givingitashot Member Profile

...See more I'm hoping to hear from someone who has been in a marriage a long time. My stage of life and relationship is so far removed from dating...I can't even imagine being with another person or even wanting to be (lol, kind of). What I really want from marriage is a partnership that produces a loving growth environment for our kids. I want spiritual and emotional stability, damn it. We've been married 20 years. It has been hard since the first day. When we met we could both pass for achievers, or had SOMEthing that passed for maturity (at least by somebody's standards, because I often heard how "smart" we were) but emotionally we were each big fat babies. In this sense we were "made for each other," and we've spent the past 20 years "refining" each other by emotionally knocking the corners off each others' egos. We have both acknowledged, along the way, that we are pretty much jerks, and there's probably no one else out there that would have put up with either of us this long. The bigger problem, beside us frequently making each other miserable, is that our kids have to live with us. And, lately, I've realized that I've developed a "go-to" response to my husband's jerkier outbursts,and it is depressed ideation. I feel trapped, paralyzed, and am just a big downer after he decides to be irrationally and "unexpectedly" difficult. My days of wallowing in despair end up affecting my kids of course. I didn't want to get divorced. He and I are both the products of messed up marriages, and like a lot of people we wanted to do better than our parents did. I'm here, though, at this site, because I feel paralyzed. I would love to hear some wisdom and encouragement.

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