The other day at the bus stop I overheard a mom saying how amazing it was that her husband not only cooked dinner - pasta - but also then put the kids to bed. The woman she was talking to nodded sagely in agreement: clearly this was laudable.

Is the bar for being a good father and husband so low? What the hell?

This isn't really new to me, I suppose. I've worked mainly with women my whole life and too often I hear that the bare minimum seems to be "they provide money" and occasionally throw down a meal and play with the kids. Sometimes, even that is expecting too much.

Can I get some perspective on this?

Hello Tilderonis! I'll be in the Vernazza area of Cinque Terre next month. While there I plan to propose to my girlfriend :)

My current plan is to find a nice part of the "blue trail" with a nice lookout, track down a florist, and prepare that spot with some of her favorite flowers before we get there. Her family is joining us on the trip so I'll get them prepped as videographers. That night I want to take us all out for a nice dinner.

Okay so now the questions-
In general any potential snags you see with this plan?

Does it matter what time? I was thinking something in the late afternoon so we can do dinner soon after. Any issues with bugs or anything at certain times?

Anything else I can do or add to make the moment a bit more special?

For dinner I'm looking at Belforte Ristorante but definitely open to suggestions.

Thanks!

tl;dr: Happy (?) ending

I wanted to post a short follow-up to my post last week, as things have progressed very quickly.

The most important thing I would like to say is "thanks" to everyone who chimed in with your very helpful advice, well wishes, and support. I took everything you said to heart (which is probably a risky thing to do from random internet folks, but this community is simply different).

Everything just clicked for me as I was going for a run last Friday and talking out loud to myself in a sort of stream of consciousness manner. I probably looked like a crazy person. Honestly, I don't know where the words came from, but it was all crystal clear.

I went home and asked my wife to talk "just one more time... and this time it will be different, I promise." I told her that I have come to terms with her decision and I respect it. I also asked her if my understanding of what went wrong made sense, and she said I hit the nail on the head. So I have a starting point for what I need to start working on personally.

We talked for a long time and started going through logistics. We are both on the same page about raising our son in a healthy manner. We will be doing equal shifts (week on, week off) and will find places to live relatively close to each other. We plan to remain friends and meet up regularly for our son.

On top of all of these things that happened VERY quickly on Friday, I found out that my mother fell and broke her hip on Saturday. She's got a bunch of other issues so a hip break is NOT good for her. We all packed up and hit the road to drive ~4 hours to the hospital. Mom is recovering now. It was a very surreal experience, this new form of bonding my wife went through over the weekend. We're now just friends, living together for the time being; yet still doing everything we can to help each other out.

I'm still very tired and not sleeping, and I'm CERTAIN I'm not even one step into the grieving process, but I feel better right now. I am working on moving on and moving forward. I feel as if I have stepping stones that will make me a better person AND I can work on the issues that caused all of this in the first place so I can learn how to pass that wisdom on to my son to make sure he doesn't run up against the same challenges as I did.

Again, I am sharing all of this because you all gave me some very frank, direct, and compassionate advice and support. Reading through the comments as they came in helped to keep me grounded and on track. I have archived all of the messages in my Obsidian notebook and I will read them in the future to remind myself to stay focused on self improvement. Thank you, once again.

Preface:

• Beware: long, scattered post incoming.
• I'm not having suicidal thoughts. No matter what happens, life is still worth living.

I'm spiraling right now. I'm so confused and lost that I need to just put this out there, somewhere, anywhere. Here goes:

I've been happily married for coming up on 8 years next week. Our relationship has always been strong, we've always considered each other best friends, and I've always felt that our love was built on a rock-solid foundation.

Lately, my wife has been acting very distant. Enough so that it started ringing some alarm bells in my head. I took a personal inventory of several of the "disconnected" events and sat down with her last week to ask if we were okay. Her response was indifference. After a bit of a pause, I asked her if she still loved me, to which she responded "I don't know." Of course a lot more was said, but the summary is that I was completely floored and she was emotionless and indifferent.

I asked one thing: that we would set up marriage counseling sessions. She agreed. Our initial individual sessions start next week.

Since then, I've spent every single moment trying to examine myself and my flaws, where I've damaged our relationship in the past, and what I can do in the future to be a better person for her.

On Monday, I actually had some massive discoveries about myself, and blindspots in my emotional maturity. I discovered one little thing, which led to two or three more. By the end of this very exciting and motivating self-reflection session, I was PUMPED UP! For once in years, I felt like I've discovered this whole new region of growth in my brain.

I also had a session with my therapist that same day, in which I shared the recent events and my bout of epiphanies. She mentioned that "sometimes it takes a major life event to get people out of a rut and start a growth journey." I left the session feeling really good, really motivated, like there is a whole new and great future ahead of me and us.

I also came to a realizations about how I've hurt her in the past. The long and the short of it is that I'm terrible about empathizing and listening to feelings, and my insecurities put me into a defensive mode rather than a supportive, listening, partner mode.

A week later, and I'm still buzzing, reflecting, discovering more emotional epiphanies, and REALLY looking forward to marriage counseling. However, I've also forced myself to keep all of this to myself and just start showing that I am growing by taking actions. It hasn't been the time to share any of this with her, especially because I've said a lot of words in the past about changing that never seemed to materialize. I knew that the right time would come.

And then, last night happened.

"I had a session with my therapist today. I've made the decision that we need to divorce."

Commence spiraling.

The first thing I said was: "Please, I'm begging you, go through the marriage counseling sessions with me."

She said "I will go to marriage counseling, but I'm only doing this for you."

I then decided to share with her all of the personal discoveries I've made and the growth journey I'm embarking on, how I've realized that I hurt her in the past when she needed me most, and how I'm committed to growing and working on myself and our relationship because I love her and I made that vow to her when we married. I told her that I realized finally what this heavy feeling in my heart is: it is the physical manifestation of love, and I know that because it hurts so much, and if it wouldn't hurt if there wasn't love.

She said she went through a similar process of pain and grieving last year (there's some really deep and heavy stuff that went down, in short, she discovered that her father was not her biological father; she started the journey of meeting her new family and my response at the time came from insecurity and jealousy). She said that she was done processing those emotions and that she has moved on and is focusing on herself and our 3 year old son.

She said that she loves me and cares about me, she even held me and hugged me. But that made it hurt even more. I feel like I am being led on.

I went for a walk to clear my head, and when I got home, she asked if I was okay, and I said "No. But I'm treating this as a challenge. Your love has always come easy and I've never had to fight for it. For the first time, I am going to actually fight to earn your love."

I didn't sleep last night. I decided to go into the office this morning to knock some stuff out early so I could take a personal day. On the way out the door, I asked her to promise something to me: I said "when we go to marriage counseling, please don't do it for me. Please do it for us. We've gone through so much together, we made vows to each other when we married that we would stick together through the good and the bad. Please, let's just give it one last ditch effort." She said "Okay."

This morning, some questions have started popping into my head, uninvited: "how will custody of our 3 year old work?" "Will I be removed from his life?" "Who's going to get the house?" -- and I'm really trying to remove those thoughts from my mind right now because I don't want to even entertain the possibility at this point. These are questions I never in a million years I thought I would be asking myself.

Now I'm at a coffee shop, typing this message. I have an emergency appointment with my therapist in a few hours, although I'm not sure what that will solve at this point.

I am questioning the very core, foundational things I thought I knew about myself. I am confused and lost and heartbroken.

I'm also not really sure why I'm sharing this message with you all. Perhaps because it is therapeutic to type all of this out, and perhaps I trust this community.

My wife of 3 years just told me last week that we're getting a divorce. It completely blindsided me, as there was no marriage counseling or communication about the marriage having problems from them before this, but I can't say I don't understand at least some of their reasons. They made it clear that there was no fixing things or repairing the relationship. They're leaving no matter what I do.

Other than the suddenness, they seem pretty willing to be amicable and compromise as needed, at least to an extent. We won't be able to properly separate for a while it seems like, though it's hard to predict the exact timeline at this stage. I'm currently planning a too-expensive last-minute flight back to the States to stay with my family for a little while, since I need some distance and they can be a source of comfort.

I can obviously hire and rely on a lawyer for handling the legal side of things (which will be complicated, to say the least), but I'm truly at a loss for how to handle it emotionally. I'm in my late 20s but I've never even been broken up with before this. Go hard or go home, ig. I hope there are others here who have good advice to share for this situation, because I don't know what to do now that the bottom has dropped out of my life like this. It feels like my whole future is gone. I was in a bad depressive episode already and obviously that's not been improved by this.

(Also, if one of our closer mutual online friends who lurks here is finding out this way -- sorry, she owns the Discord server so I can't exactly bring this up there. I welcome DMs from y'all.)

I hate TODO lists. Even when they're for a single day.

I inevitably put more in my TODO list than I can accomplish in a day. When the new day begins, and I see the tasks I did not accomplish before, I feel anxious, sad, and even ashamed. Then I find some of that anxiety is for how my partner will judge me for the unfinished tasks on my list that she tells herself she expected me to accomplish.

While I have worked on self-compassion for years, occasionally it is not there. I have worked on having boundaries between my partner's own issues and my mental health.

I wonder how others with ADHD, particular those with partners, cope.

EDIT: I started using an allegedly ADHD-friendly planner yesterday. These feelings came pouring out of me this morning, hence the post. Yet I've had these similar difficulties for years.

Hiya folks!

My partner (M36) and I (F30) have been in a relationship for 2 years (living together for 1) and have started talking about marriage lately. Neither of us has popped the question yet (we both want to be proposed to), but we're starting to do "Marriage Mondays" and work through The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver. (I was also thinking of reading The ADHD Effect on Marriage by Melissa Orlov since my partner has ADHD.)

We're both big into communication, studying relationship books, and making sure we iron things out before we take the next step. Before we moved in, we talked about divvying up household chores and made a spreadsheet detailing who does what. We also made sure that the spreadsheet was not a holy text, and if one of us was feeling bad (whether because of sickness, mental health, or work stress), the other would temporarily pick up the slack (or at least cut the other person some slack!) It's been great so far and I really do feel like we're in an equitable partnership. (As much as it can be, at least!)

But of course, marriage is a whole other story. We both live in a different country from where we're from and if we ever have kids, we won't be able to rely on either one of our families for much. I know the major topics of finance, kids, and careers, but is there anything else (besides the wedding) you all may have done or questions you asked to "prepare" for marriage?

I'm facing this now and it seems like an impossible and monumental choice.

How did you decide to marry your partner? How long had you been together? If you lived together beforehand, for how long? Did you make you choice on having kids before marriage?