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40, she about the same. To give you some more context, she was big time into meditation.
2 years.
She has become disillusioned with "companionate love" as well. We call it unconditional love which she claims does not exist. This is what she told me:
One thing is true though, I definitely feel freed from a sense of responsibility (that a typical man suffers from) when being around her. We are enjoying each other's company but I miss the heady feelings of the old days.
Why did you get married?
Marriage's purpose is to raise children, clearly that's out of the window.
In your 40s you're supposed to either welcome your first grand-children or get ready to welcome your first grand-children.
She could be brushing up on her cooking, baking, knitting skills, or helping a teenager / young adult form or get ready to form a family, but here she is...?
Get her a dog. Please, no pitbull.
If she's bored, she can volunteer at the homeless shelter or something.
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So yeah, sounds like she's dealing with the end of the "euphoric" stage. This is more concerning, though:
These are very different things. The standard reductive view on "altruism" is that there's no such thing, because every example you can give, someone else can explain a way as not really selfless. Even the paradigmatic "parent throws themself in front of a bus to save a child" can be explained as "pro-social behavior geared toward benefitting one's own bloodline through the development of a personal legacy" or somesuch. I think it was the philosopher David Hume who suggested that this kind of reductive analysis is unhelpful--our analysis must stop somewhere. But of course these ideas are certainly out there.
But companionate love can still be "conditional" in these ways. The entanglements of responsibilities toward others are often burdensome but they are also widely regarded as essential to a flourishing life. Having children is a lot of work, and yet it is (in my experience) rewarding work. Having good familial relationships often requires a high degree of tolerance, compromise, and forgiveness, and yet familial relationships are usually the most reliable and lasting--and beneficial--of all. Chris Gowans writes a bit about this in his book "Innocence Lost," if I remember correctly--basically he notes that even though there are times when we feel absolutely burdened by even our very good relationships, it is morally important for us to experience and bear such burdens, but also to be aware of when, and to what extent, it's okay for us to put them down anyway. The movie "A Monster Calls" is an exploration of this very idea through the eyes of a child losing a parent to illness.
Now, this bit does sound suspiciously like a woman who is either already cheating, or is exploring the possibility:
Many people describe companionate love as each partner being the other's highest priority. Certainly relationships come with expectations! But the idea that this is a bad thing seems like a red flag to me. It just might instead be a particularly clumsy way of characterizing the end of the "euphoric" stage, which would be less to worry about.
I think this is just wrong. Here is one of my most highly upvoted comments on reddit ever:
Put a little differently--it may not be your responsibility to make her happy, per se, but if she sees no reason to at least occasionally make personal sacrifices for your happiness, and you see no reason to make similar sacrifices for hers, then you don't really have a relationship anymore--you're just two people sharing a house. Even friends regard themselves as at least minimally responsible, in context-bound ways, for one another's happiness and well-being; otherwise, how are they friends?
This is normal; this is how the euphoria stage ends. It can be recaptured at times, with effort. If this is your only real complaint, then you just have to work through it (hopefully with each other's loving help--that seems like a reasonable responsibility to think you have toward one another!). But I have certainly seen relationships where the end of the euphoria stage was accompanied by a drastic reduction in sexual congress, which is totally unnecessary and frequently kills marriages. Communication is important, but don't mistake words for communication. What you've shared so far from your wife is a lot of words that don't say much of practical value. So far I am about half convinced that she still loves you but doesn't know what love is, or doesn't understand how important interpersonal relationships actually are to her because she has internalized a radically individualist mindset that is complete empirical bullshit.
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