Hello,
I’m struggling in my relationship. I don’t see a lot of posts like this when I’ve searched through here – usually it seems like it’s from the other parties perspective. But I feel like there’s certain traits in myself that I don’t like and those traits are hurting my wife.
I’m not always good at supporting her. There are times when whether it was someone not being nice at a party, or a hard day at work, or a nightmare – she is looking for support and I don’t give it to her. Sometimes I think it’s coming from a place of me trying to understand or maybe somewhat of like a bit of a debating personality and sometimes I think it’s a bit more of not having emotional capacity or a bit of a distancer inside of me pushing her away in those moments.
Additionally, I push her. I push her boundaries. She feels like I don’t listen. Like the time I was making a poster and she told me to stop but I argued for a bit or continuing certain conversations longer than she’d like or in the worst case scenario her feeling like I didn’t listen to a no and still tried to engage sexually in some way…
These two parts inside me the distancer and pusher – I hate them. I am in therapy and trying to understand where they came from – but therapy just feels slow. We’re also started couples counseling recently.
The thing is we got married kind of quickly. She was an aupair and we took a leap of faith and got married only after a year or so. We’ve been together about 3. We had another fight semi recently and for the last week or two she’s just been really distant. She doesn’t want to talk about her new seminar she started taking on gentrification because we had a conversation about gentrification a few months ago that she didn’t feel listened in. Fuck she doesn’t really want to talk to me in general. It feels like her trust is nearly broken and she has started asking questions like “Do you think we’d still be together if we weren’t married?”
Idfk. Its hard. I love her so much and I don’t want to lose her, but I hate that I’ve hurt her. And it’s fair that she’s losing trust asking me to change and not seeing it. I’m working on it – I really want to show up for her different in these moments – but it just feels like it’s going slowly. And tbh with myself these have been issues that came up in other relationships too, and I’ve been working on for years now with different therapists.
I hate that I’ve hurt her and I hate that I can’t promise I’ll never hurt her again. Idk – I think maybe I’m just looking for some hope. Has anyone’s marriage or relationship survived issues similar? Has anyone here ever successfully changed for their partner? I feel like if I don’t change quicker I’m going to lose her.
TL;DR Looking for some success stories of actually changing for your partner/getting over and healing from past trama and hope healing trust with a partner who seems to have one foot out the door.
Comments
Never change for another person.
Change for yourself, or not at all.
If the person that she wants you to be…or even the person she needs you to be…is not a person that you yourself want to be, then if you try to be that person for her, one of two things will happen:
You’ll make changes, but they’ll be under duress (basically, “If I don’t change these things about myself, I’ll lose her, so I’ma do them even though I don’t really want to be that person”), so your motivation won’t be the change, your motivation will be “keeping her around”, and (as an indicator of that) “making sure she isn’t expressing upset about the person she wants me to be”, so basically once you make those pro-forma changes, and she stops being upset that you aren’t living up to her expectations, she’ll stop putting pressure on you, and with the pressure off, you’ll tend to revert to being the person you actually want to be, she’ll notice and wonder why you’ve “changed”…and you’ll be right back where you started, or
You will make the changes (still under duress), but you’ll cling to them long-term because you are keeping pressure on yourself to “not let her down”…but the person you are having to be to “not let her down” and the person you actually want to be are not the same person, and so that will create stress, and eventually you will come to resent her for “not allowing you to be the person you want to be”.
If you have to change into someone who are not, in order to be the person that someone else needs you to be, then the two of you have a fundamental incompatibility, and there is no healthy, workable, long-lasting path forward for the relationship.
You need to be exactly the person you want to be. All day. Every day.
If that’s not the person she wants to be with, then the two of you are not compatible partners.
she was asking for support and you were challenging her? about what, the fact that you thought whatever was happening to her wasn’t a big deal? knock it off and just support her how she’s asking, it isn’t rocket science