Oh, I’d say she solved her problem.

I had to take a while to respond before talking personal stuff. I’m not coming at this as a women vs. men angle. So if that’s what you’re thinking, let’s not stick with that notion, k? It’s about ideas of what marriage partners are for as well as the roles they play. In my case it was my parents having different expectations of marriage. My dad wanted a partner, a buddy to do things with. My mom wanted a traditional marriage where she was left at home and he provides her with an income. She would take care of his domestic needs but otherwise didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Or even talk to him beyond what was absolutely necessary.

Long story short. He was incredibly lonely. He stayed because of us kids, marriage was incredibly isolating for him. He loved us and spent time with us but he needed adult socialization he didn’t get too. He ended up hiding out at work or in the garage/garden as much as possible. By the time I’m in college and he’s waiting on my sibling to finish high school he’s taken up skydiving again. Every weekend. And all week long he’s asking himself, “what if I don’t pull the cord?”. He told me later, right before he left. Don’t think all that depression and stress hasn’t negatively affected his health too.

So this isn’t a gender issue. Either could find themselves in that position. It happens when your partner doesn’t see you other than what they can get out of you(a role you fill) but they don’t see your humanity. And it’s not because they can’t or aren’t able, it’s because they simply don’t care to. They’ve already got things ordered just how they like them, they don’t want to share, change, or expand. They don’t even blink at how you feel about it.

Is that selfish? Was my mom obtuse, willfully? Yep. You betcha. I love my mom so much. I do. She’s hard to deal with or live with because everything is so one-sided. There’s no room for anyone else to sparkle the slightest bit outside her perception of who they are. That’s hard to say, but it’s true. I love her still.

The term obtuse here is not a bit of verbal trickery. I use it because it is my belief that this particular type of selfishness is a deliberate insensitivity born of narrow-minded beliefs or outright apathy. There’s also a level of contempt that your partner would want more. In my mom’s case, it was traditional gender roles. You always hear the obtuseness in the excuses and dismissals after a blow up of deep pain or an attempt to do something nice, like cooking dinner, that steps on your narrow mindedness…. Your father’s being dramatic AGAIN. I don’t know why he has to take his frustrations out on me, IIIIII didn’t do anything. He always makes a fuss. Why does he have to work so much? He doesn’t make any extra for it. What does that have to do with me? He’s just better at that than I am. I don’t like how he does X, it gets in my way and he makes too much noise. I don’t want to have to clean up his mess. Why can’t he just do his thing and leave me alone?

So yeah, in the author’s article it resonated with me pretty strongly. She’s expressing some of the same emotions my dad did looking back after he left. Like he was a political prisoner who’s finally been set free after decades in a hole, being punished for no crime but saying “I do" and trying to stick it out. It’s the same tone of someone who’s had a death scare and now knows they’re going to live — a new lease on life.

As for all the other stuff you said, that’s mostly gender garbage. Kindly, and sorry. So I’m going to choose not to dig into that as it’s like herding cats, frankly. Except for this one… Women aren’t inherently better at relationship stuff and not all women want to cuddle or whatever. We just practice at it more on average (though clearly, for some, no amount of practice is going to help without deep personal work beforehand) because it’s necessary to maintain the family. Super glue isn’t gonna cut it as a bonding agent here. Only willing interest, inspection of all the moving parts, and proper maintenance will keep that engine humming. But families aren’t a single prop engine, they’re a dual prop engine, so it can’t be one person being interested and engaged and the other being apathetic and aloof or annoyed. It takes two, working in tandem for the plane to fly true. Things are shaky when only one of those engines is operating. Just saying.