Our biggest contention was in discipline. I felt we needed to be somewhat strict, like my parents were with me. She wanted to be best friend with our daughter. I see now how that turned out.
Well said, BJ! Thanks.
Y’all others who want to weigh in and tell me I’m wrong—screw you, you have not felt my pain, rest assured. Not even Adolph Hitler deserved what I got.
I’m not divorced, and I sympathize with the divorced men on this forum; younger American men are watching & learning, and apparently are determined not to repeat the same mistake (in terms of marriage in general - not divorce). I work with angry childless American women who are past childbearing age, who are getting married late in life because the current boyfriend safely feels he risks nothing. The women have their own money, won’t steal their children (they’ll have none), and would have no claim to the mens’ future earnings due to their own salaries.
Today’s American teens & millenials are the last generation of Americans; these women seethe with resentment at the black, Hispanic, and Asian co-workers who have the families they can’t, and they resent American men like me who married a foreigner to have a family.
It's like that with any philosophically formed topic.
In the current case, you are dealing with a) women facing up to the duplicitous, condescending, culture they subscribe to, b) religious beliefs about what will and will not sustain a marriage. In either case, negative testimony about the validity of their beliefs means either they are wrong, or you are...and almost no one is going to admit they are the one in the wrong until they are drug kicking and screaming to it.
And for the record...I’m not and have never been divorced. I’ve been married for 28 years.
If my wife didn’t stand head an shoulders above nearly EVERy woman I’ve met in my life, I wouldn’t be married.