Over the past few years, I have shown progressively less patience with a number of Wife's behaviors that I wish she would outgrow. To name only a few:
- Wife has a very hard time accepting personal responsibility. Every single thing that goes wrong in her life is somebody else's fault. This is ironic, because in the abstract Wife talks a lot about the importance of personal responsibility as a virtue. But there it is.
- Since nothing in her life is ever her own fault, Wife spends a lot of time being a victim. She whines over and over that she is a victim, that she is helpless, that shit just happens to her worse than what happens to anybody else. This gives her room -- and, apparently, a license -- to complain incessantly about everything.
- Wife spends a lot of time dissecting the faults of others. That should be pretty easy, since after all Those Others are responsible for everything that goes wrong in Wife's life. And it does seem to be one of her favorite pastimes.
- Wife lies, to herself and to me. This, too, exacerbates her sense of helplessness, I think.
- Wife panics over any kind of imperfection. Of course the world is imperfect, but she deludes herself into believing that imperfection is intolerable, and that she will be shot at dawn if anybody ever discovers how imperfect she is.
- And, of course, each of these points feeds all the others.
As I say, I have been showing progressively less patience with these behaviors for some time now. I am less likely to make excuses for her. I am less likely to coddle her. I am less likely to buy into her opinions when they are utterly childish. And I am correspondingly more likely to suggest to her that there is a better way to live, one that may involve less short-term reward but that is guaranteed to be better for her in the long run. And her answer is generally "What's in it for me -- today?"
But what this means -- long story short -- is that I am trying to change her. I know it is a commonplace in the therapy business that one spouse cannot change another, because only you alone can make you change. And you will avoid doing it until the costs of failing to change are higher and more painful than the costs of change itself. Since those costs are pretty damned high, fundamental change is not common.
All the same, I am trying to change her because I believe that the way she lives today feeds her depression, makes it worse, and poisons her life. If she could overcome these behaviors (and others like them) and replace them with their opposites, I truly believe she would be a lot happier. What are my professional credentials, to stand behind such an opinion? That's simple -- I have watched her every day for a quarter century. I do not know how any professional's expertise could be better than that.
I should add that Boyfriend 5 makes no such demands on Wife. For him, she is just fine the way she is; and when she complains about how I have no respect for her (or whatever it is today), he jumps right in digging at me and throwing dirt in my direction. At some level, he may see her as a wounded puppy who needs extra care. Or maybe they are both wounded puppies, and therefore just right for each other.
This may be, though, why Wife thinks I am trying to destroy her. If you identify "her" with the whining, lying, neurotic basket-case who logs into IM each morning to chat with her boyfriend, then yes, I guess that is someone I would like to destroy. I want to replace her with someone better, stronger, more calm and assured, and happier. But from this side of the chasm that may be too hard to see.
Once long ago, Wife made a promise to Heaven, as part of her spiritual development and training, never to keep still -- to stop changing -- but always to remake herself closer to what Heaven wants from her. She promised, in effect, to die every day -- die, that is, to her old self so that the new self could be poured into her. I don't claim to be any kind of wise man. I am certainly no enlightened soul or religious leader! But somehow, from my mundane and pedestrian perspective here, it looks rather as if Wife has forgotten that oath or renounced it. Therefore when I try to encourage her to change in ways that would help her over the long run, she fears that I am trying to "destroy her". And she wants to run away to Boyfriend 5, who "understands" her better than I do because he has never tried to challenge her to be better. Boyfriend 5, like Boyfriend 4 before him, is "easier" than I am. She talks about our communication problems, which are real, but I think that more of it is this stuff.
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