Question?

@Hockeydad It's very difficult to know how to respond without knowing the people involved personally.

My feeling is that as soon as an argument starts, any previous agreement can be assumed to have ended. Then the outcome of the argument is effectively the new agreement.

Of course, the same applies in future. If the argument is reopened, then it can result in yet another new agreement. I cannot say how one should proceed, but it does seem to me that the options are either to reopen the argument or to accept things as they are.

I think your questions about acceptable boundaries and too much to ask cannot be answered without more information. It is not clear what the practical purpose of these agreements was. If there was a clear, and agreed, practical purpose, then they seem reasonable to me. A person can easily say, "No, I'm not going into any bar" and "Oh, I have to make a call" if there is a concrete reason to do these things.

Charlie

Quick run down.

Married 15 years, 3 kids. But every argument or disagreement has ended her blowing up with either I should.have gotten a divorce or I hate you...things along those lines and then never resolving any of the issues. Just moving on and "forgetting".

One time she asked me to come meet her at a bar a while ago and when I got there her married friends had guys dancing all over them grinding and touching.

She has told me that she likes cash because it's easier to be sneaky. Which I think lost a bit of trust. She has multiple emails/tiktoks.

She hides, deletes search history.

We were raised differently, and her mother thinks that hiding cash and lying about things was ok and normal.

It’s about FAITH. Specifically she does not negotiate in good faith with you, with the expectation that she will honor her promises, and boundaries she agrees to. She likely just agree to those things to end the conversation (at the time) and figured she will still do everything she wanted to do and argue about it later.

So there’s no point negotiating boundaries if [either] partner isn’t going to follow through or at least try their best. For her, maybe she feels that she wants to have fun with her single friends in bars and remember what it was like to have male attention (I’m not making any judgment about her behaviour, but that’s possibly what some people miss in their marriages). Maybe the spark is gone in her marriage, maybe she misses adventures and risk taking and being young.

All of that is not any reason to break promises and boundaries with a spouse. But they might provide some insight into why she seems to behave like a rebellious teenager breaking her curfew. Point is, when two partners have equal respect for each other and want the same things, and tend to be fairly compatible, negotiating boundaries is more meaningful. But if she feels like negotiating boundaries is just a “losing” exercise where she is “losing” all her freedoms (as compared to what her girlfriends are up to/doing) then she is less likely to behave in accord with the things she promises, because in her mind “she only agreed to them because she was made to/had no option” / she didn’t want to hear about it all night etc (Maybe).

I think you both definitely need to re-evaluate what your marriage both means to you. What do you each feel is missing? What do you each want to improve? How can you make your partners happier? What did she enjoy about being in a bar with strangers dancing and grinding on each other…? If she was able to talk to you, to say ANYTHING at all and have you understand it - what would she tell you? Would she tell you she misses being single? Or that she misses romance, and hotels and dancing carefree in bars, and adventure? Would she say that she feels trapped sometimes? It’s actually in these moments that we could learn a lot about our partners, about what the “narrative” for our marriage is. Very often it’s not what we expect.

This could be another fight, or it could bring you closer to understanding each other. Sometimes it’s what we choose to say when there are NO boundaries that really define us!

Try different ways of having a conversation. If you want different outcomes you have to try something different.

CatsInTheCradle

@Hockeydad