Agreebw everything xantippe says
Yea I have no idea why anyone would suggest marriage counseling. That comment seemed wayyyy off.
I suggested marriage counseling, because when things get to the level that the OP speaks of, people have a tendency to become entrenched in their positions and no longer listen to the other…
The OP noted in his first post that the wife did not like his traveling before the children were born.
In his second post, he noted that there was some future travel; he tried to discuss it with his wife, and “she shut down”. That is another way of saying she would not discuss it; the joking way of saying it was that he was “going to sleep on the couch”.
She married someone with the potential to travel; she did not like it before the kids were born and she appears to becoming more entrenched in her position.
Without some outside help to get her to participate in meaningful discussion, this has the potential to force him out of his job, and possibly out of engineering entirely, because she shuts down and won’t discuss.
Which is another way of saying that there is the potential here of her “winning” by losing - losing the potential of a future with more economic stability (engineering jobs have a tendency to pay more, long term, than, say a Humanities job - aka “Do you want to Big Size that order?”).
Sorry - I have dealt with families after the “discussion” degraded to this point and then spiraled down.
I disagree with you. When the wife “shuts down” and won’t have a rational discussion of necessary matters, marriage counseling is in order; left to their own devices, this is going to spiral out of control of either party, or of any rational decision making.
Just as a curiosity - when do you think marriage counseling is needed - a week before a summons is served on the other party? What is the purpose of marriage counseling? Isn’t it helping the parties to learn to communicate, when communications are breaking down? And if the wife is “shutting down”, do you call that communication?
