I don't like anyone as much as I like my wife, straight up. It's incredible to have a partner that acts as my actual 'other half'. We are two sides of the same coin. It's an amazing thing. I can't, nor do I want to, get that close to other people.
I was friendless and grew up with the same 15 boys until the end of highschool, never fit in. Married the first girl who showed me attention, because whatever she had going on was better than the nothing social life I had. Breaking up with her would put me back being the lonely awkward kid at my parents house.
So now two kids and a mortgage later... realizing that being married to a 2/10 friend is very lonely. The Venn diagram of what I like to think and talk about covers what she likes to think and talk about, but we never talk about or do almost anything in my section of the diagram.
Apparently this problem has been happening since time immemorial - from a This is Love podcast...
Phoebe Judge: Many people say the first ever advice column started in the 1690s in England in a publication called The Athenian Mercury. People wrote in with very big questions like, is there a large part of the world still left to discover? The answer was just one word — yes. Someone wrote, “Who are wisest, those who marry for love or for convenience?” The answer was:
There is no degree of wisdom in either, but they're both fools if they marry for one without the other. Love without the necessary conveniences of life will soon wear threadbare. And conveniences without love are no better than being chained to a post for the sake of a little meat, drink, and clothing. But if we compare the small degrees of each together, much love and moderate convenience is far better than the most plentiful estate with little or no love.
"I'm most lonely when I'm alone with my wife" -- that is not healthy or good. I don't think your situation is applicable to the OP.
As a counter, I feel most comfortable when I am alone with my wife. She is my best friend.
Haven't popped the question yet because, a)I want to build my business first, and b) in my experience and observations at least 5 years of dating someone is great for knowing if things will be good going into the future. Know too many who have rushed into failed marriages, and only a few who rushed into successful ones
That is debatable. What's not debatable is that it's not healthy. Unfortunately a lot of marriages are not healthy so what is 'good' and what is 'normal' significantly differ.
I grew up around a lot of evangelical religious people and there was a massive amount of pressure on people to get married. Conversely there was no pressure to make sure you got along with the people and were going to be happy. This lead to pretty much all my friends having short marriages that ended in divorce.
Marriages are like diets. Some people eat healthily and get the benefits from it, a lot of people have no idea how to eat healthily and suffer because of it.
I know a couple who have been together for close to 20 years, they love being together, talking together, going out together, &c. and they're just thinking about getting married now, and they're only doing it to simplify some paperwork for something unrelated
Marriage isn't a checkbox, it's an option if you find the right person and want to legally bind your things to their things in case of death/disease/&c.
In my case I thought we had a lot of shared interests, but after a few years into the marriage my wife had decided that she really liked the idea of those things more than the reality, or that it was just a (nearly decade long) phase she was going through. We still get along well enough personality wise, but we can't find anything for us to do together. Our relationship feels more like good roommates than a marriage.
At the same time I can't really think of any good reason why we should end it. We don't fight hardly at all. Neither of us want kids, so that isn't an issue. AFIAK, I'm not craving another romantic relationship. If we were roommates, I wouldn't want to kick her out. So we just continue on with her being one friend among many.
A marital relationship without leadership and responsibility is not a “functional” relationship even if it works well.
We have differing levels of desire to do things with other people. When we're in a group setting, she's an extrovert - but it drains her. At home she's always been happy with a book, puzzle, or now, doing sudoku or a paint-by-number app on her phone. I find the paint by number app maddening - it'll take a picture of a parrot and subdivide it into thousands of squares. You pick a shade of green, track down and touch all the squares that are that color - and then pick another color - track down and touch all those squares.... She's done hundreds of these and the end result is just a picture on her phone. I suspect autism, but she's super verbal and outgoing which I think masks it.
I find that both my wife and myself, and myself and my kids get closer by doing things together that we all enjoy. This ranges from trying out a new restaurant in town, to going to a museum or themepark we all enjoy, to going on holidays.
What I am trying to say is that experiencing things together may help you bond more and experience pleasant feelings together.
We're compatible roommates, but we have very different languages of play. I like to explore, she prefers to stay home - if you gave her a choice of 'the same thing we did that you enjoy' or 'the new thing that you might not enjoy or is mildly inconvenient' - she'll choose 'the same thing' every time.
We've had kid-free Friday nights for years, we've only went for a 1 mile walk around the neighbourhood less than 5 times, never left our small town to go to something. Most date nights are spent sitting on the couch and failing at choosing a movie or show we'll both enjoy.
She did say I could pickout the movie once, no complaints. So I chose Airplane. She said, oh, I don't want to watch that - which then kills any Airplane related jokes you could ever make. Pinocchio was also rejected as being too weird. She'll watch entire seasons of TV shows, on her phone with headphones in, as she does work around the house. She made a reference once that a song sounded like the theme to XXXX show. She'd watched all 5 seasons and I'd never even heard of the name of it.
So, ya. Find things to do together has been well explored.
Piece of advice:
One (or both) of you will significantly change your personality and interests, or you will split.
Figure out which option you prefer.
It's lonely, but financially and logistically splitting up is unaffordable.
So. Option 3. Stay and regret it 'til my dying day.
I'd suggest doing everything in your power, even if it means completely breaking your obviously well-fortified comfort zones of personal conduct, to change how you live your own life. Find new activities for yourself, try to meet new people (friends I mean, but don't exclude the possibility of someone that sparks your romantic side) and create a new personal internal and external dynamic of interesting experiences for your mind and body. Work at these persistently, and if after having made progress in these things, you still can't make yourself connect with your wife on some deeper level that goes beyond the banal nightmare your describe, then leave her. You will be cushioned at least somewhat, by having already made inroads into your own self-improvement over the life you've lived so far and the type of life you described from before meeting her.
The economic costs of this will be heavy maybe, but they're nothing compared to, as you say in another reply, living like this "till your dying day", because that would be a miserable day indeed and at the end of a whole miserable life of missed opportunity for new textures of experience that were likely always within your reach.
Having children certainly complicates the above, but you absolutely can escape your situation and still work to keep a good relationship with your kids. Millions of divorced people do it over a lifetime, and usually without major traumas or loss of quality experiences with their own kids.
To pull out weird analogies, a mother and a fetus share the same system, they're different people but work as a single unit and need to survive together. I think some marriages are in that level of symbiotic relationship, and when it works it's incredible, when it fails it's really really messy.
But it's pretty hard to explain to people that you're seeing the other person as an extension of yourself and think of their well being literally as your own.
Instead, have your wife be your best friend. That's wonderful! But also have other friends. Keep making new ones as old ones drift away. And keep the friendship with your wife alive.
And you know -- maybe some people just aren't programmed like that. I happen to be. Maybe some people _do_ get more out of friendships than they would out of a relationship. Really very different strokes, you know? Wild.
Centering marriage and romantic relationships means that most people only consider romantic partners as their 'person'. My person is my baby sister. We live together, have co-mingled finances, make long-term plans (including possibly fostering or adopting children), etc. If we were more open to different relationship priorities, more people would find their 'person'. The focus on romantic sexual relationships above all else keeps people from finding their person because they don't consider all the possibilities!
There are certainly benefits to having your 'person' be your sexual partner: Sex helps with intimacy and hopefully creates a part of your life where you associate each other with pleasure. If you're of opposite sexes, you can have children that reflect both of you which makes parenting easier. It can also compensate for weaknesses in one's family or community of origin: somebody leaving a cult can find love.
But there are benefits to other types of primary relationships as well. For me and my sister, for example:
- No worries about the bedroom. We don't have to worry about staying sexy enough, our partners losing attraction to us, etc. Sex drives change over time and are finicky and hard to control.
- We've literally known each other our entire lives. You can find this in a romantic partner but most people aren't marrying people they've known since they were four years old.
- Related to the above, we come from the same environment and have a lot of the same touchstones which makes communication way easier. Instead of having to explain my entire childhood history and why I would be reacting a certain way to something, I can just say, "You're being like Mom. :( " and it's automatically understood.
- Sibling bonds aren't dissolvable and are relationships of equals. You can hate your sibling, but you're always siblings. Marriages and romantic partnerships end. Parental bonds have power dynamics encoded in them.
- Practically, us living together and pooling resources allows for maximization of inter-generational wealth building. Whatever our parents have - if anything - when they pass won't be split.