Stuck in awful marriage

Parent Cafe
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Part of the problem is the unrealistic expectations that go along with this Love Story view of marriage. Most of the time, it’s more about keeping a ship afloat and operational and who is going to do what to make that happen than it is about candlelight and flowering meadows. The unfortunate couple, having gone in with the expectation of perpetual romance and no idea how the ship is going to run, often runs aground.</p>

<p>This is also related to the reason marriages are just as likely to fail if the couple has been living together beforehand, in contradiction to their argument that living together is just a practice for the marriage. </p>

<p>Marriage is probably the most complicated interpersonal relationship in our society, but couples are not given much help in establishing workable relations either in the beginning or in the long term.</p>

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<p>I think the best “practice” for marriage is building and sustaining long-term relationships with varied people and having friends and family who do so as well. It helps to see others with give and take relationships which are healthy and worked at by everyone involved so that at the first obstacles folks don’t just “throw in the towel.” It is too easy and bad for everyone involved where folks just keep chasing for the perfect relationship rather than working with the person they’ve committed to. </p>

<p>Of course, abuse, addictions, drugs and violence would be absolute deal-breakers for me and many others. I admire folks who can take these on and battle through them as well. Lots of collateral damage in those situations.</p>

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<p>The article is interesting, but the author is primarily concerned with the two-thirds of divorces that occur in low-conflict marriages. That is not what the OP described.</p>

<p>As for the children, as a child of divorce, I don’t think you can assume what the kids know, which outcome they would prefer, or which decision would cause them the least pain–especially when more than one child is involved. That’s part of what makes these situations so hard.</p>

<p>In my family, I was aware for years that my parents were miserable–but my younger siblings were not. Why didn’t my high-school age sibling notice anything? I don’t know–kids are self-absorbed and not really concerned with their parents’ marriages, I guess. I felt relieved when my parents split up (at least at the time), but it was much tougher on my siblings. So what should my parents have done? There wasn’t any easy answer.</p>

<p>I think where kids are concerned, the decision to split up or not (assuming it’s made carefully, as sadmomof3 is clearly doing) is ultimately less important than how it’s handled, because the kids will have a response either way–how could they not? Parents don’t need to second-guess their decisions or feel guilty, they just need to pay attention–the same as they would for any other family issue a child faces (job loss, financial problems, death of a parent, illness of a family member, etc.). </p>

<p>My siblings and I always did well in school, and we didn’t act out, use drugs, or show any outward signs of distress. So everyone thought we were fine and that was the end of it. Mostly we were–but a little more conversation and a recognition that we might need a little help (e.g. family therapy) would have gone a long way.</p>

<p>(And contrary to the statistics in the article, including my half-sib there’s been only one divorce among us, and we’re all currently happily married. Being a child of divorce is only one risk factor for divorce.)</p>

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<p>Zoosermom, I never said abandon her kids, or not prepare. If you read my posts I say it’s important to prepare, financially emotionally, etc and if she has to wait it outnwhile kids are still minors, then that what she may need to do. But in the meantime, find some tools to getthrough the day to day living with her unstable husband.</p>

<p>And ps not every marriage is worth trying to save. If one party is a constant jerk, if and when you can move on, and in many cases it’s after kids are in college, then do whatyou need to do to survive.</p>

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<p>Yes, I know several women who divorced their Hs (who were NOT nice people by the end of the marriage). The women all seem to be better for it and have maintained close relationships with their kids, though all of the kids reacted differently.</p>

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<p>“Say your daughter came home with a bf like the ops husband. Would you suggest she stick it out?”</p>

<p>I’d do everything I could to try and convince her she was making a mistake. How would I react if she came home and said, “Mom, I’m in love – with heroin! I’ve decided to become a junkie”? I wouldn’t feel any pressure to express approval and acceptance. I’d tell her I was terrified for her, that my heart was breaking from the pain I saw in her future, and that I would do anything in my power to help her make a different choice.</p>

<p>Speaking as someone who’s more likely to be the engaged daughter in this scenario, the above is what I hope my family and friends will do if I ever fall under the spell of a jerk.</p>

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<p>An analogy: I have heard if you put a frog into cool water in an open pot, and gradually turn up the heat that you can actually boil the water without the frog jumping out. The frog gets used to the gradual, degree by degree change in temperature and doesn’t do anything to save itself.</p>

<p>People generally don’t stay with someone who is abusive at the beginning of the relationship. But if one partner slowly ramps up the abuse over a period of years, the other partner may just stay with them well past the point that makes any sense. You just get used to it, and having accepted it once, it becomes easier and easier to accept more and more crap, especially when there are third parties (i.e. kids) to consider.</p>

<p>OP is very brave to have started looking at her relationship with objectivity. It can be pretty hard to look at what you’ve come to accept over the years. It can actually be kind of embarrassing to admit to others that you have accepted bad treatment.</p>

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<p>People who think it’s easy to throw in the towel have never thrown in the towel.</p>

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<p>Using a rough analogy, getting out of a marriage is like a physics statics problems, where you have some combination of forces on an object and what happens depends on which way the forces sum up to go. So if the forces that indicate divorce outweight staying, it is probably better to divorce.</p>

<p>The problem with the analogy is there is nothing simple as a physics problem here, a lot of the ‘forces’ are difficult to resolve or figure out, it is why working things through is important, because often you don’t know even where to begin summing things up to decide, and then you need to be able to look at how to handle whatever the decision is, whether it is to remain or not, on for example figure out the consequences of divorce. </p>

<p>In terms of why divorce became more common, another poster hit the nail on the head, it was because it became a lot easier to divorce, not only did the laws change to allow people to more easily divorce or divorce at all, but also it had to do with women not being forced to stay because their opportunities were so limited. By the 60’s and 70’s a lot more women who got married had had lives outside their family, they had gone to college or had job skills and because of the changes in discrimination law, women started having opportunities at a variety of professions, not just the secretary and teacher of prior generations, and when they married, they had had the opportunity to date and see what the world was, and more importantly, to feel if they got married they could support themselves if it didn’t work out. </p>

<p>On the other hand, I think the pendulum swung too far the other way, I think people because they could simply when things got rough said “see ya” in far too many numbers, rather then try and make things work. Someone I know who is a therapist who is skilled with issues of sexuality and relationships had done some work on people who live in alternate relationships, people into poly relationships, dom/sub relationships and so forth, and one of the things she said was that people in ‘regular’ marriages could learn a lot, that those kind of relationships require all kinds of negotiating and navigation skills to even start let alone work for any length of time and the people in them know that and expect to work, whereas many people in regular marriages kind of expect to let it ‘flow’, find their soulmate and everything will be going downhill, and it isn’t, it takes work to keep people happy as time goes on. She said that when the floodgates opened on divorce, people who didn’t have the skillset to negotiate their relationship, to get what they needed, saw divorce as the only option.</p>

<p>I read something recently that was interesting was that the children of divorce from the era when it became common (1970’s, 80’s) themselves are showing major reluctance to get divorced, and that in some ways the stigma of being divorced is greater then it has been in a long while among them (I think the article was in the NY Times). One of the big differences is younger generations are getting married later, so it could be that other then the Kardashian family they actually have figured out what they want and have held out for what they want…</p>

<p>For those interested in the reference to Harville Hendrix, the book I am referring to is ‘Getting the love you deserve’.</p>

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<p>For what it’s worth, two of my friends had S’s who married women whom these moms despised. They did their best to bite their tongue and now, wonder of wonder after several years, have managed to have decent relationships with these women. Sorry, this is slightly off topic, tho I believe both of them did have a DOL who sounds somewhat like the controling H of the OP.</p>

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<p>re: spotting the toxic boyfriend and warning your daughter – these people are very good at pouring on the charm in public (like OP’s husband). They reserve the abuse when they’re one on one with their victim. Chances are, family would not be able to spot any clues to their behavior (and neither would the unsuspecting girlfriend) in an initial meeting or over a brief social visit like Thanksgiving or Christmas.</p>

<p>All you can do is tell your child to trust their gut. Someone may look good, be charming, be outwardly successfuly, but if your gut tells you to run, run.</p>

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<p>Ewwww about the frog, megmo. But good analogy. People/creatures acclimate to situations and seem to tolerate the changes. It becomes “normal”. Not good, not okl, but predictable.</p>

<p>Forgive me if I am wrong, but I thought the OP said in one of the very first posts that older step child is grown and married, and the younger kids (HS and MS age) would soon, if not already, be old enough to make their own choice re: which parent to live with and there would not be a custody battle. I don’t recall seeing that the kids would be left behind with the dad if OP moved away to another state. Sounds like dad will be a jerk if divorce is pursued, but sounds like he isn’t the nicest person already.</p>

<p>Am hopeful that the OP will feel empowered to do what is best for herself and her kids.</p>

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<p>Snowball, who said it was supposed to be easy? There is absolutely nothing easy about leaving a marriage. But many do find happiness after getting through it. Despite the statistics on second marriages, I’ve seen many mature, thoughtful, smart women I know find much greater happiness in second chapters. I did.</p>

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<p>The frog-in-hot-water thing is a myth, thankfully: [snopes.com:</a> Slow Boiled Frog](<a href=“http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp]snopes.com:”>Critter Country Archives | Snopes.com)</p>

<p>However, it does make for an excellent metaphor about the effects of positive punishment. Dog trainers know that if you punish a dog for something, it better be immediately effective, because if it’s just a mild punishment, you can actually teach the dog to tolerate more and more punishment. </p>

<p>The Milgram experiment might be more apropos here: [Milgram</a> experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment]Milgram”>Milgram experiment - Wikipedia) It’s the experiment that showed that people will do harm to others when ordered to do so, even if they feel badly about doing it.</p>

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<p>Or Marty Seligman’s research on learned Helplessness – also very a propos
[Learned</a> Helplessness](<a href=“http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html]Learned”>http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html)
[Learned</a> helplessness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness]Learned”>Learned helplessness - Wikipedia)</p>

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<p>I can answer the what would do if the bf seemed like this from personal experience. My sibling had a fiancee I thought was like this. Before the wedding I suggested premarital counseling. she told me he wouldn’t go. I told her that would be a deal breaker for me. They did get married. I kept my mouth shut. Eventually when he turned from verbal abuse to grabbing her arm a couple of times and she felt he was so out of control that he could do the same to their daughter she got out of the marriage. It was a long difficult process. She has been divorced for years and still has mh issues.<br>
The point is you can offer your opinion and express concern but you don’t control other adults…even adult children. I can’t begin to express how painful the situation still is in our family. I haven’t posted much advice to the OP on this thread because I don’t feel I know enough about her specific situation but I certainly have empathy and wish her lots of courage and strength</p>

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<p>“People generally don’t stay with someone who is abusive at the beginning of the relationship.”</p>

<p>I don’t agree with this. Yes, some of these abusers are outwardly charming and start slow. Yes, some are nice to friends/family and reserve the abuse for private time. But that’s not the only pattern. Others are creeps from the word go, and it’s obvious to everyone but the creep’s lover. For whatever reason, some people feel drawn to a controlling type, and they DO stay with the person who’s abusive at the beginning. They feel flattered by the creep’s obsessive attention and his jealousy. The abusers I know best are in this category.</p>

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In the beginning H was never abusive or mean in front of other people, his family, etc. But later on he would say meaner and meaner things right in front of his family. Maybe he felt that because they just pretended it wasn’t happening it meant they approved or at least didn’t disapprove. </p>

<p>He often did this thing in arguments where he would say “You should do X. Ask anybody and they will tell you that you should do X.” He would appeal to this vague “Everyone” who would agree with him, so obviously I had to be wrong. Sometimes it was “my family feels sorry for me, they think you’re a joke” yada, yada. So it wouldn’t be surprising to me if he just saw his family as being completely on his side and thus wasn’t concerned about how his abuse might look to them.</p>

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<p>One of the best books I’ve ever read on the subject of telling whether someone is ‘marriageable’ is:</p>

<p>“Are You the One for Me?: Knowing Who’s Right and Avoiding Who’s Wrong” by
Barbara De Angelis</p>

<p>There usually are warning signs, subtle but nonetheless they are often there. It’s easy to dismiss things that are slightly ‘off’ or justify them in our minds when we are dating someone we think we want to marry. The boyfriend who calls us constantly - he’s just crazy about me. The girlfriend who flips off another driver - she’s just had a bad day. The man who has kids from a previous marriage that he rarely sees - it’s his first wife’s fault. The bf who has to habe all his shoes lined up just right - he’s just quirky.</p>

<p>Biggest warning sign of all is when someone wants to get married right away (or even of both parties are pushing it). That in and of itself signals tons of issues, not the least that the person is ‘waiting’ so they can let down their guard and be their true selves. It takes a long time and seeing a person in a lot of different situations to know enough about them to be able to judge their true character.</p>

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<p>One really important thing to me is how people treat others who serve them (e.g. cashiers, waitstaff, folks at hotels, cleaners, clerical staff, civil servants, etc.) If they ignore them or appear to enjoy having power over them, I steer clear. I like people who treat everyone like a human with feelings, doing their best job under the circumstances.) </p>

<p>I also agree its important to see people in multiple settings, especially with folks whom have known them for a long time (family, long-term friends, etc.) to REALLY get to know them. If they seem to have no friends or long term relationships, that also sets off warning bells for me.</p>