pathdr2b said:
And your points highlight the fact that marriage is ALWAYS different when it's the WOMAN in med school. In my expereince, guys want you to be superwoman when you get married which obviously can't work when you're a med student or you have a demanding career.
I really disagree with you here. Maybe you're generalizing from your own experiences, and maybe that was true in your case. But that doesn't mean it's always true. My husband and I are BOTH in medical school, and far from expecting me to do most of the work or 'mother' him, we split housework pretty much 50-50...in fact, to be honest, he might do a little more, because he cares more about it than I do (and he just brought me a cup of hot cider, because I have a cold). I'm not denying that there are many guys out there who are stuck in the Ice Age and expect a woman to cook and clean up after them no matter what else she might have going on...but I think it's unfair to generalize that all guys are like that. There are lots of men who are willing to be equal partners in relationships and pull their own weight, and it just irks me when I see generalized male-bashing going on.
To the OP...it sounds like you went through an awful lot of loss in the years before your marriage, first your father and then your best friend. That's awful, and I feel for you. It's true that those losses may have colored your judgement when you met your husband...on the other hand, it's also possible that some of these issues that are popping up now with your husband are somehow masking unresolved grief you may still be carrying around from your fathers' and best friends' deaths. Grief can do strange things to us when we don't work through it. It's possible that you're depressed or having some type of grief reaction and that that is coloring the way you are seeing your marriage right now. Similarly, from the way you describe him, it sounds like your husband is at the very least hungry for your attention and bored...and maybe depressed himself? I mean, the most he has to be excited about is a t-shirt that comes with his new video card? What is this guy doing all day?
On the other hand, though, it's easy to get needy and dependent on your spouse when you don't have enough going on in your own life. This summer, I was incredibly bored and lonely because my summer job was keeping me busy for maybe 3-4 hours of the day and most of my friends were out of town...and my husband was working 14 hour days in an intense ortho program, not sleeping enough, and cranky when he was home. It wasn't a good combination...I got really needy, wanting his attention all the time when he was home, etc. and he just needed to unwind. Maybe that's what's going on here? Your husband is bored because he doesn't have enough to do so he relies on you to entertain him? I agree with relatively prime and the other people who suggest that it sounds like he's trying to find ways to get your attention. Yeah, it's immature, but it's also kind of easy to do when you're bored or depressed and don't have enough going on in your life. I bet if he found some way of entertaining himself he'd bug you a lot less.
I don't know what to tell you, really. If you've TRULY felt that this marriage was a mistake from the beginning, maybe in the end the best thing to do will be to end it before you become any more involved or have children together. I'd strongly recommend that you BOTH make a good-faith effort at counseling first, though. Not just a couple of sessions but a minimum of six months to a year with a competent couples' counselor. Marriage isn't something to give up on lightly. Everyone who's been married knows that marriages go through good times and bad, and sometimes when you're mired in the bad, you can't remember the good that there was or see the good that's coming around the corner. On the other hand, frequently people who are on the brink of divorce lose perspective and think that it has been this bad all along and that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning, but really they didn't feel that way at the time...it's a matter of the present coloring your perceptions of the past, kind of the opposite of how nostalgia makes you see everything from the past with rose-colored glasses...instead, when the present is bad, it makes everything from the past look worse than it actually was.
Anyway, good luck to you with whatever you decide. I hope that you'll be able to work things out, or that, if not, you'll be able to move on and find happiness. No matter what the reasons, divorce is rough on everybody involved. Good luck with everything.
