My wife and I have a baby and a toddler who take an absurd amount of energy every day, my wife and my family can’t stand each other, so I effectively don’t have an immediate family, but the catch is my wife is not a nice person.
So I’ve given up my family for a person who is rude, demanding, impatient, doesn’t show empathy, and is extremely controlling, but shows a nice face to everyone else.
The thought of divorce makes me sick to my stomach because of how difficult of a process it is, trying to explain all the changes to my toddler, how much harder solo parenting is, and being in a marriage and a home had a ton of financial and practical benefits, but I’m just so tired and lonely and sad.
I’m in therapy and we’re in couples therapy, but she started pulling away the first time the therapist challenged her so I don’t have any hope for genuine change.
It’s just a Groundhog day of exhaustion, loneliness, and misery, and the only person left in my life i could lean on is at the core of the problems. I’m not going to kill myself, but things are so dark right now.
The reason it’s so damn hard to believe none of out is conscious is that she easily, rapidly identifies the exact same behavioral in her mom, and i have told her repeatedly and clearly what she is doing and examples that directly reflect those behaviors she’s pointed out in her mom.
That, coupled with the fact that she is not stupid, I’d say a decent bit smarter than her mom, just makes it so hard. She either has an ENORMOUS blind spot regarding a ton of her own behavior, to the point where she is utterly incapable of analyzing her own behavior critically, or there’s some degree of conscious awareness. Both are equally unacceptable in my mind.
As for the repeating stuff, I could try that, but I’m 98% sure that the moment I did, she’d repeat it how she BELIEVES she said it, which is perfectly nicely. Again, either she’s utterly unaware of how nasty she is, or she does know and is lying about it.
One vaguely related fact that does support the supermassive blind spot theory is that for our entire relationship she has insisted she has curly hair. Not wavy, curly. Now, the reality is that she is a Caucasian redhead, with unambiguously straight hair, so to watch her vehemently disagree with me when we’re both looking at what is to me a fact that is so obvious and undeniable, is bizarre