Dr. Howard said:
Op, you made a ballsy move. I don't know if it was the right move but you had to make one either way once you opened the can of worms. Staying silent would have just kept running things downhill. You have also captured the pain of modern marriage and women. Women think its a partnership of equals, but its not. One leads and one follows, if the follower won't submit, then there are problems. A modern woman has a very hard time understanding that it is still an honor to be Mike Pence when Donald Trump is president or that Melania has it good being the first lady. No, instead they think a marriage should be two presidents.
If you are not yet married, and this discussion is brutal, sure you can just leave, but if you are married then you have to have the entire fight, over multiple battles. You can't just Vietnam it and pull out when everyone gets tired.
Either way, you made a move, which I can respect.
Captain GH and Dr. Howard are adding an important element to the discussion and I want to respond to that to fill in more of the picture.
I can't jump right to saying that this was 100% the right move. I probably won't know for a while. There's a voice in my head telling me this could be a mistake and maybe I could win the war if I kept at it.
But, at the same time I've been working on this relationship for almost 5 years. I agree that you have to train a mold a modern woman through trials and hard work because I did it to some extent. There were plenty of times I wanted to walk out but didn't. One of the things I valued most about the relationship is that we both seemed so intent on making it work.
We did get in several fights about her friends and she couldn't see why I didn't like them or thought they were bad influences. She used to come home from work in tears and bitch about how awful they were to work with constantly. No matter how I broke it down she insisted they were her friends.
Like Dr. Howard pointed out, if the follower won't submit, there are problems. In a lot of aspects my girl did submit, but obviously not entirely. She was happy to submit to things especially if she could see the benefits. I got her into intermittent fasting and she got skinnier, she got off birth control and her energy and mood improved, etc.
But, at a certain point the woman has to give up her ego-pleasing dreams to focus on kids, even if you are only having a few of them. I don't think only having 3 kids would have broke my heart. I never even said she could never work again, just tone it back while the kids are young. But, my girl wasn't ready to give up the satisfaction she got from work for anything. Neither could she see how she could gain that satisfaction through other means. Maybe I could have gotten her to see that but waiting to see if having a kid would change that is a huge gamble.
I think she understood that men and women aren't equal in a physical and emotional sense. At the same time she was unwilling to give up the part of her ego that was satisfied by work. Her ego in general got to be a problem. That's why she would say things like how she didn't need religion to tell her how to live her life, or that she hated the priest who was going to marry us and thought that discussions with him, or spiritual life in general were wastes of time. I know she tried to get with the program but in a way I think that broke her.
I talked to one of my close friends who got married by the same priest and he told me about a time his wife wanted to talk some issues out with him after their first child was born. That story just made me think about how it was the wife's openness to listen to something bigger than herself was what made that work.
At one point during these last few discussions with my girl I asked if she believed in anything bigger than herself and she told me she didn't. It's not that she doesn't believe in god but that she didn't care to consider it. That was pretty telling for me.
That's part of the issue with modernism in general. Nobody wants to stop and consider anything bigger than themselves because life is good. The paychecks come in, you can buy the toys you want, and have kids and a healthy family without ever considering the bigger picture. Another thing I hate is that even if the woman wants to try stepping away from work the corporate machine is setup to make them believe that if they take a break for a while to raise kids no one will ever hire them again.