W2BHA, thank you for sharing how your approach to marriage had to change in order to R. This raised a question for me. So often it is said not to expect a partner to change. You recognized this in your post, and then said that if he didn’t want to change into the husband you needed, it would be his loss and no R, right?
So does that approach cover changes a WS needs to make to overcome their fixated, disordered personality traits? Traits they must have possessed when you met, but you never understood how pervasive or persistent they would be? Is it even reasonable to try this approach and expect a miraculous change in such deep seated, brain wiring-type issues?
My list, would include a husband who didn’t perceive everything as if he was occupying his own little space capsule, solo in the universe, with no instinct for empathy, no ability to perceive me as a separate individual, etc., almost as though he were autistic. Or severely PD. Nobody has been able to help him, and he has little felt need to work on this.
At this stage of a lengthy, unhealed “marriage” that involved EI, and his life history of the same, even if I made a list of what I wanted in my life, his psychological impediment, a deliberate refusal to be intimate or adapt to being in a world that includes another real live person, keeps us “stuck.” Yet he “wishes he could change.”
I have repeated been told by real life admirers of my talented WS to accept that “this is as good as it gets, men like him aren’t capable of such fundamental change. It is just who he is. You are wrong to want more...”
So, trying to apply what you wrote, I am not sure how what I know I need in my life to thrive, is something I dare even expect, from this individual.
Were you talking about these kinds of necessary changes?
