Separating from husband/wife

[thirdunity]

Has anyone else found that they no longer get along with their spouse after they go pre-med?

I'm 31, husband is 34. We have only been together for two years, but it feels like it's been five or more, because of the drastic personal changes that have happened during that time.

One thing that happened is that I was chronically depressed when we got together. Our relationship was based upon me being a relatively incompetent, unmotivated person who needed him to take charge of my life. I started getting over the depression. And then everything started to fall apart. Our relationship only works as long as we both want to be "crazy", and I don't want to be crazy anymore.

After deciding I wanted to go pre-med, I found that my life goals just no longer in any way meshed with my husband's, and it's been hard, but I'm realizing that for many reasons, we have no future together, but have been staying together out of comfort/convenience, because neither of us had enough initiative to leave.

There are so many things that changed. I became serious and motivated; I started hanging out with different people. He is still the same person, still hangs out with the same crowd. He is not an ambitious person in any respect, he doesn't have initiative or motivation, and while I still find the same things in him that I got with him for, I find I just can't respect him as much as I would like. After I decided that I wanted to ultimately become a doctor or scientist (which is what I'll do if I don't become a doctor), I found myself not even having anything to talk about with him - we don't even like each other's friends anymore.

I am moving out soon, because staying will be too depressing to me, and the depressing relationship often completely saps my motivation. I don't feel like I can achieve my goals in life and stay in this relationship.

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[heech]

In my very humble opinion... there're a couple of superficial ways to understand your motivations based on what little you've said.

The first is exactly the situation that you described. Your husband is sabotaging your professional success because he neither understands nor supports your goals of improving yourself. If that's the case, and if you're serious about coming a doctor... then there's nothing left to be said. You have incompatible life goals, and you're taking the right step in ending this relationship. If this is the case, you're making the right choice, I support you absolutely, and there's no reason to read on.

In my second interpretation... I'll play devil's advocate, and be more cynical of what you're saying. (Again, knowing absolutely nothing about you, I hope you don't take this personally. I'm just being as candid as possible.)

Is it possible that you've grown to dislike him because you've become arrogant with your new goals/dreams? That you no longer respect him because you believe your career to be "superior", and his to be "inferior"? Is it possible that you have been belittling his career "goals" (such as they are) while expecting him to worship yours?

Speaking in generalities now... in my opinion, any relationship is best served separating our professional lives with our personal lives. Our professional lives shouldn't be the primary source of our emotional satisfaction; they should be the source of wealth so that we can enjoy our personal lives. Don't lose sight of that. Superior or inferior professional lives should never, ever translate into similar positions in the home.

Even if I happened to be very successful in my million-dollar career, and my wife just managed to make it as a shift-manager at the local McDonalds... I would take time to celebrate her successes as if they were my own.

Why should you reward your husband this respect even if he sits around on his butt all day? .. well, what do you expect from your own ideal spouse, somewhere down the road? What if you struggle further down in your med school career... would it be fair for him to leave you for a better doctor who matched into a surgery residency?

Again, speaking in generalities... for those in the same situation, I hope you try sitting your spouses down and talking the logic out with them. Explain to your husband the reasons that you loved him, and explain to him that you can only continue to love him if he supports you in your goals. Explain to him that his professional "failures" doesn't detract from his role in your relationship, in your marriage. Explain to him that he shouldn't feel inadequate or insecure, that you took vows to be partners in life... that your successes in school and in medicine *can* be 50% his as well.

 

[thirdunity]

Heech,
It's reasonable that you'd try to see the issue from both sides.

There's actually a bit more to the story - if I went into all of it, you'd probably wonder "Why did you two get married?", regardless of whether or not one of us is pre-med. Since I've ranted and raved in friends-locked and private LiveJournal posts over the months, since every person close to me was wondering what the heck I was thinking when I even married him,
I'll just save the drama and character assassination for my journal. I'm trying to be mature about this, whatever that means. I'm just so emotionally burned out as it is from the whole deal, I'm pretty much talked out about everything that's wrong with us.

There's a large extent to which it can be explained by both of us having a lot of growing to do when we got together, and finding that we are growing apart.

The first is exactly the situation that you described. Your husband is sabotaging your professional success because he neither understands nor supports your goals of improving yourself. If that's the case, and if you're serious about coming a doctor... then there's nothing left to be said. You have incompatible life goals, and you're taking the right step in ending this relationship. If this is the case, you're making the right choice, I support you absolutely, and there's no reason to read on.

That's a large part of it. I can't go into much more with hauling out lots of dirt laundry.

One big deal is that he really wants children. I don't.

This is my bad. I wasn't clear on this when we got together. Just as I wasn't sure yet that I was going to go premed, I wasn't sure yet, either, whether or not I would ever want children. He seemed to accept this uncertainty when we got together, and I was very honest about it, but it comes up every time a relative gets sick and he feels that his family is dying off. "One wants kids, the other doesn't" is kind of a deal-breaker. He should be with someone who wants them. I just don't.

For some bizarre reason I don't understand, he's rather maligned toward the health care profession, and doesn't enjoy hearing me talk about medical science, but he's said that he'd just have to get used to this if it's what I want to do.

In my second interpretation... I'll play devil's advocate, and be more cynical of what you're saying. (Again, knowing absolutely nothing about you, I hope you don't take this personally. I'm just being as candid as possible.)
Is it possible that you've grown to dislike him because you've become arrogant with your new goals/dreams? That you no longer respect him because you believe your career to be "superior", and his to be "inferior"? Is it possible that you have been belittling his career "goals" (such as they are) while expecting him to worship yours?

Thanks for pointing this out to me; these are motivations that I need to examine. There must be *some* of that, especially since my social group drastically changed in the past year. When we got together, we were both part of the whole science fiction fan community; then I started getting interested in Toastmasters and professional type organizations.

He absolutely can't stand people he meets through any of my groups.
I try to remind myself that just because he and I like to hang out with different people, this does not mean that my people are better than his, or vice-versa. But he *has* often been very negative and rude around "my" people (he *only* likes gamer types and hippie types), to the point of seriously embarassing me and impacting some of my relationships (he's not even allowed in my mother's house anymore; one friend totally stopped returning my calls because of how he treated her - this was a dear friend of MANY years). I'm afraid of having anyone ever meet him who might ever potentially offer me a job.

Speaking in generalities now... in my opinion, any relationship is best served separating our professional lives with our personal lives. Our professional lives shouldn't be the primary source of our emotional satisfaction; they should be the source of wealth so that we can enjoy our personal lives. Don't lose sight of that. Superior or inferior professional lives should never, ever translate into similar positions in the home.

This is an important heads-up for me; I *do* tend to be somewhat of a workaholic and somewhat of a "Type A" personality. I tend to combine work with hobby, with there being little boundary between them. But I worked in computers and graphic arts for years, and I think that's an occupational hazard of computer people. My work also required humongous amounts of overtime - when I worked in QA, it was common to do "overnighters" during crunch weeks. I would find myself becoming closer to the people I worked with than I could become with anyone else. The work *itself* wasn't very rewarding, but I enjoyed the camaraderie. Work sort of became my identity.

I need to be more careful about that in the future.

I think I've outlined things enough.

 

[alison_in_oh]

I tend to think that major life changes can cause people to draw together or grow apart. In nearly seven and a half years, every major event in my husband's and my life has caused us to cement our bond more tightly and learn to be better friends and partners.

Your original post was asking if going pre-med is one change that universally drives partners apart. I don't think it is, clearly, since my sweetie has gone from bio major to pre-med biochem major to struggling med applicant to med student as we've grown closer. But it doesn't sound like it's even the cause of your current relationship woes. It seems to me that your choice and ambition to pursue medicine is a symptom of a greater lifestyle overhaul and a new direction that doesn't include your partner.

Optimistically I'd like to urge you to consider counseling and see if open communication can heal some of these rifts. Otherwise, proceed as you see fit -- just be wary of the "peanut gallery" at LJ or here: make this decision your own, and don't rely on the validation of those who might not really know you.

 

[thirdunity]

Your original post was asking if going pre-med is one change that universally drives partners apart. I don't think it is, clearly, since my sweetie has gone from bio major to pre-med biochem major to struggling med applicant to med student as we've grown closer. But it doesn't sound like it's even the cause of your current relationship woes. It seems to me that your choice and ambition to pursue medicine is a symptom of a greater lifestyle overhaul and a new direction that doesn't include your partner.

That makes sense to me, looking at even how our *friends* have changed recently. And I went through some pretty drastic changes.

One is that I started getting treated for depression (the usual combination of therapy, medication, lifestyle remediation, exercise), and actually getting accommodation for my attention issues. I hadn't even known I was depressed, and I was literally depressed my entire life to the point that it was my personality! So now I'm finding I'm a "new me". And getting used to who the "new me" is. I like the "new me". But the "new me" and my partner don't get along. Basically, he likes the "old me" better. And even *that* isn't my only reason for leaving. People shouldn't choose mates when depressed, any more than they should choose mates when they're drunk.

Optimistically I'd like to urge you to consider counseling and see if open communication can heal some of these rifts. Otherwise, proceed as you see fit -- just be wary of the "peanut gallery" at LJ or here: make this decision your own, and don't rely on the validation of those who might not really know you.

There just isn't even enough there left to try to save, from my end of it. Nobody close to me blames me, and most are wondering what took me so long (let alone why I even married him).

By the way, we've only been married for a year. Things started falling apart after the wedding. I knew while we were planning the wedding, that this wasn't going to last, but by that time, relatives had literally already started arriving from out of state.

It's not easy breaking off - I do love him, for what it's worth - but I'm not doing either of us any good by staying.

Even if all *other* things were equal, he doesn't want to follow my academic and vocational career around all over the state/country. And I don't want to have children. Neither of us were clear on these issues when we got together.

All of that said, after living through the wedding that killed our marriage (or rather, brought all of its flaws to light)...

...next time I get married, it's Vegas.

 

[horizontalchew]

Has anyone else found that they no longer get along with their spouse after they go pre-med?

I'm 31, husband is 34. We have only been together for two years, but it feels like it's been five or more, because of the drastic personal changes that have happened during that time.

One thing that happened is that I was chronically depressed when we got together. Our relationship was based upon me being a relatively incompetent, unmotivated person who needed him to take charge of my life. I started getting over the depression. And then everything started to fall apart. Our relationship only works as long as we both want to be "crazy", and I don't want to be crazy anymore.

After deciding I wanted to go pre-med, I found that my life goals just no longer in any way meshed with my husband's, and it's been hard, but I'm realizing that for many reasons, we have no future together, but have been staying together out of comfort/convenience, because neither of us had enough initiative to leave.

There are so many things that changed. I became serious and motivated; I started hanging out with different people. He is still the same person, still hangs out with the same crowd. He is not an ambitious person in any respect, he doesn't have initiative or motivation, and while I still find the same things in him that I got with him for, I find I just can't respect him as much as I would like. After I decided that I wanted to ultimately become a doctor or scientist (which is what I'll do if I don't become a doctor), I found myself not even having anything to talk about with him - we don't even like each other's friends anymore.

I am moving out soon, because staying will be too depressing to me, and the depressing relationship often completely saps my motivation. I don't feel like I can achieve my goals in life and stay in this relationship.

sure you guys have a future.

can he cook?


after you get home from working a 15 hour shift you wont care who is in the bed waiting as long as theres some good leftovers.

just support him and stay with it.

you made a commitment to god !

 

[LADoc00]

Just get divorced already and accept your new life (and fate, as a 31+ year old divorcee your pickings will be mighty slim for a new BF). FFS, the drama! Just do it already, it takes 100 bucks and half an afternoon in most states.