he did a good job of it.

Yea, that's what I suspect too. I'm just attributing that to some level of narcissism.

My first husband was very critical about nearly everything and I'm a blunt person who has no time for that so we fought often. Screaming yelling fights. Neither of us ever even contemplated cheating. Had he cheated, he could have come up with some rationalizations, but that isn't who he is. I had a ton of rationalizations I could have used, but I didn't consider it either. I just divorced him.

It's interesting--this came up for the first time awhile ago (it might have been during the affair; I don't recall), where I noted how my wife and I never fight. Her view was that we always fought. We tried to explain how we felt to each other, but couldn't. I suspect in her mind, she was making all these concessions and viewed them as lot fights--for me, they didn't even register as conflicts (I think Farside hit this point well).

I did cheat back within a couple of hours of finding out my XWH was a serial cheater and I really don't think that I'd have ever cheated under any other circumstances. That was basically a mental breakdown. Not even that was excusable, but the reasons were pretty obvious there.

If you don't mind me asking, what was the scenario of that? There seem to be a lot of mad hatter situations in threads throughout this site and they fascinate me. It seems to me they're simply people feeling like they have a hall pass and doing what they wanted to do, but previously couldn't. I never had a desire to cheat, so it never came into my mind after DDay. The idea of random sex with a stranger seems largely unappealing to me--but I recognize I'm the minority.

Is there anything that will will cause you to separate from her? Anything she could say,or do?

Hellfire, I was up most of the night thinking through this exact question.

I think if she was diagnosed with narcissism, that would be reason to exit. The thinking then would be that it's highly unlikely she's going to change and her behavior will undoubtedly hurt the kids, so limiting their time with her would be a net-benefit for them. I'd then no longer have the pull of staying to do what is *right*. Our MC doesn't think she's a narcissist though.

Alternatively, I think it's just a gradual degradation of the marriage. I already feel that. I feel less connected to her everyday. Maybe I love her less too. I find myself still saying "I love you" to her, but it doesn't feel the same. It almost feels like I might be trying to convince myself that it's true each time.

So to HikingOut's point, on a long enough timeline, the dam breaks and I lose my desire to protect the marriage. I give up. It certainly seems likely that will be tied to something insensitive she says or does, but it could just be a matter of attrition.

She might understand that, but I really don't know. For me to know that, I'd have to trust she's being authentic--and that's impossible for me right now.

Personally, I think it is IMPOSSIBLE for her to be truly authentic with her own self only 6-months after discovery.

Most WS are still stuck between door #1 - Rationalizations and resentments that made them the hero and not the villain of their own life story.
And door #2 - Holy $#!% I made horrible choices, I risked my marriage for nothing/betrayed my own self interest.

WS who cannot get beyond their justifications or door #1 are not safe partners.

She can only get to authentic by showing you her work- answering your questions, building or rebuilding empathy toward you, asking herself the hard questions about her judgment, and showing you truth and understanding to help you heal the relationship.

Thirteen months in was my last last knee buckling moment, when I still questioned whether it was worth it for either of us to hang in there. And two years before I was certain we had broken our bad patterns, bad roles, bad trades and that we were both being real enough, authentic enough to have an M worthy of both of us.

A lot more time and work ahead for both of you, regardless of how it turns out.

I bet if you look closely at yourself you do things that aren't ideal too.

Of course. I like to think I examine those things and work at them. You certainly could be right--maybe I don't see my flaws because I don't have someone like myself around to point them out all the time.

I am "cursed" with being a very rational person and also being guilty of extra-strawberry purchasing. I track my money down to the penny and yet there I am, spending $4 unnecessary dollars. $3 unnecessary dollars on pasta just the other day. Yet I'm generally rational. I have exactly the amount of gas on hand I will need to mow my grass three more times before season change makes it unnecessary to mow again because I don't want gas going bad in my garage over the winter. Yet, strawberries will happen.

You listed several ways you're frugal and then one error. The strawberries my wife bought weren't the error, they were the pattern. She is *never* frugal.

Now if she really is just irrational with money in general, that's a hard problem. My first husband was that way and it would drive me nuts at times because we literally couldn't pay a bill due to it every few months. Are you paying all of your bills without stress? Is this money what she earns? Are your bills divided up evenly? If so, maybe just let her be herself on this one. You say you have no anger over it, but it sounds like this bothers you a lot.

We have not struggled to pay bills, but that's only because we have very supportive parents, who bail us out with extra money all the time. She's never had financial consequences her entire life. I haven't either, but I had financial values instilled in me that she never had.

So on one hand, who cares, right? Buy all the strawberries and throw them away--there's no consequence. But that's why I don't get angry about them--if I thought we couldn't afford heat one month, I'd be beyond angry. Her behavior is being absorbed by our children though--and that's terrifying to me. And again, quite simply, it's *bad* behavior. It's a problem. And I want to fix it.

You may just be a bad match. Your goal is to stay together for the sake of your children, but that isn't always the best thing if you're a bad match. I'm not getting from you that your marriage has ever been particularly happy. Kids need to see their parents happy more than they need to see them together.

Yea, I recognize that based on my posts. It has been a *very* happy marriage though. Perhaps because we don't have consequences for her bad decisions. We've lived blessed lives. I know that's hard to believe based on my posts, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

I suspect in your assessment of how you perceive my life, you're discounting my critical nature. Meaning, you're asking if our life was so happy, why would I be so critical? I'd be this way if I was a billionaire and my jet needed to go in for maintenance on the day I was planning to take my son to Cabo to go jet skiing. Because I'm not homeless and jobless, doesn't mean I find less to be critical about.

I don't want to be that way though. I'd like to lean into the happiness.

My WW knew I was sad this morning. Since that point, she's texted me suggesting some sex game for us play tonight and she just sent me a nude photo of herself from work while I was responding to this post. A less critical person would be thrilled and excited to go home and have sex with his beautiful wife. I'm sitting here wondering if she's throwing sex at me to manipulate my mood. It's not fun being in my head.

[This message edited by Drstrangelove at 7:41 PM, Wednesday, August 31st]

Most WS are still stuck between door #1 - Rationalizations and resentments that made them the hero and not the villain of their own life story.
And door #2 - Holy $#!% I made horrible choices, I risked my marriage for nothing/betrayed my own self interest.

WS who cannot get beyond their justifications or door #1 are not safe partners.

I think she is between doors. Door #1 still pops up, but I'd say August was more door #2 on the whole--she's just wallowing in her shame.

My WW knew I was sad this morning. Since that point, she's texted me suggesting some sex game for us play tonight and she just sent me a nude photo of herself from work while I was responding to this post. A less critical person would be thrilled and excited to go home and have sex with his beautiful wife. I'm sitting here wondering if she's throwing sex at me to manipulate my mood. It's not fun being in my head.

I don't think it has anything with being a less critical person or not. This reeks of manipulation and I'm surprised you're even wondering if that's why she's doing it.

If you don't mind me asking, what was the scenario of that? There seem to be a lot of mad hatter situations in threads throughout this site and they fascinate me. It seems to me they're simply people feeling like they have a hall pass and doing what they wanted to do, but previously couldn't. I never had a desire to cheat, so it never came into my mind after DDay. The idea of random sex with a stranger seems largely unappealing to me--but I recognize I'm the minority.

I don't mind a bit. Long story short, he'd been cheating for at least a couple of years with prostitutes and I'd had no clue anything was going on until he got into drugs while hanging out with a particular couple of them. I only knew of the drugs and kicked him out over those and allowed him to come back after rehab. He'd kept a journal in rehab. I normally wouldn't read something so personal, but my gut feelings were screaming at me so I did peek in it and discovered he'd slept with "many women" while married to me. I had some kind of mental break. I couldn't feel any emotions about it, felt like I was outside my body. I confronted him calmly and left the house to find a stranger to have sex with. I didn't feel anything until driving home when it all hit me and I wound up screaming in the car. It was pretty surreal. I didn't have any coherent thoughts that I could point to now. It was like I wasn't really there. In the space of four months, I'd gone from being very happy with the best man to suddenly being married to a drug addict to suddenly realizing I was married to someone I didn't know at all. Kinda wrecked me for a minute there.

It's interesting to me that you say your marriage has been very happy.

For years, your wife has resented you so much that your sexual pleasure meant nothing to her. She was fine,somewhat,with you pleasing her,but wanted no part of touching you.

She has said horrible things about you over the years.

She has been committing financial infidelity for years.

She has outright told you she stopped loving you before the affair.

If you were happy, do you think that might have been because you didn't really understand how she felt about you? And,now that you do,how can you still say that?

And,yes, the pic and throwing sex is a way to rugsweep how you're feeling. She's reading this thread,and she's doing what she has always done. As someone said above..it's odd that you even wonder at this point.

[This message edited by HellFire at 8:15 PM, Wednesday, August 31st]

We have not struggled to pay bills, but that's only because we have very supportive parents, who bail us out with extra money all the time. She's never had financial consequences her entire life. I haven't either, but I had financial values instilled in me that she never had.

So on one hand, who cares, right? Buy all the strawberries and throw them away--there's no consequence. But that's why I don't get angry about them--if I thought we couldn't afford heat one month, I'd be beyond angry. Her behavior is being absorbed by our children though--and that's terrifying to me. And again, quite simply, it's *bad* behavior. It's a problem. And I want to fix it.

This is starting to make a lot more sense. She hasn't had financial consequences. She sounds like my teenaged daughter when she first started working. For the first few paychecks she'd make around $300 and spend it all in the first two days and be broke for two weeks. I didn't bail her out because I agree with you that this is bad behavior. She now throws half of her paycheck into savings immediately to prevent herself from doing that. Had I bailed her out, she wouldn't have learned that lesson. Many people only learn and change via consequences.

Yea, I recognize that based on my posts. It has been a *very* happy marriage though. Perhaps because we don't have consequences for her bad decisions. We've lived blessed lives. I know that's hard to believe based on my posts, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

I suspect in your assessment of how you perceive my life, you're discounting my critical nature. Meaning, you're asking if our life was so happy, why would I be so critical? I'd be this way if I was a billionaire and my jet needed to go in for maintenance on the day I was planning to take my son to Cabo to go jet skiing. Because I'm not homeless and jobless, doesn't mean I find less to be critical about.

I do take your word for it. And no, I'm not discounting your critical nature. That's the very thing that broke up my first marriage. I couldn't live with it. I needed to exist in a world where I could buy the "wrong" brand of toilet paper or sometimes not take the fastest route to a destination without being brow-beaten over it. I don't have a people-pleasing nature and I was tired of fighting. If her response to your criticism was to be the utter smartass I was with my first husband, you probably wouldn't have had a happy marriage up to this point. I expect that if I'd just said "sure, okay" each time he criticized, he'd have thought we had a happy marriage too.

I can't get anywhere close to accepting that premise. The idea that a view opposite of mine can't be villainous is obviously absurd. And it extends far beyond cheating and financial infidelity (those are just two bad things you've decided to list). I could fill a thread listing objectively bad views. "Different" doesn't mean bad, but it certainly *can* mean bad. I'd list her agreeing to things she doesn't agree with as bad, objectively. If she was a racist, I'd list that as bad too, etc.

I used the villain scenario directly from your response to me.

A villain is a cartoon character. I have to believe that you would not marry a racist. But what has happened over time is that the ways you are different you haven’t accepted, you have merely tolerated. And under that construct your resentment grows with both big offenses and tiny ones. I don’t have time to sit and site all the times this has been a theme in your posts.

Again, she cheated that is clearly unacceptable. Financial infidelity is also unacceptable. But all the small offenses get lumped into this picture you have of her as a child.

And you think of boundaries of leverage. Change or I will leave. That’s not at all what boundaries are. (It’s the one that has gone into effect most recently as an outcome of her cheating) You don’t like how she manages her finances? You separate the money and make her responsible for her part of living expenses. If she blows the rest in Gucci you don’t bail her out. You don’t worry about how she spends the rest of her money. You seem to have a moral judgment she can’t have so many clothes because she is a mother of children. That makes no sense to your audience because we have no idea of context.

At our house, we made equal money until I retired last year. We kept everything together, I had more clothes than I could wear but my kids lacked nothing. My husband is actually more of a spender than I am. Is your wife to say to you that you are a father so you can’t have a first class trip to Italy for two weeks? It sounds to us who know nothing about your life that is a skewed viewpoint. You do not need to explain it to me, in fact it really doesn’t matter to me. It’s more we are trying to hold a mirror.

It’s the confirmation bias, that happens within a narrative. The same happens for your wife, she takes a small thing she feels is critical and paints you critical. Then lumps anything in that category that feeds her confirmation bias.

What is actually happening is both of you feel unseen and unheard because of these narratives.

I will also say I think you are just having a bad day today. Completely normal. It’s annoying to be called out about behaviors that seem minor compared to an affair or thousands of dollars in debt. In that way you are right. But it’s really not about being right.

It’s more, how do you focus on your behavior so your boundaries are better? So you take the responsibility of protecting yourself, the areas where to practice acceptance and the areas you need to change the construct that is enabling behaviors. I pointed out the affair and finances because those are her responsibility. It is also her responsibility to not be childish. Leverage isn’t what you are looking for, how to make a boundary you can enforce that is not just binary - stay or go. The enabling, the parent/child, the accepting behaviors and not knowing how you can be responsible for your part without leverage or punitive measures.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:25 PM, Wednesday, August 31st]

People behave the way they behave.

Clinical asshole or regular asshole, they are still an asshole.

Asperger's or just awkward, they can't operate well in social situations

Narcissist or just selfish, they are going to be selfish.

Diagnostics just give you a picture of a condition contributing to the behavior and is useful in guiding treatment. A doctor saying your wife sucks shouldn't be what causes you to leave. It should be you wife sucking.

My 0.02

I don't think it has anything with being a less critical person or not. This reeks of manipulation and I'm surprised you're even wondering if that's why she's doing it.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps she saw I had a rough night's sleep and was feeling down and she's offering something genuinely fun to cheer me up.

I don't mind a bit. Long story short, he'd been cheating for at least a couple of years with prostitutes and I'd had no clue anything was going on until he got into drugs while hanging out with a particular couple of them. I only knew of the drugs and kicked him out over those and allowed him to come back after rehab. He'd kept a journal in rehab. I normally wouldn't read something so personal, but my gut feelings were screaming at me so I did peek in it and discovered he'd slept with "many women" while married to me. I had some kind of mental break. I couldn't feel any emotions about it, felt like I was outside my body. I confronted him calmly and left the house to find a stranger to have sex with. I didn't feel anything until driving home when it all hit me and I wound up screaming in the car. It was pretty surreal. I didn't have any coherent thoughts that I could point to now. It was like I wasn't really there. In the space of four months, I'd gone from being very happy with the best man to suddenly being married to a drug addict to suddenly realizing I was married to someone I didn't know at all. Kinda wrecked me for a minute there.

That's horrible and I'm so sorry you went through that. So you literally approached a random guy and suggested sex or just went to a bar open to the idea of meeting someone? Either way, I imagine the next day was rock bottom.

And perhaps more importantly, why do you think that was your reaction? That seems more like revenge than anything else, but I'm interested in how you saw it.

It's interesting to me that you say your marriage has been very happy.

For years, your wife has resented you so much that your sexual pleasure meant nothing to her. She was fine,somewhat,with you pleasing her,but wanted no part of touching you.

She has said horrible things about you over the years.

She has been committing financial infidelity for years.

She has outright told you she stopped loving you before the affair.

If you were happy, do you think that might have been because you didn't really understand how she felt about you? And,now that you do,how can you still say that?

No sense in debating with you how I felt, but of course in retrospect I question why I was happy. I'm not telling you I'm happy now--I very much am not--I'm telling you at the time I was happy.

I was largely happy a year ago. I understand now that she didn't love me a year ago. That doesn't mean I wasn't happy a year ago.

This is starting to make a lot more sense. She hasn't had financial consequences. She sounds like my teenaged daughter when she first started working. For the first few paychecks she'd make around $300 and spend it all in the first two days and be broke for two weeks. I didn't bail her out because I agree with you that this is bad behavior. She now throws half of her paycheck into savings immediately to prevent herself from doing that. Had I bailed her out, she wouldn't have learned that lesson. Many people only learn and change via consequences.

Agreed. But I don't have the leverage to provide her consequences. She needs to agree to change--which she does...but she doesn't mean it. I suspect it's no different than a drug addict agreeing to stop using so you won't leave him. But again, she has the leverage because I don't want to break up the home.

I do take your word for it. And no, I'm not discounting your critical nature. That's the very thing that broke up my first marriage. I couldn't live with it. I needed to exist in a world where I could buy the "wrong" brand of toilet paper or sometimes not take the fastest route to a destination without being brow-beaten over it. I don't have a people-pleasing nature and I was tired of fighting. If her response to your criticism was to be the utter smartass I was with my first husband, you probably wouldn't have had a happy marriage up to this point. I expect that if I'd just said "sure, okay" each time he criticized, he'd have thought we had a happy marriage too.

Precisely. A couple of things though.

I don't brow-beat--I don't stomp my feet and yell and scream and call her names. I do point out flaws in process though.

Her response of, "sure, ok," made me think everything was fine. Because again, if it wasn't fine, why would someone say it's fine? That didn't even seem like an option to me. When something isn't fine for me, I say it. The idea of being upset, keeping quiet, and then festering in anger for years seemed impossible--I genuinely had never considered that as a possibility. If something was wrong, surely I'd know about it.

Also of note, I do think the healthy response would be "sure, ok" and then to move on. So I do think there's a world where I could have had that marriage and it not exploded like it has. Her Us being trapped in the parent-child dynamic prevented it. She wanted to rebel from me, just as a teenager would. She felt defiance that she was holding at bay the entire marriage. That dam broke.

Again, she cheated that is clearly unacceptable. Financial infidelity is also unacceptable. But all the small offenses get lumped into this picture you have of her as a child.

Interestingly, I don't even care about the clothing--it's entirely on her how she spends the money. The food does bother me more, but that's my FOO issue. I'm not angry about any of it specifically. I'm angry that 15 years ago and virtually every year since she has made a commitment to me to save $5,000 a year and has done it exactly one time (about 10~ years ago). The strawberries and jackets are just reminders of that failed commitment. If it was possible for her to save the money and buy lots of strawberries, that'd be fine I think.

And you think of boundaries of leverage. Change or I will leave. That’s not at all what boundaries are. (It’s the one that has gone into effect most recently as an outcome of her cheating) You don’t like how she manages her finances? You separate the money and make her responsible for her part of living expenses. If she blows the rest in Gucci you don’t bail her out. You don’t worry about how she spends the rest of her money. You seem to have a moral judgment she can’t have so many clothes because she is a mother of children. That makes no sense to your audience because we have no idea of context.

At our house, we made equal money until I retired last year. We kept everything together, I had more clothes than I could wear but my kids lacked nothing. My husband is actually more of a spender than I am. Is your wife to say to you that you are a father so you can’t have a first class trip to Italy for two weeks? It sounds to us who know nothing about your life that is a skewed viewpoint. You do not need to explain it to me, in fact it really doesn’t matter to me. It’s more we are trying to hold a mirror.

I don't know how to resolve this. I'm stupid or incompetent in this area; every mechanism I've instituted has failed. So you frame it as we should take X% and use that for joint and then she can use the rest as she wants. The issue is saving the money for the end of the year so we can invest it. So if we account for that money to be contributed to the joint account gradually, she'll see the joint account accruing money and buy some stupid decoration for the house or w/e. If she keeps the EOY money in her account, she'll spend it before the end of year.

I have tried to take control over all joint-spending under the logic that we need to agree on all joint-purchases, but that just makes her feel like a child because then she can't buy household items without my permission. So then she'll come to ask me if she can buy some $50 vase and I'll say no and she'll go blow another guy lol. All of it is exhausting. And if I'm being honest, I don't want to live like that anyway. I don't want to create any situation where I'm giving her permission to do anything.

And there's no reason I'd ever bail her out--I set up a life where we have very little expenses. I have no mortgage on the house; I have zero-cost energy (geothermal and solar); I cook so we don't need to eat out often--we pay a monthly Verizon bill and take vacations. She is flooded with expendable income. Quite literally, her and her salary could disappear tomorrow and my lifestyle wouldn't change. She *can* spend all of her money on nonsense and nothing changes day-to-day. But we now have to keep working forever because of her selfish spending--that does make me a bit resentful. If she decided to save more, it would help us and our children immeasurably. I'd like her to see that. I have failed at illuminating it though.

I'm very open to suggestions.

What is actually happening is both of you feel unseen and unheard because of these narratives.

That seems very accurate.

[This message edited by Drstrangelove at 10:14 PM, Wednesday, August 31st]

People behave the way they behave.

Clinical asshole or regular asshole, they are still an asshole.

Asperger's or just awkward, they can't operate well in social situations

Narcissist or just selfish, they are going to be selfish.

Diagnostics just give you a picture of a condition contributing to the behavior and is useful in guiding treatment. A doctor saying your wife sucks shouldn't be what causes you to leave. It should be you wife sucking.

My 0.02

Totally reasonable. I don't know what distinction I'm trying to draw. I guess I feel like a clinical diagnosis makes her changing less likely than if she's just run-of-the-mill selfish. I don't know if that's true though.

That's horrible and I'm so sorry you went through that. So you literally approached a random guy and suggested sex or just went to a bar open to the idea of meeting someone? Either way, I imagine the next day was rock bottom. sad

And perhaps more importantly, why do you think that was your reaction? That seems more like revenge than anything else, but I'm interested in how you saw it.

I logged into a dating site and found a guy and met up pretty much immediately. Yeah, the next day was beyond awful. I have worked on why that was the reaction in therapy and it seems to have boiled down to how I respond to things. There's fight, flight and freeze and I'm stuck on fight. I reacted to being raped at 16 by becoming sexually aggressive and promiscuous. Infidelity was another sexual wound, so I guess it makes sense that I reacted basically the same way. Very disturbing, though. I guess it was better than killing him, lol.

Her response of, "sure, ok," made me think everything was fine. Because again, if it wasn't fine, why would someone say it's fine? That didn't even seem like an option to me. When something isn't fine for me, I say it. The idea of being upset, keeping quiet, and then festering in anger for years seemed impossible--I genuinely had never considered that as a possibility. If something was wrong, surely I'd know about it.

Ha ha ha, we do have a lot in common in some ways. I was surprised to find out that my XWH had been passive-aggressive with me a good part of the relationship because that stuff flies right over my head. "Do you want to eat at ____ tonight?" "Sure". Sure was apparently full of resentment that I didn't remember that he liked the other place better or whatever. "Are you feeling okay?" "I'm fine" and I was the bad guy because I took him at his word and didn't cajole the real problem out of him. So I was happy and thought he was happy too because he didn't know how to use his words and express himself. He was a grown-ass man and I am not clairvoyant.

Also of note, I do think the healthy response would be "sure, ok" and then to move on. So I do think there's a world where I could have had that marriage and it not exploded like it has. Her Us being trapped in the parent-child dynamic prevented it. She wanted to rebel from me, just as a teenager would. She felt defiance that she was holding at bay the entire marriage. That dam broke.

Yeah. I got put into a mom role too and I don't find that the least bit cute. He felt like a teenager running around behind my back. It thrilled him. Shockingly immature.