How do you deal with causing your spouse existential disappointment?

[Anastasia13]

How do you deal with causing your spouse existential disappointment?

[Guest]

Nm misread question.

Edited May 26, 2019 by Guest

[Lilllabettt]

17 hours ago, Anastasia (L&T) said:

How do you deal with causing your spouse existential disappointment?

Can you explain further what you mean?

Like, being married to a particular person causes someone to doubt the meaning of their lives, and to believe life "didnt turn out" like they'd hoped it would?

[Lilllabettt]

If that is what you're describing  - the key thing to dealing with that is knowing that existential dissapointment is essential to human development. Integrating that stress is how we psychologically mature. When you have someone who has only faced  mild existential crisis, mild interpersonal disappointment or "expectation hangover" - perhaps only as a teenager - that person overall has the life experience of finding out they always were who they thought they were.  They often have an intuition that something is "missing" or sensation that they are living at a superficial level. 

I mean, if my spouse located his marriage to me as the locus of disappointment in how his life turned out, it would be hard not to be upset and take that personally.  But, I hope I could remind myself that it likely has next to nothing to do with me personally.  The existential dissapointment would come regardless of who he married. Hopefully it would! Because as I said integrating past that is key to living a meaningful rich life.  So, the thing to do would be support him through it, if you can. Its ouch though.