Category Archives: marriage advice
Carolyn Hax: To attend — or not to attend — an ex's wedding
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Keep clicking or swiping through the slideshow for “10 places to visit before they disappear forever”
Keep clicking or swiping through the slideshow for “10 places to visit before they disappear forever”
Photo: Anthony Boccaccio, Getty Images
Keep clicking or swiping through the slideshow for “10 places to visit before they disappear forever”
Keep clicking or swiping through the slideshow for “10 places to visit before they disappear forever”
Photo: Anthony Boccaccio, Getty Images
Adapted from a recent online discussion.
Dear Carolyn:
I married my high-school sweetheart when we were both 25 — not because we were soul mates or even particularly happy together, but because we were imagination-lacking, co-dependent and afraid to let go. We stayed married for three years before I cried uncle and filed for divorce, with his agreement that it was the right thing to do. While it was painful at first, we have wound up more or less friends again, and share a social circle.
He is getting married again in four weeks, and I’m invited to the wedding. First marriage for the new bride. I’ve been perusing their wedding website and, maybe this is my glass of wine talking, but I’m having a hard time with all the quotes and hashtags that reference “forever.” She is so happy they will be together “forever.”
Don’t get me wrong, I hope their marriage works out, but that language seems ridiculous considering he has been married before, believing it would be “forever,” and it wasn’t. This is leading me to rethink attending their wedding — I’m afraid I might scoff my way through the ceiling. Any ideas to reshape my thinking?
— Feeling Discarded
Oh, but it’s so easy — you guys thought it was forever, but you were “imagination-lacking, co-dependent and afraid to let go” (now there’s a sign to have tastefully lettered and mounted over my sink), and this time the couple is mature and clear-eyed and in loooove enough for a lifetime.
Yeah, yeah.
But do you really want to live in a world where hope never triumphs over experience?
And/or where a bride-to-be hashtags, #hopingitsticks?
I don’t. But if you do, or if you don’t but you’re not feeling it, and/or if you present even the slightest scoff risk, then maybe it’s time to back out. Doing so four weeks out is not the most polite move ever, but it beats the day before, and it beats eye-rolling the bride.
Re: Scoffing:
She and her ex “have wound up more or less friends again,” but the letter suggests “less” is winning out. Skipping the wedding seems like a mercy.
— Merciful
Re: Ex’s Wedding:
Don’t go. I have a few friends who have attended the wedding of an ex and it always turned out to be a bad idea. Not necessarily because they did something dramatic and embarrassing there, but because my friends came away feeling like crap. The nature of a wedding is just not designed to leave an ex feeling good about attending.
— Anonymous
Re: Wedding:
I’m getting married soon. Three of my four bridesmaids are my fiance’s exes. Last weekend I was my best friend’s maid of honor. My date was my fiance, her ex-boyfriend. They’re good friends. It was a beautiful wedding and we were honored and joyous to be there.
I think “Discarded” shouldn’t go if she’s not feeling it, but it’s by no means a universal rule that you shouldn’t attend an ex’s wedding. If you’re actual friends — not just amicable former partners — you should go if you want to, without worrying that you’ll come away feeling like crap.
— No Bridesmaids for Me?
You’re right — and, may I say, gloriously entangled, disentangled and re-entangledish. Thanks.
My husband's support for Trump is poisoning our marriage. Should I get a divorce?
The question
I’ve been with my husband for eight years. We have no kids. For the past three, he has become increasingly alt-right and quite the Trump supporter. I’m very moderate in politics, but slightly left of centre. I like to follow the truth where it falls. But he will not allow for any kind of discourse or debate. He’s right, and I’m wrong. According to him, I’ve been brainwashed. It’s gotten to the point where I have left the house and am considering divorce. It has filtered into our relationship in too many ways. I’m not sure what to do.
The answer
Well, politics has always been famously fraught as a topic of discussion, which can quickly devolve into two disputants – at a dinner party, say – who might normally get along, gesticulating wildly, impugning one another’s intelligence, knowledge, insightfulness and so on.
I’ve certainly seen that happen more than once.
And the current climate in U.S. politics – well, a word the punditocracy like to throw around is “divisive,” and that sure seems true to me. On a recent car trip to the United States, I had a real sense of a country divided.
What’s less reported on is that it can be also be divisive for families, friends – and even, as in your case, couples.
I have a lot of relatives in the United States and when a couple disagree on the merits of the current White House administration, watch out! It can lead to hammer-and-tongs type arguments, hauteur-filled froideurs, sleeping on the couch, “the silent treatment” (what I call “marital omerta”) and all the other tools in the arsenal of spousal warfare.
Yours, though, is the first I’ve heard of a case of it leading to de-cohabitation and possibly divorce.
But let’s step back for a second: It sounds to me like the real problem is not that you and your husband argue, or what about, but how you go about it.
There comes an important point, I think, in a marriage – in any relationship, really – when one says to oneself, “I care more about this person’s company than I care about being right.”
And ideally around that same time one asks oneself: “And what makes me so sure I’m right, anyway?”
To me, these are important twin pillars of the maturing process. When you’re young, you think you know it all. As a teen, I used to “debate” my poor mother all the time, sometimes ticking off points on my fingers, always convinced I was right.
Then as you get older you (should) say to yourself: “Maybe I could be wrong.”
Your husband sounds like he needs to grow up in the above ways. You, too, maybe a bit. Your statement “I like to follow the truth where it falls” is a hint for me he may not be the only one with a touch of hubris.
Now, generally speaking, I’m a big proponent of working things out rather than splitting up. Because divorce doesn’t look like a lot of fun to me. Lawyers bleed you white, you can wind up lonely, your friends choose sides, you have to get out and date again, which can feel like a series of job interviews – the list of downsides goes on and on.
But in this case, if you really were willing to move out over all this and he hasn’t come after you in any way, well, obviously there are larger issues afoot. So maybe you should pull the trigger on divorce proceedings.
If you do decide you want to work it out, there are a lot of elements about your situation I don’t know (e.g. all the ways your Trumpian arguments have “filtered into your relationship”) or, frankly, understand.
So sorry, normally, I hate to do this but I’m going to fall back on that hoary advice columnist staple and suggest you seek couples counselling.
A good couples therapist will (ideally) tease out the good things in your relationship, help you learn to communicate better, maybe figure out a way repair some of the damage all of this has done, even get you back on track.
You did reach out to me, so that tells me you haven’t given up.
And I don’t mean to be rude but I do feel the need to be blunt: While you’re at it, maybe get a couple of regular therapists as well, because there’s something about the whole situation that’s a little “out there.”
Are you in a sticky situation? Send your dilemmas to damage@globeandmail.com. Please keep your submissions to 150 words and include a daytime contact number so we can follow up with any queries.
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Married Women Cheat, Too… but Why? One Expert Tells Us the Two Main Reasons
The usual cheating story we hear goes like this: wife is amazing, husband cheats, breaks up marriage and family, ruins everything. Exhibit A: Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Garner (where both Gavin Rossdale and Ben Affleck cheated with the nanny).
But women can be cheaters too — we just don’t hear about it as much. It happens all the time. (Exhibit B: Some sources are claiming that Khloe Kardashian “retaliation cheated” on Tristan Thompson with her ex French Montana.) In fact, one relationship expert in New York, Rori Sassoon, co-founder of upscale match making agency Platinum Poire, said she’s seen it happen throughout her career. She said while there are “a million reasons” women cheat, there are two main things that often drive a woman to seek another guy.
“From my experience, it’s either women who are a little bored — they have a great husband, a great life — but they’re bored. They’re usually the women whose life looks perfect from outside, like on Instagram. They are looking for sex, or emotional affection, or some kind of attention, basically they are not getting what they need.”
It’s easy for those women to cheat, Sassoon added, because they are often not getting what they need at home, the husband is usually neglecting them, and so they find someone to make them feel good who fits easily into their schedule. “It’s the classic story of cheating with the physical trainer,” she said. “It’s very easy two or three times a week for an hour.”
There is also one major clue a woman is cheating on her partner. (It’s not texts, sexts, or physical evidence.) Before all that, Sassoon said, the woman will become totally indifferent at home. “If a woman becomes very indifferent to her husband, like doesn’t care anymore, something may be going on. Think about it, he’s carrying on, and you just don’t care, and that could be because you have someone else in your life. It eases the guilt if the husband is off doing his thing.”
Another reason many women stray is because things in the marriage have changed. “Sometimes men can’t perform and that’s not just in the bedroom,” Sassoon noted. “Maybe emotionally they’re not there, maybe work isn’t going their way, they’re not making the money they used to and there’s a lot of pressure. Sometimes people just need that adrenaline rush of a love that’s exciting and new.”
Sassoon added that women are often the more emotional one in relationships, so if her husband neglects her, she feels she can “revenge cheat.” “That also happens after he cheats… she’ll cheat for revenge,” Sassoon said. “At that stage, it’s over.”
The good news? A couple can recover from cheating. Sassoon has seen it happen with therapy and communication. “Often they can get past a one-night stand, but everybody’s level of cheating is different.”
According to U.K.’s The Telegraph, men and women “tend to two-time for different reasons.”
“Research suggests that the majority of men stray in search of get-the-job-done sex, whereas women want their sizzle with a side of emotional connection,” said the report. “A study by anthropologist Helen Fisher concluded that women tend to cheat when they are dissatisfied with their relationship as a whole and seek what is missing elsewhere. But when it came to male cheaters, Fisher found that 56 percent claimed to be ‘happily married.'”
Modern technology and women having careers are also huge contributors to the gender cheating more, reported The Toronto Sun.
“According to Dr. Ashley Thompson, director of the Sexuality and Relationship Science Lab at the University of Minnesota Duluth, there are several factors at work…Technology is making it easier for women — for everybody — to find extra-dyadic partners, whether it’s on Ashley Madison or Tinder… Women also have more opportunity now than they did in the past … If, traditionally, women were homemakers and men were going off to work, men had more opportunities to cheat. But now you’re seeing increased gender equality, and women are out in the work force, gaining more autonomy. Women are engaging as much as men because now that opportunity is there.”
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