When do the things you love about your spouse become the very things you detest?!
I love my husband, deeply, madly, passionately- and then there are those moments when the very things that attracted me to him– his quiet disposition(which when we first met I took as introspective) now after 13 years strikes me more as being zoned out and disinterested.
But I digress, why is it that the qualities that most attracted us to our spouses/ partners are the very same ones that make us want to light our significant other’s head on fire and run from the room screaming at times?!
I’ll admit it- I am a bit neurotic- I like to sleep on clean sheets; I like people to take their shoes off before traipsing through the house and I do think after a day of wearing a pair of jeans- it’s perfectly natural to chuck them in the hamper. All these things are completely foreign to my husband- and how is it that I did not see this side of him when we were courting– was I just so engulfed in my lust for him that I didn’t notice the fact that he was wearing the same pair of Docker’s on our first three dates? Did I not notice that he never changed the sheets on his bed (until I bought him a new set?) Did I not notice that despite having a cream colored carpet in his apartment- he never saw the specs of dirt lodged in it- which I did and then brought over a vacuum cleaner to clean it? Was I just so enamored with him- that all these things seemed extraneous? Or have 13 years of marriage- changed my perspective– and made these little “cleanliness quirks” of his more irksome than before?
I don’t know, I don’t have any answers- except that he will likely continue to take the jeans out of the hamper and tell me I’m obsessed with cleaning and – regardless of what he says I will change the sheets. And life and our marriage will go on…
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Attraction when we are ‘in the hunt’ comes from a different part of the brain, and involves all of the senses, in a combination that can finally be overwhelming to the logic center and the emotion center gets the upper hand, being more tied into the senses. As marriage rolls on, our senses start picking up a lot of regular every day stuff, which then the logic center picks up on and processes — and the emotion center no longer has the upper hand, we are no longer ‘hunting’. Perhaps to salvage we need to go part way back to ‘hunting’ mode and give each other a break.
My grandparents had been together since, I believe, the Civil War. And neither could remember what had initially attracted them to one another. The rest of the family just figured it was practicality: she was a divorcee with two kids, and he a flirty barroom clown. But in the end all that bound them was a harness of resentments over the most petty and forgettable of things. My parents, on the other hand, had a 'good' marriage, as defined by Rob & Laura Petrie (Google it). They were very emotionally supportive of one another but had separate beds. In my own two marriages (past and current), one thing I've learned is not to go to war over the little things.