My (36f) husband (36m; 14 years married) has a very strong personality and doesn't really meet me halfway--how do I decide if I get on board or leave?

This is an issue that has crept up on me over time. My husband and I are high school sweethearts and have been together almost 20 years. When we first got together, our lives were 100% compatible--we liked the same things and when we didn't it still worked (we wanted similar amounts of hobby alone time, for example), we had the same life goals in terms of "launching" away from our parents and establishing our lives as adults, and we did great! We both have good careers, we bought a house in a city that we love, we kept in touch with our old friends and made new friends together, we got some cats and loved them SO MUCH, we spent time together and laughed a lot. He's very funny, very fun, a great friend, and a pretty good roommate, but to be honest he is not a very good PARTNER.

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As tends to happen when you get married very young, we did grow in different directions as we became adults, and my husband turns out to be a very strong personality who is not very flexible/willing to compromise. A few ways this has manifested itself:

• He has strong opinions about how certain things should be done around the house, especially around food, and relatively little patience for things getting messed up or done differently. We are both good cooks and I took the kind of standard advice of "either you can let me do it my way and not complain or you can do it" and he picked do it! We have a CSA/farm share and get takeout a few times a week, but he does all of the grocery shopping otherwise and cooks most of our meals.
• He's also set up some systems in the house that strike me as deeply odd. One example, he's started keeping his old phones when he upgrades so we now have a "music phone" that he uses only to play music and a "tv phone" that he uses only to cast to the tv, I think this is just so strange when we both have our normal phones all the time, they can easily be used for these functions, and it just adds clutter and more things that need to be charged. When he pitches something like this and I have a difference of opinion, he'll say something like he's going to try it anyway and I need to give it a shot.
• He gets really, really into his hobbies. In the past two years he's gotten into both D&D and camping in big ways. I'm not into either of those things and that's ok, I have my own things to do! But he gets pretty obsessed, anytime there is a moment of silence he's thinking about his next D&D session and he'll talk to me about it for basically as long as I'll let him. With quarantine this past year he leaned into the camping extra hard as a way to get out of the house safely. I love the outdoors but would much rather sleep in my own bed, but I did go camping several times including for 4th of July, his birthday, and Halloween. He went on his own a bunch more times. I am definitely happy to compromise but there's not much going the other way--when I said hey what do you want to do for Halloween he already had the entire plan in his head and my only decision was whether I wanted to come along or be alone for Halloween.
• To go along with the hobbies, he buys a ton of stuff. He got really into grilling and we have TWO big green egg grills, which are very pricey, because he wanted to have a very large cookout party and needed a bigger surface to do that. I tried to get him to either invite fewer people or to do fewer meats (you don't need ribs AND brisket AND pulled pork) but he refused, saying that this was one of his life dreams to have a party like this.
• He'll make decisions without me or do something different than we agreed on, and thinks this is fine if he has a good enough reason. We have a couple of cats and were considering adopting another this year, but ended up deciding together that we'd foster (guest room hasn't seen a human guest in SO LONG), and that we'd be willing/able to take care of one adult cat who didn't need any serious daily medical attention. We had one who turned out to have medical issues that were diagnosed after he arrived, not my husband's fault but it was stressful and more than we were prepared to handle. The next call he got was for a set of 3 10 month old brothers and he said yes without even telling me! This is definitely more than I'm comfortable with but he just said, he had the opportunity to save these cats and one of his life dreams (again with the life dreams!) is to save cats so here we are, there are three cats in my guest room right now.
• There have also been a couple of even more big picture things--about three years ago he got laid off with severance, coincidentally right when we had been talking about him taking a bit of time off of work to work on a passion project. I was happy to support him and actually excited that he'd be able to work on this project while he still had income coming in, all I wanted was a budget for how we'd survive on my salary and for him to actually do stuff during the week. But he said he needed a week of vacation, which turned into two, which turned into a month which turned into until after our summer vacation which turned into something else and so on, until he had been unemployed and pretty much doing nothing for 8 months. He found a new job relatively easily but kept talking to our friends and family about how he just needed a break so badly and it was so great to take time off, with no "and it was all made possible by my wife" or really any nod to the fact that I was not on board. No budget was ever made. There are probably 2-3 of these really big picture things, and this is the one item where he swears he has learned and that nothing like this will ever happen again.
• About two years ago he got really obsessed with the idea that he'd never had sex with anyone but me, and ultimately we ended up opening up our relationship. In the big picture this doesn't really belong on the list because I was actually 100% on board with it, especially since it would take care of some of these problems I'm listing here (much easier to be happy with my husband going on a bunch of camping vacations without me when I can spend the weekend with my boyfriend), but these issues have cropped up in a lot of the details--he had sex with a dude in a steam room on vacation literally the DAY AFTER we declared that we were officially opening up, it happened so fast that we hadn't really set rules and he didn't use a condom because it just didn't occur to him. More recently, he's seen people during the pandemic because "they work from home and just see their partner it's totally safe," but the partner is in SCHOOL so like, not accurate at all.

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Most of these are only workable because I am a pretty flexible/easygoing person, we don't have kids, he has a job that affords him a lot of free time, some of them have silver linings for me (I don't do many chores and it turns out I love being polyamorous generally and my boyfriend in particular!), we already reached a lot of the early adulthood goals that we had together, and we have enough money that we can absorb extra expenditures. I realize that all of those things afford us a lot of freedom and I want him to be able to do things that are important to him, I just don't like feeling like I have no say. As I have pushed back against these things over the years, there has been a lot of crying and we have done counseling which has helped with communication and things like that, but hasn't changed this overall pattern. I've pretty much arrived at the conclusion that his life is very much The Husband Show, and I am welcome to take part and live my life alongside it, but there is just not going to be much in the way of us working back and forth together about what our lives are going to be like.

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So, my ultimate question is whether this is enough for me. I still love him so much! The idea of not having this life that we've built together is so, so painful. But I just don't feel like this is what I signed up for. I think I could be happy if I stayed, but I would very much have to just let him do whatever he wants and make my own life in parallel. How do I decide if this is good enough? How do you leave someone who you love and who adds so much to your life because they just don't want to meet you halfway?

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tl;dr: As we've grown older, my husband is really attached to doing things the way he wants to do them and isn't really willing to meet me halfway. I still get a lot of great things out of our life and our relationship together but I also feel like it just isn't enough. How do I decide?

Submitted February 09, 2021 at 10:08AM by Maleficent_Energy865 https://ift.tt/371MkxY