My wife is seeing an IC for the time being before we work on our MC together. One thing her IC brought up was about our marriage. We were married pretty young (20 for me, 22 for her). We have been married 8.5 years and together 10.5 years.
The IC's perspective is that our marriage/relationship was very fused (close together, us against the world) in the beginning. As we have grown up we have begun to Individualize.

So I guess my question is has anyone else been throught this? For those of you that have been through this, was there compromise on both sides? Was it easy to find that middle ground?

Thanks in advance!

My back story:
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/forum/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=37;t=036927#000000

I think it is excellent that she is going to IC. I believe most young couples start out with the us against the world thing. So your counselor is probably right.

Glad you are still posting.

My H and I married young. I was 18 and he was 19.
Contrary to alot of people we know.....we didn't get married just because I got pregnant. We talked about marriage long before I got pregnant. We had already been together for 3 years.

Now....onto something that alot of people on here don't know about me. Though I've mentioned it a couple of times.

I was first a WS before I became a BS.

After the birth of our 3rd daughter I became VERY depressed. I was already depressed because I'd gotten pregnant when our middle daughter was only 9 months old....and I just didn't feel like I could handle it. My oldest was just starting Kindergarten.....the middle one was a stinker and ALWAYS wanted to be held and she would NEVER stay with a sitter without bawling her eyes out....which in turn made me never want to leave her with anyone.......and I was having a horrible time with my pregnancy.

Well....my H didn't know how to handle me feeling this way. I felt like the world was out to get me....and everything was done to make my life horrible.

In this time I had been spending more and more time on the computer when I couldn't sleep.....which was very often.

My step mother turned me onto this chat program so that we wouldn't have to spend alot of money in long distant phone calls and that's all it took for me.

I was completely addicted to chatting.

After about 3 months of only talking to family members on the program I decided to look for more people to talk to. I would talk to anyone who would listen.

I ended up talking to a man one night that was a real charmer. I was hooked on him from the first time I talked to him.

Now....I KNEW it was wrong.....but with all addictions....I couldn't stop. I would make excuses to stay home when my H asked me to go somewhere so that I could chat with this man.

My H never got on the computer...so I had no worries that he would find out.

Well....my H started taking an interest in the computer. He figured if I was on it all the time then there must be alot of interesting things on the WWW.

Now...to note.......I NEVER made plans to meet this person.....and I NEVER talked to this person on the phone. Later I realized that my addiction to this man was the fact that he listened to me....and he agreed with everything I did.

After about 4 months of talking to this man I started feeling a HUGE amount of guilt. I started realizing that what I was doing was cheating on my H....emotionally. BUT....I had no idea how to get myself out of the situation. It never dawned on me to just delete this man from my program. He had no other way of contacting me. I just had myself so far into something I felt I had no control over at the time.


My H actually stayed up longer than me one night and somehow accessed the message log in this program. I guess he read for a while....then woke me up and told me what he had found.

That night...while my H watched....I wrote this man a long message (it was the only way to contact him) and told him that I would no longer be talking to him. That it had been a mistake on my part to get so attached to talking to him and that because of it I had hurt my H deeply.

After that I showed my husband where the files for the program were (he wasn't good with computers) and the file names so that if he wanted to search the computer for them he could. To make sure that I hadn't re-downloaded it.

Well....to make a long story short. We didn't really solve our problems...as you can see....since he cheated on me about a year later....but....we've come A LONG way since both instances.

We now know what it takes to make a marriage what it should be. Thankfully.

I never went to the extremes that your W has.....but I can identify with the addiction. I saw no problem in what I was doing either.....until it was almost too late.

Thanks for the replies.

I guess I can see the us against the world looking back on it. I can even see the growing up/growing apart and honestly don't think I had too many problems with it until my W got into The Sims Online (TSO).

Miss Priss, thanks for sharing your story. I think my W's IC is leading her down the path of realization that what she was doing was at the very least not productive for our relationship. A bit of good news on that front, my W has promised me she will keep things platonic in TSO, as long as I don't snoop. I think her IC is trying to get my W to find more "healthy" ways of expressing her "new" self that what she was doing in TSO.

I can see that it is going to be a long road to reconciliation and readjustment to each other, but I think I am ok with that. It is a bit frustrating at times, but I am trying to deal with it. I could see for quite a while (last few years) that we were becoming more individual which doesn't really bother me, but I think we both need to learn how to be individuals and be in a relationship at the same time. Hopefully when we start MC we can begin that process.