Two Worlds Collide

There is a scene in the movie Witness where Harrison Ford says something like "If I had gotten with you, I would have to stay or you would have to go." It's not that he didn't want her. It's that he understood that it wouldn't be an inconsequential private moment.

Had he accepted her advances, someone's life would be gone with no going back. This is likely true to some degree for all relationships but it's seldom recognized up front by the two people in question. 

And it's not because either of them necessarily wants that. This is largely about stepping into the social fabric of another person's life and other people imposing their expectations on the relationship. 

This is also a theme of the movie Fools Rush In where a White man and Hispanic woman get involved and neither of them is at all ready for the other's world. They both feel the other individual in the relationship is shafting them but a large part of it has to do with social dynamics they have no control over.

One of my favorite parts is the scene where he is shocked at the huge extended family and her reply is "I guess a lot of people couldn't make it."

In some sense, when you get involved with someone, you get involved with everyone with whom they have any kind of relationship. And that seems to frequently not make anyone's radar when they are deciding at a bar "Hey, you're kind of cute."

So there's your assumptions and there's your partner's assumptions and there's the assumptions of a potentially long list of other people whose expectations and actions will impact your marriage, like it or not, for better or for worse. 

My marriage went as well as it did because he was extremely introverted, we got secretly married and he joined the Army and we left town because of his career. My oldest kid told me once he didn't understand the evil mother-in-law trope as a kid because stuff like that wasn't a part of his life experience. 

So if you really want to transition and stay married, you need to navigate this piece of the puzzle. 

In the movie Fools Rush In, she asks a random stranger to go home with her and meet the family because she's pregnant and she wants to be able to tell the family "Oh, you met him once." She's not actually trying to get involved with him.

They end up falling in love in part because he is willing to do that for her and thereby protect her public reputation and help her navigate important social stuff as a girl in trouble who isn't asking him to rescue her. She's not playing the victim card. She's not trying to claim some right to be rescued by a man as a damsel in distress.

It's not the only movie with a plot like that, so presumably more than one script writer has seen something like that in real life.

In real life, men seem to frequently be oblivious to the importance of his actions on her social standing because men seem to not think of women as having a public reputation that matters materially the way their reputation is a factor in having a successful career and therefore pertinent to paying the bills. 

For a woman who is about to become a mom, her family is likely to be an important form of material support in terms of money, food, clothes for the child and childcare if they stick by her and don't kick her to the curb. This can be worth quite a lot while men frequently don't really see the dollar value of being able to drop the kid off with a relative sometimes instead of hiring a sitter.

It's also her safety net if her relationship to the father ends. Women tend to be more aware of the potential significant value of retaining the respect of the extended family while bringing a child into the world.

I look back on my life and I see my marriage differently than I did at the time. 

While married, I was aware of the weight of the situation and the weight of the world creating a situation that seemed largely out of my hands. I felt sabotaged by an unsupportive husband and his very male-coded career that still does a better job than most of providing benefits that foster a traditional nuclear family 1950s lifestyle.

I look back on it and feel I chose a man who could give me a lifestyle that worked for me in part because I understood it and in part because I was born with a medical condition that undermined my desire to "have it all" as part of a two-career couple with children.

I chose a man whose stated career goal for what I wanted and my recent posts on this site and elsewhere have altered my view that he was some immovable rock and I was some helpless pawn. I feel more like I helped make him into the man he claimed he aspired to be in ways he really couldn't accomplish on his own.

I stayed as long as I did in part because I was trying to understand what was his crap, what was my crap and what was some magical, alchemical "our crap" that only existed because we were together and which wasn't per se something I needed to try to fix in me if I just left him.

I suspect that yours, mine and ours formula means a lot of relationships end and both parties genuinely experience it as "Now that they're gone, two thirds of my problems are gone!!!" and both parties sincerely feel that must mean their partner was most of the problem and no one can convince either of them that's not really the case.

I've spent a lot of years trying to break down my marriage, what worked, what didn't and why in hopes of figuring out how to do it better someday with someone else.

Having a partner substantially shapes a person and the life they live. It does that for both people.

My husband exited the military shortly after we split. He never got the PhD he expected to pursue while married to me and never became a college professor.

The career he said he wanted that I fully supported ended not long after our relationship ended. He didn't stay another five or ten years and he bought a house at wherever he stayed wherever his last duty station was though it wasn't the place he spoke of wanting to retire to.

Our post divorce lives suggest I have far more agency than he has and always did in spite of being a medically handicapped woman who has so far failed to establish a real career and adequate earned income of my own.

I mostly liked the life I had while we were married in spite of not much liking him once the initial blush of falling in love wore off and failed to be recaptured, try though we might.

His military career is largely what provided me the life I liked in spite of he and I proving to be fundamentally incompatible in many ways.

I've spent a lot of years wondering how to recreate something that never actually existed.

I've wondered how to get involved with someone without derailing the person they are CURRENTLY, how to respect someone's boundaries and let them be them while SOMEHOW making our lives fit together and also also sidestepping the part I loathed and resented: Being treated like chattel property by a man who fundamentally didn't respect me.

If you are AMAB and married to a woman, she likely sees her own life as profoundly defined and shaped by you, your life, your identity and your career in ways you may be wholly unaware of and may not even agree are a thing.

When you decide that the you that exists currently is killing you and must somehow cease to exist, this is an existential crisis for her which is unlikely to result in her feeling like "Good riddance. I don't really miss you. I miss me more and I am so glad to have me back now that you're gone."

Telling her "Honey, I think I am trans and I need to live life as a woman." may not bother her in the SLIGHTEST in terms of judging you per se while nonetheless shattering her world and her identity in part because women simply get told their man defines them.

I have six years of college. I've done substantial therapy. My divorce was finalized something like eighteen years ago. I'm still revising my opinions of what really happened when I married him, while I was married to him and since he's been gone.

What I hear married AMAB people say is they are terrified their wife won't love them, won't accept them and won't stay and they shall be devastated by her loss during what they expect to be one of the hardest times in their life.

They seem to fail to recognize the devastation to her life and identity she sees by simply being told "The man you married isn't who you thought he was. I don't think I'm even a man at all and I don't think I can continue living the way I've been living."

I don't know how you can cushion that blow but I think most AMAB individuals are oblivious to the fact that it exists and needs to be cushioned.

And it's not just psychological on her part. No matter how savvy she is, the weight of the world pressures women to prioritize their husband and his career etc etc etc in ways that make this challenging to navigate under the best of circumstances with the most enlightened partner imaginable.