Yeah, you’re taking the word "Shrinks" as a action verb but I meant it as an emotional state of being. Sure, it could be something that’s done callously, but not necessarily. Nor is it gender specific. I’m talking about loneliness caused by a limited life. That’s a human emotion, not a female one exclusively. And btw, it’s (male) hubris to think that you’re being blamed when more often than not it’s the social constructs we were all born under and live with that leave us trapped and trying to deal with loneliness. After all, an illness or disability like CP, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s can shrink ones life too. Who’s fault is that?
I’ll give some examples.
A couple is married and they love each other. Everything about their relationship is good except ... he makes his living as a rancher and she’s her best self with a vibrant urban social life. Over time, the isolation wears at her and she feels withered, lonely, and depressed. Turns out, cows are not great conversationalists. The marriage has shrunken her away from her best self but it’s not his fault any more than it is hers. They both said I Do. It’s not because one of them doesn’t love the other as much, or any of that jazz. It’s just not the best life for her, and then subsequently for him either because now he has an unhappy, depressed wife.
A couple are married. She wants a small family and he wants a big one. He promises he’ll help with child care if she agrees to have more children. Then, 4 kids in she’s forced to choose between giving up her career and financial instability due to cost of child care because now she’s taking care of more kids than she ever wanted in the first place. In this case, more blame lands at his feet because he broke his word. He promised he’d do his fair share. Now her life has shrunk to the role of a wife and mother only. She’s lonely, she misses her colleagues and adult conversation/activities. Her life feels like never ending drudgery. Hello resentment, contempt, and a failing marriage.
A couple get married. All of a sudden she hates his friends and starts pitching fits whenever he spends time with them. She refuses to spend group time with a mixture of their acquaintances. She demands he spend all his time with her and her alone, doing what she wants only. In this case, let’s say it’s holding her purse while she shops all day. So much fun, right? If he complains, she threatens to leave him and/or kill herself. He starts to feel like he’s being erased, or rubbed down to nothing more than a pet or a beast of burden. He misses his friends. He misses doing fun things. He misses the fun girl she was before he married her. His life has shrunk immeasurably and he’s lost all confidence and happiness. In this case, she is greatly to blame because she’s basically holding him hostage through emotional manipulation. It’s abuse. Pure and simple.
Notice in all 3 situations, the lonely, shrunken party has the agency to leave. But how we think about love, marriage, gender roles and expectations makes it hard a lot of the time. If leaving an abusive spouse ostracizes you from your community, you’ll try to ride it out no matter how badly you’re hurting. If the state/legal process makes getting a divorce overly onerous, you’ll talk yourself out of it, even if you know it’s the best thing for you both. If children are involved, you’ll turn yourself inside out to try to give them the best if everything, even if deep down you feel like you’re dying. And so forth and so on ...
The ultimate point is that these are hard situations to go through and hard situations to deal with. For all of us. There’s "blame" to go around, but that’s not very useful in dealing with extreme loneliness. Married lonely truly is the worst kind of lonely there is, except maybe POW lonely. I can see how that would be worse.
Neither is not owning that that’s how you feel useful. Nobody can move forward, however as individuals and as couples that gets decided and falls out, until we can all honestly admit that that’s where we’re at and talk it through appropriately. That includes not getting defensive and thinking you’re being blamed for an emotion or a long term feeling of unhappiness.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Hopefully that clarifies what is meant by being shrunk.
