Communication

My marriage has been going downhill for a while. I quit work to finish my degree and care for my (now) two year old son. Since leaving work my marriage has been rocky. My husband spends all his free time hunting/fishing. Even when he is home there is no connection between us. I feel that he is unappreciative of the things I do as a wife and mother. He does not share in my desire to socialize and he doesn't celebrate in my successes with me. This weekend was both Mother's Day and my college graduation and I didn't get recognition from him for either. I have been preoccupied lately and I know that I was probably less than nice at times. However, the lack of support with the household and our son only added to the strain. I'm depressed, because I fear the lack of job availability now that I'm finished with classes, as well as the added responsibility a new role will add to this already building turmoil. I wish there was a unified front between us that would relieve the pressure, but instead the relationship is just another source of stress at this point. When I hear about the time friends spend with their husbands, it makes me more depressed, because we don't make the time for ourselves anymore...and when we have in the last few years the time together has been less than fun. Last summer I has to practically drag my husband to a concert that I won tickets to, and he just made the whole night a downer. I wish I had gone alone, which is the case more often than not when we go somewhere that should be fun together. I don't want my marriage to end, for the sack of my son..I wish we has the fun we had early in our relationship.

Post Edited By Moderator (BnotAfraid) : 5/15/2013 5:39:56 AM (GMT-6)

Thank you Karen and Carl for your responses.
One of my problems is that work used to be one of "my things" and I miss the interaction I had with others. For me, satisfaction comes from the praise on a job well done, the promotion or raise, the great scores on evaluations. While I know this and have shared this with my husband, because his personality is so different, he doesn't know how or remember to share in my delight at accomplishments and it turn I'm left feeling that he doesn't care.

I have read some motivational books on the differences in personality types for my work as a manager and can translate it to my personal life, but I know that I'm going to be the only one in the relationship doing the work, which means I'll benefit from being a better mate for my husband. That used to be enough to put the work in for a while. Then I started to resent that I was the only one working, along with resenting that he had "his thing", while I was stuck doing things that had to be done as a caregiver in our home. I do love spending time with my son, teaching him and watching him grow, but I feel that's only one piece of who I am and I'm losing the rest of my identity to this one piece of my life.

In all of this, I've started to lose respect for my husband, because I perceive that he doesn't care about what I'm feeling, and I feel that he's losing respect for me, because of the "nagging" about all my feelings and preceptions. I start trying to be positive and think of the good things; that my husband is a good provider, that he never complained or held me back from going back to school, that he is a loving father and that he deserves the time he spends away, but then I start to resent that while he works and I don't that I deserve some of the "me time" he's getting in all this.

My husband reads a fair amount and I'm thinking I'm just going to put one of the books that I've read in his lunch box one week and see if he reads it or not. I can't imagine that he will or that he'll try to associate it with our relationship, but maybe it's a starting place.