Posted on 02/16/2011 2:06:45 PM PST by wmfights
End of story? The wife had an affair because she "wasn't happy", they lost their business, he lost his country home, is facing bankruptcy at the same time he is working like a madman to pay for college for his 2 kids. He will divorce her eventually, but is keeping married FOR HER SAKE as she doesn't have medical coverage any other way. The funny thing is, I don't think she even realizes what she threw away or how precarious her position is.
What's the DEAL with women now-a-days?
I had to say “If you drop your dog off by the side of the road and drive away you can't say you “lost” him.”
But that is OK, cuz this old dog still knows a few tricks! ;)
Thank you both for your input.
I don't know why most women don't "get" the economic side of marriage. I've been blessed to be married for 25 years. We've had more good years then bad, but some of the bad ones would break your heart. However, because my wife had faith in me she stuck with me through all of it. I put her through law school and when she finished she stepped in and started running the first business I started so I could get involved in commercial real estate. As a result we were able to live on the income from our first business and save the income from the real estate.
My MIL nagged us incessantly to buy a house in the suburbs. Instead when the opportunity came we had the money and bought apartment buildings. My wife kept running our first business and we bought several more buildings. Now 25 years later we see the rewards of our efforts and willingness to take calculated risks.
I would never have been as motivated, or able to do all this without her and vice versa. Why more women don't see this I don't know.
As the blues song says “when there ain't no lovin’ there ain't no getting along”.
I suspect women are more susceptible to peer pressure then men. They really don't understand how much a man will do for them if they just show some appreciation, support and loyalty. If a woman does that for a man, most men would die for them.
After a few years under one roof, Willy Bill and Cupcake no longer get along well. Part of it is Willy Bill's fault, and he knows it. Part of it is Cupcake's fault, but she doesn't know it.
I can't count the divorces I've seen over the years, and I've never once, not even once, play out like that. Typically, it's been a friend that comes to me with the "She's leaving me, I had no idea" cry, and I'm torn between offering sympathy and screaming, "Are you ------ blind? How could you not see it." in his face? Men are horrible at getting to a comfortable place where we sit in front of the tv, a book, or the computer and really don't pay wives any attention at all until bedtime. Hell, I've probably been guilty of it, and I'm consciously aware of the pitfall.
A good friend of mine credits me for helping save his marriage with a simple, but brutally honest statement. He was relating that his wife had just dropped the cliche'd "We never go out." when I interrupted with, "That's because you don't."
“if they just show some appreciation, support and loyalty. If a woman does that for a man, most men would die for them.”
Any man worthy of the name would. But appreciation support and loyalty are, of course, a two way street. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Perhaps the best known series of sociological data is the General Social Survey (GSS), which contains data on religion and marital outcomes. Below I present the percentage of ever-married respondents who had ever divorced or were currently separated by religious affiliation and frequency of attendance.
Divorce rates by religious affiliation & attendance. General Social Survey, 2000, 2002, 2004 (N= 5,963)
58% Non-active Black Protestants
54% Non-active Evangelicals
51% No religious beliefs (e.g., atheists, agnostics)
48% Non-active other religions
48% All non-Christians
47% Active Black Protestants
42% All non-Christian religions
42% Non-active Mainline Protestants
41% All Christians
41% Non-active Catholics
39% Jewish
38% Active other religions
34% Active Evangelicals
32% Active Mainline Protestants
23% Active Catholics
Source: http://www.norc.org/projects/gensoc.asp
“”Christians divorce at roughly the same rate as the world!” It’s one of the most quoted stats by Christian leaders today. And it’s perhaps one of the most inaccurate. “
I don’t know either way, but the VAST MAJORITY of marriages in the world do not end in divorce. Many are not pretty, but the women and men generally stick together.
It is only in the ‘liberated’ West where women run out on their men (or vice versa, to a smaller extent though) because the men just aren’t perfect. And if the little kids get traumatized, what the hell, who cares.
bttt
Do these stats factor in the people who are already divorced when they become practicing Christians?
Mine was different. Mine was very much like the fred article. A lot of guy’s situations are.
I was going to abuse classes, even though I didn’t abuse. I was working hard to do everything I could. She withheld sex for 14 months. She said I had an anger problem, yet she got furious with me for NOT getting angry at stuff. If it had not been so serious it would have been comical.
I remember going to the learning to live class. There was a mens class and a womans class. The book the men used was brutal. It showed all the ways men can be abusive and helped us to identify where we, personally, were being abusive to our wives and familes.And it should be. After all, the men get the book nailing them for what they are doing, and the women get the book nailing THEM for where they are going wrong. So both sides can fix the part they control - themself.
It helped us guys to see how we were being abusive without knowing we were, often based on interpreting the way the family acts toward us. I really worked hard to try to determine where I may have been blind to my own abuse. But then one class it hit me, my family treated my WIFE the way they treat an abusive husband.
Then the teacher said he was concerned that I was repressing memories of my parents spanking me, and repressing memories of my parents never arguing. I was concerned too. I only remembered one “spanking” event in the third grade, and NO arguing. I called my mother after the class and asked her about it. She said that she remembered only spanking me once, and described the very event I remembered. And she said they NEVER argued in front of us. They always took it to a bedroom or somewhere we could not hear.
And then I found out that the women were using the same book we were.
My ex’s mind was poisoned. The class was good for actual abusive relationships where the man is the abuser. For all others, it was a shotgun against a fly. It actually did more harm than good.
You paint with a broad brush my friend, regarding things you really know nothing about.
BTW, years after the event the husbands of women that were friends with my ex came and personally apologized for believing what were, as time demonstrated, obviously lies. My ex goes through various boyfriends and, according to my daughters, they fight continuously. This, of course, is what she really wanted, since her parents fought continuously, and my style with her was to go “Mr. Spock” when she tried to ramp it up.
Meanwhile, my wife of 13 years is from a family where the mother respected the father and the father truly loved his wife and treated her so - and still does. We are each other’s best friend. We simply don’t fight. It’s not how we roll. We listen to each other. We apologize when we are wrong. We forgive each other.
My experience with my ex made me realize there is one thing that every person should think about before marrying another person. If I had, I would never have married my ex. The thing to think about: If you cannot remember your fiance ever offering a heartfelt apology for something they have done, RUN, don’t walk from that person, because they will blame all the things that go wrong in their life on you.
It is what my ex did. As with Willy Bill, I knew some of it was my fault. She was simply sitting back and waiting for me to be her lap dog. I learned that is not how a good marriage survives. It is the relationship she has had with every other boyfriend since.
BTW, I disagree with Fred on most of his new stuff, but before about five years ago the guy and I agreed a lot. I especially like his “Suicide of Marlboro Man”.
>>A good friend of mine credits me for helping save his marriage with a simple, but brutally honest statement. He was relating that his wife had just dropped the cliche’d “We never go out.” when I interrupted with, “That’s because you don’t.”<<
Several friends were giving me advice at the time. One said, and I am not making this up, to do whatever she says. He is one of the guys that, years later, apologized.
I remember when our pastor, in a counseling session, quietly brought up the fact that withholding sex is a form of sexual abuse. She was spitting mad and refused to talk to him after that.
Oh, and during the celebant 14 months, I dated her, bought flowers, bought jewelry, took out the trash on command, bought a MOTOR HOME, and on and on.
She complained that the flowers had brown edges on a couple. I kid you not.
Excellent point. Did you ever check up on the particulars of that class? There's something odd about its results. It wasn't run by someone connected to the lawyer, was it?! Obviously I watch too many mystery programs. A married person taking a class with "learning to love" in its title is probably in marital trouble already.
A little courting for as long as ye both shall live can keep a marriage out of harm’s way.
I agree.
>>A married person taking a class with “learning to love” in its title is probably in marital trouble already.<<
The problem is that the class actually CREATED marital problems. For example, did you know that if you and your wife have an argument and you make up and buy her roses, the roses as simply one phase in the cycle of abuse?
At first she was taking the class to become a lay teacher to help couples in trouble. She would come home and tell me all the ways husbands abuse their wives (but curiously, she never mentioned how wives abuse their husbands). One day I finally said that they have so broadened the word “abuse” as to take away its meaning. It must be broken into different types of abuse. And according to the definitions she was getting from the class, the only person that ever lived that did not abuse was Jesus.
That would not be a problem, normally, but she couldn’t separate different levels of abuse into different categories. It was all “abuse”, be it snapping at your spouse or beating her bloody. And that is the core of why everything fell apart.
Heck, knowing I am not perfect, I took much of what I learned there as an opportunity to fix things about me that I might otherwise not have been aware needed to be fixed. I even read “The Dance of Anger” and learned some stuff.
In my instance, the “Willybill/Cupcake” scenario was spot on. I was married to that woman for over 20 years and could not remember a single time she apologized for anything. It is sad, because it did create problems with my daughters that they still have to deal with, but you do what you can with the hand you’ve been dealt.
My oldest hated my wife and me for years. Now she comes by whenever she can, confides in Mrs. Robroy about very detailed stuff, and actually may be going to Kentucky when we move there.
Our youngest was failing school miserably She was ten when the divorce happened), though she has always had very good people skills. Well, Mrs. Robroy started tutoring her on math when we had her for the every other weekend and she eventually started coming over on nights that we did not officially have custody. I then successfully represented myself to get custody when she was a sophomore in high school. At the time she was in the “special remedial” math class. When she graduated from high school, the teacher came up to us and said that she was one of only a very few students he had ever been handed that actually got so much better at math that they equaled and surpassed many of the “normal” students. And the PE teacher said she was one of the two best students he ever had the pleasure of working with. She also became captain of the girls varsity basketball team and “concert master” of the high school orchestra.
And now she has graduated from Seattle University with a degree in Civil engineering, specializing in concrete, and her team won a bridge building competition that enabled her team to travel to the east coast to compete at a higher level. She is doing post grad work at UW right now and has an internship with the City of Seattle traffic department that had oer 4,000 applicants.
And she was lead singer and acoustic guitar/fiddle in my band.
I give credit to her, but also my wife who enabled her to get through the crap and believe in herself. And it was VERY hard. She left home by crawling out her bedroom window at midnight on her 18th birthday and within a year came back and articulated why she was wrong and why we were right and thanked Mrs. Robroy for all the help and patience. And it wasn’t about money. We were broke. She worked her way through college, getting the loans only in the last year.
Nobody will read this, but I had to vent.
This will sound crass, but I mean it. Anything approaching a month without sex, without an obvious reason such as grieving, illness, and I’m going to start assuming that spouse is getting it someplace else. I would have been long gone before we even got close to 14 months.
>>This will sound crass, but I mean it. Anything approaching a month without sex, without an obvious reason such as grieving, illness, and I’m going to start assuming that spouse is getting it someplace else. I would have been long gone before we even got close to 14 months.<<
Yeah, I hear you. Thing is, for me, divorce was not an option. I love what one woman I worked with said when her husband divorced her. She said, “I tale responsibility for some of the problems in my marriage, but not the divorcee, because I didn’t to it.”
Same thing with me. I believe that all people are loveable and hateable, and when you marry someone “until death do us part” you are making a commitment to them that you will love them. And whether or not you love them is totally your responsibility.
In the case of mine, I don’t think she was “getting it somewhere else”. I think she was one of those people that just didn’t need it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.