Why did I think it was a good relationship?

Watching my long-term marriage get so carelessly discarded without warning or much explanation has made me question so much.  Every moment of my more than two decades relationship has run through my head more times than I can count as I search for different perspectives, interpretations, understandings, etc.  I keep looking for what I missed.  And in the process, I'm recognizing things that weren't so great.  So I keep coming back to this question - why did I think it was a good relationship?

I was not blind to our communication issues.  I used to get so irritated when he would tell me just half of what he was thinking about a problem or just half of a story.  And I don't mean like the just the first half or the second half.  It would be random pieces between the beginning and the end such that what he was saying just didn't make sense to me.  So I would ask him questions to try and fill in the gaps in my brain.  And he would usually get a bit defensive as if I should already know the answers to the questions I was asking but ultimately, he would fill in the gaps and a lightbulb would click in my head when I finally had enough to understand what he was trying to tell me.

And there were things he just wouldn't talk about until it blew up and then he still held back some of what he was thinking.  The relationship we had with his parents, especially his mother was one of those topics.  She would interfere in ways that made me really uncomfortable and that at times seemed to pit my ex-husband against me.  I really tried to separate the boundaries I needed related to how her actions affected me specifically and our marriage from the his own relationship with his mother.  My goal was never to stand in the way of his own relationship with his mother.  But I didn't realize that wasn't enough for him.  He wanted me to like his mother, be close with her, and just accept whatever boundaries she wanted to cross.

And in the most recent years, I realized he was holding on to a lot of negative assumptions that weren't necessarily accurate.  That made me worry that I was making my own assumptions without getting clarification, so I worked hard to start verbalizing the assumptions that formed in my head as a check.  Unfortunately, he would just sit silent when I did that.  I don't know if that was because my assumptions were accurate and he didn't want to admit that or if his conflict-avoidance coping mechanisms got in the way of him speaking up when they weren't accurate.  I tried to explain to him what I was doing and that I really wanted to hear clarification from him but still got silence.  This probably should have been my biggest sign that he wasn't invested in the relationship at all.

Okay, so for a post about why I thought it was a good relationship, it's probably not a good sign that I haven't gotten to that question yet after four paragraphs.  But I'm still not ready to abandon my trust in my judgment for two decades.  I truly felt good about us until last year.  I can't throw away all the good feelings I felt for so many years.  So why did I think it was a good relationship?

Our values were aligned (except maybe our understanding of love and marriage).  I truly feel that we both want the same things out of life as it relates to career goals, not having children, travel, saving for a reasonably early retirement, etc.  As much as we struggled with communication, we rarely disagreed on major decisions.  We seemed to effortlessly tackle together financial challenges that came up, decisions about moving across the country, homeownership vs renting, etc.  As odd as it sounds our communication problems didn't get in the way of working as a team at so many aspects of life.

My ex-husband is a good man.  He's respectful.  He helps others.  He tries to be considerate.  He has good intentions.  He was always honest and transparent with our money.  He pulled his weight around the house.  He's intelligent and knows how to critically think.  Even with how awful he treated me this past year, I don't doubt all the good that genuinely existed in him.

I just really enjoyed being around him.  We went on great adventures together.  We laughed together.  I enjoyed doing life with him.  I liked him as a person.

And there weren't any major needs, I wasn't getting met somehow.  I could fulfill a lot of my needs on my own and although my social network wasn't truly adequate, it did exist and helped me meet other needs.  So I didn't ask much of him.

Finally, because of all the amazing things I loved about him, I was willing to accept his challenges.  If I had to work a bit harder at communication to try and bridge the gap, I was willing to do that.  If I had to let go of some of my annoyances (such as related to his mother or the way he would complain sometimes), I was willing to do that, because I loved him and enjoyed being with him.  And I thought I found the right balance of advocating for the boundaries that were really important to me and letting go of the rest.