I too wish for some sort of objective marriage-rat...

2009-01-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

I too wish for some sort of objective marriage-rating or emotion-rating device. There is just no way to tell if what I have is as good as, worse than, or better than the "right kind" of marriage.

I'll say two things:

1) That I think I have a good marriage, and it goes through phases where I feel like it's a good marriage and phases where I feel like it's not.

2) That with my first marriage, I decided it WASN'T a good marriage, and I got out of it, and I don't regret it. I didn't have any kids in that marriage, which makes it so much easier: I really could just completely remove him from my life.

I don't know you or your husband, obviously, so I ...

2009-01-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

I don't know you or your husband, obviously, so I don't know if this advice will help. So, as my uncle says, take it for what you pay for it.

I found at a certain point in my marriage that I was just going through the motions and I wondered if I'd made the wrong decision in marrying my husband. I thought I was "out of love" and struggled with exactly what you describe -- did the movies set the bar too high and I'm just petty? Or did I really miss something?

This sounds hokey, but I really believe that you have what you expect to have. And by that, I mean, if you spent your energy focusing on the bad stuff . . . after a while, you only *see* the bad stuff. But the converse is true as well. So try spending your energy on the good stuff.

I tried adjusting my thinking. When I would get in a funk and start thinking about all the things I hated about my husband and my life, I would make myself turn it around and think about some things I loved about them. And soon, the conscious realization that I had it pretty good trickled from my head to my heart. I started seeing the little things my husband does that make me love him and recognizing that even some of the things that drive me nuts are really good things. (Like his inability to clean a room without deep cleaning it -- floorboards and all -- which causes the housecleaning to take a lot longer than I sometimes want to spend on it. And when I find myself thinking, "come on, man, if we miss the baseboards in the kid's bedroom for one month it won't kill him," that positive attitude forces me to follow up with the recognition that my house is a heck of a lot cleaner than it would be without him!

Anyway, this is a ridiculously long comment to make a simple point. While your "keeping on" you may have to force yourself to look for the positives. But once you find them, that can be the spark you need to get back to not feeling like your husband's an asshole.

Then again, maybe he really is an asshole, in which case you have an entirely different problem.

Comments on Constance the 111th: Blah

I too wish for some sort of objective marriage-rat...

I don't know you or your husband, obviously, so I ...