The Assumptions Your Spouse Makes

When my oldest child was like five or seven, he would say he wanted to play video games for his career! And I would tell him "That sounds like a child's idea of a career and probably won't be what you wind up doing, but feel free to prove me wrong."

So this is my opinion and I think it's a reasonable opinion but it's meant to help people find their way, not crush someone who thinks they see something else in their own life. So feel free to make me look like a damn fool. Have at it with your bad self. I don't care.

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It's been my observation that the act of being married makes it psychologically, emotionally and logistically challenging for either partner to pursue significant changes such as gender transition. 

And I hope to cast light on why and how that is so in my opinion. And I do so in hopes of helping open up options for people needing options. 

First, you have two people who are coming to the relationship with separate mental landscapes and assumptions about life, the universe and everything and particularly about gender roles and what marriage means.

So assumptions your partner is making can have a profound impact on your choices.

I got married at age nineteen to another nineteen year old and I'm now sixty. When the divorce was finalized, I had been married more than half my life. 

In recent months, I finally concluded that I was unfaithful the first time in part because he was failing to uphold his end of the bargain and -- critically and especially pertinent to my point here -- most likely my act of infidelity pressured him to actually get off his ass and do what we had both agreed he would do and join the Army. 

We got married somewhat spontaneously. My father was retired Army. His father was still career Army. I thought we had a shared context and were on the same page. 

Unbeknownst to me, his mother was a poisonous psycho bitch who blamed all her marital problems on the Army and she opposed her son joining the Army.

So after marrying a woman in secret who was living with her mommy and daddy whike going to college two weeks after he finally got a job at McDonald's while living with his mommy, he then allowed the Air Force to jerk him around for a YEAR during which time I dropped out of college rather than admit to my parents I was secretly married to a total fucking loser who felt no real obligation to get off his ass and support his wife financially or, alternately LIE on federal financial aid forms AKA commit fraud.

So I don't know what my putz of a husband was thinking but I ended up sleeping with my ex-boyfriend and "coincidentally" about two weeks later the future ex joins the fucking Army. He probably could have gone in the Army at any point but didn't feel like being married obligated him to support me financially. No, his priority was catering to the whims of his nutcase mother.

I didn't actually tell him our secret marriage is why I felt forced to drop out of school. It probably didn't cross his moronic little mind these were related.

To be fair, he wasn't in college because his asshole parents weren't at all supportive of him, so he wasn't familiar with what that entailed. But he did know we were married,  he did know I married him expecting him to join the Army shortly and he knew we weren't living together because we couldn't support ourselves. 

He had told me the Army was his dream career. There was nothing else he wanted. I saw that as my ticket out of my hometown and fully supported his desire to join the military, which was bizarre to him because of his mother's attitude. 

There's a lot of baked in assumptions there and it ended up working out in part because in my mind that was the only viable path forward. So I was waiting for him to actually join the military like we had agreed was The Plan and I had no desire to get parents involved in solving this issue that I was married to a total fucking loser with no goddamned sense because I had been molested by my brother and I wanted out.

So without consciously thinking much about it, I made choices that aligned with "The only answer here is he will join the military. Full stop." And I kept other people out of our decisions and gave him latitude to solve his issue as he saw fit.

I never nagged him about how long this was taking. And then I slept with someone else and he suddenly had different priorities and chose to walk across the hall to the Army recruiter.

So he ultimately did join the Army. I ultimately got what I wanted after a bumpy start. I don't regret it but looking back on it, it wasn't as slam dunk as I imagined.

It went that way in part because I married him based on his stated intentions to join the Army and I made decisions that helped foster that outcome. 

He then spent the entire marriage acting like he rescued me from a life as a welfare mom -- reality: I gave up a National Merit Scholarship and quit college to be with him -- and never acknowledged that the reality is our secret little <s>pact with the devil</s> saved his spineless ass from having his life utterly ruined by his poisonous mother just like she

ruined the lives of his sisters.

My sister used to tell me if he hadn't married me, he would have ended up delivering newspapers and living with his mom forever like some of our gaming buddies. She's probably right.

At age twenty when I chose to sleep with my ex-boyfriend, there was no conscious intent to pressure my husband into getting off his ass and keeping his word about his plans to join the Army. I absolutely would not have married a guy who finally got a job at a fast food place after a year or more of job hunting if I didn't believe he was about to have a real career capable of supporting us.

First takeaway: 

He and I didn't communicate.  

I didn't tell him why I dropped out of college. He didn't tell me why his sissy ass was letting the Air Force jerk him around. 

Poor communication dogged our marriage every step of the way. 

Second takeaway:

There's layers and layers of assumptions there. Even if we had tried to discuss it, I doubt I was capable at that time of explaining to him why I did the things I did.

Third takeaway:

That entire plan has enormous amounts of heteronormative assumptions baked into it, including he will be the breadwinner and supporting us financially is not my responsibility. 

Fourth takeaway:

If there's a plan of some kind in place, your spouse may be arranging for that plan to happen even if you maybe have other ideas.

Even if nominally that plan hinges on your actions. 

Again: It went that way because I married a man who said this was the only thing he wanted in life. 

I didn't feel I was maneuvering him, manipulating him, pressuring him, etc. I was supporting HIS dream. Because I'm all loving and stuff. 

But once he told me that was an etched in stone plan and then married me, I made sure he "got what he wanted."