I wonder what causes people who once thought they’d spend their life together to not want to do that anymore.

Has your partner changed? Or did they not change when you expected them to? Have you changed?

Have you not noticed each others’ flaws when love was young and the pink glasses still worked and only discovered them later?

And what can your experience teach us about our own relationships?

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 days ago

    She poly bombed me, came out as narcissist, and made derogatory remarks about me making a solid effort to understand poly and maintain our marriage.

    Now, she’s still extremely mad at me, still very much acting like a narcissist would, and I’m the one in a harmonious poly relationship.

    It’s hella tough, making a split family work when she absolutely refuses to communicate directly with me. My poor kids are stuck in the middle of this mess which will likely never mend.

    But apparently that’s better than giving me just a couple of weeks to get to grips with her desires. It’s hard to forgive.

  • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    The decision was made at the end of October last year, so still very fresh and still very painful. Legally still married for a few more months.

    I watched her spirit die in slow-motion from my health issues making me unable to meaningfully contribute and turning her into a caretaker while being the breadwinner. It wasn’t one single thing with my health, it was a series of one issue setting off new issues, and after a long enough time of that you stop feeling optimistic that getting through your current problem will be the end, and emotionally the new ones hit harder. I know this sounds bad on her, but she tried so hard for so very long. I knew it was killing her, it was killing me watching what she was going through. It wasn’t her fault for giving up, and anyone who watched what I did would understand that.

    I’ve moved back in with my parents as a man in his late thirties. I wish I had had the courage to make that decision myself a year ago rather than forcing her to decide to give up. I kept trying to have faith that if I just kept pushing I could get back to a better place and fix everything. My parents are a nine-hour drive away, with my mom having severe cat allergies, so moving out also meant abandoning my best friends, and obviously my human friends too.

    Counseling helps a lot but I feel like twice a week is still nowhere close to enough. And of course, almost every single problem I’m going through has health insurance fighting tooth and nail to not treat and I feel limited in my emotional ability to be constantly fighting on all of that.

    I also had a really good relationship with my parents before but I am absurdly sensitive to the weight I’m putting on them right now, which I think is a trauma reaction. They are doing everything they can for me and I just totally withdraw and don’t feel like myself at all around them now. They want the best for me but right now I do not have the emotional strength to make any requests of them, no matter how light.

    This mostly turned into venting, but given the thread topic it’s probably expected. I don’t really want suggestions for actions to take because right now I’m still too dead inside to follow through on anything.

  • memfree@lemmy.ml
    1·
    19 days ago

    He’d tell you because I was crazy.

    I’d say it was because he wanted us to both move in with his (wonderful and supportive) family.

    I was crazy, but not THAT crazy.

    We had been living far away from his family, but he’d landed a fantastic job in their home town. Before the move, his mother started calling me and telling me that if I wanted to live in her house, I’d have to be respectful, and not go out drinking all night and coming home drunk – something I’d never done or conceived of doing – or what chores I would have, or how loud I could be, and when we would eat, and so on. I told him that I could not live 24/7 with his mom. I said I was moving to MY mother’s and when he got us a place of our own, I would join him. He didn’t. We divorced.

    The divorce was fairly amicable. That was all about 30 years ago and I never remarried. I did shack up with a wonderful man for about 20 years, but I eventually kicked him out because he’d shrink into the shadows when I most needed support and I was tired of feeling emotionally devastated when I reaching out for succor and instead finding a void. I explained that I’d rather know that no one is there to help if I’m flailing about than to have someone I trusted stand by and do nothing. Yeah, I’m bitter about that one. I still love the guy, but sheesh.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    0·
    19 days ago

    Saw a similar thread on reddit recently.

    Overwhelming majority stated it was cheating, followed by cheating and boozing, followed by money issues.

    It seems people can eormt through a lot but cheating is just kills it, which makes sense. Since after that there ain’t much of a team left lol

    • memfree@lemmy.ml
      01·
      19 days ago

      The reddit hivemind gets triggered by the very idea of cheating. As far as I know, there was no cheating in my marriage and eventual divorce, but it didn’t matter to me if he cheated or not. It mattered to him that I didn’t cheat, so I didn’t. From my point of view, I’d have a problem if he was spending all his free time with someone else instead of helping with the house, chores, relationship, and so on, but random sex was fine by me – as long as it didn’t result in pregnancy or become a full-blown relationship.

      Years ago I read some paper about how humans have two primary and competing reproductive strategies: monogamy versus promiscuouness. It theorized that cultures tend to codify monogamy as the standard to follow because its proponents get very hostile to the promiscuous whereas the promiscuous do not much care what the monogamous do.