You're not the villain, either, Hold. You're two humans in a human marriage...each doing harm and love, working out your stuff.

Still a real H...and she's a real W. Her H. Your W.

I believe you stopped being the H you really liked being before...absolutely. What would you say are the key differences? You didn't have healthy boundaries before...and you aren't enforcing healthy boundaries now...that I can see. I know you see yourself as different, though...before, were you giving to get, to achieve balance, to get her to stop/start?

Incompatible? How very alike your issues are...as you've seen. Consider compatible dysfunction? Like Functional Dysfunction.



You've succeeded every day, Hold, in many ways...and choose to focus on your lack. You know this...part of the choice to emotionally cut and do harm to yourself and others.


BUBBLES...

Do you remember I Love Lucy? One of the situational comedic themes she had going was financial infidelity. Portrayed as cute, entitled, attractive...full of funny justifications and assumptions. Since Shakespeare, most comedies are tragedies with timing.

Modeled wives as treating their husbands as alternately daddies and little boys...and growing up, I decided that was what love was...how women were supposed to act...saw it in my mothers and my father...wives pushing the financial limits like children...and calling their spouse juvenile.

Only my father was portrayed as the spend-thrift, the one always pushing the boundaries...and I married a shopaholic. Quite a mixed bag...certainly one attracts the other...to work it all out, over time, together.

And some do. And some gain forgiveness and live new...make new choices...and others repeat and repeat...until they stop (or don't)...

Gotta tell you...my false payoff was in the superiority of being a miser, better at money, and I got to manage my DH, shame him for his fiscal irresponsibility...what I mess I was and yet, least not that one way, eh?

He bounced checks and I didn't take away his check book. He didn't record atm withdrawals and I didn't take away his atm card...didn't brainstorm POJA with him...I, too, kept that addictive cycle going, playing my part, reaping my own twisted rewards.

I believe this is the sin of pride God speaks about. Not what we really want...very destructive and abusive, blocking our relationship with God in different ways. And with others. And does harm.

Which is why God made no one on this earth in more control of others...even though we can experience life as if they are...that we are done to...when in reality, we don't do what's only our part...eyes on the perp at all times.

So we repeat.

My answer to your question, Bubbles.

LA