Wow. This thread needs a contrarian view.
@Frita,
If nothing else from this post gets through, consider:
One thing that has happened with my spouse’s isolation is that I, too, have become isolated. I want to (re)discover who I am.
And I need to substitute resuming better self-care for overwhelm.
Your husband is depressed. Depressed people suck. Being around people who suck, sucks. Your first and only option at this point is to find a way to recharge yourself. Until you are successfully recharging yourself, there really isn't any hope of things getting better. You have to be in a good place, yourself, and be able to maintain that good place to be around people who suck without getting dragged down yourself.
Interesting the parallel you draw between retirement and divorce with both being catalysts for self-discovery. So, retiring from is more avoidance of role-based demands that are not congruent with temperament. Retiring to is substituting temperament-aligned pursuits for roles that may or not continue to (or ever have fit).
How well one knows themself, can choose life-pursuits that match temperament and values, and can verbalize this determines how synced one becomes. With the 2x2 outcomes, it is possible to have a mismatch and convincingly assume the role. The irony is hating the performance while lacking substance under the costume while being accepted as being the mask. I think I have more compassion for how retirement affected my spouse, thanks for the framework.
You mentioned your husband wanted out early (Dissatisfaction with work rewards), but topped out at Optimizer. jacob sees the danger of loss of life satisfaction, and going back to work.
As someone who has dealt (poorly) with his own depression (only getting diagnosed in late 40's), I see a different danger.
I'm going to steal quotes from another journal for how an optimizer could face problems in retirement. This is not to imply that poster has or will have any of the issues I'm describing. I'm using these as great examples of optimizer thought patterns.
If maintaining my garden takes me away from fruitful social relationships or creative pursuits I'd like to spend my time on, how do I figure out those "across systems" benefits/costs?
It's challenging because we're weighing categorically different currencies*. <-- this is what I'm trying to systematize / learn from others.
The argument for subscriptions is that they free your time and attention from the costs of ownership as maintenance. The cost of subscriptions is being beholden to a recurring payment and its inflation, acknowledging that sometimes we have to subscribe to things to get enough of them (food, end of life healthcare).
Let's say that money is no longer the bottleneck in the system (post FIRE) and you can trade it away for other currencies.
Using the swept floor example, is there an argument to get a robot vacuum to save me time that I can spend elsewhere, doing the things I really want to be doing? I trade one currency (money) for another (time, relaxation) to get what I really want (more time with friends, lower cortisol).
Is a dishwasher bad? A washing machine? My annual physical? <-- trading money for time to do X.
If money is abundant, why wouldn't I try to own certain things that free up my time**, or even potentially subscribe to them***?
If one spends their career placing a high value on $$, saving for one's retirement, one will make sacrifices. Those sacrifices are justified by the high value of the reward. One is "making progress", plus whatever social rewards are available. If this doesn't change, it becomes a pattern of self sacrifice and reward. Reach the end of the game, now $$ don't mean much. Rewards from previous self sacrifice are gone. But the pattern is still there.
Sacrificing time for money is rewarding, until one has both time and money. Then one has the capacity to sacrifice, but no rewards are available.
Depression is getting stuck in a discharged state, with a decreased ability to get charged from previously rewarding behaviors. The chemical rewards are both harder to come by, and less rewarding when activated.
If an optimizer achieves his goal of less demand and more time, and is prone to depression, I see a real danger of early retirement causing a life implosion. The rewards from work end. The rewards from retirement are increasingly less rewarding than anticipated. The time to inventory the damage one has done to oneself to get to this stage is now everywhere.
This:
These are my spouse’s current favorite activities:
• Lying down on bed or couch for hours at a stretch during the day (intermittent episodes or even majority of day).
• Eating heat-and-eat frozen foods (burritos, corndogs) or going to McDonald’s.
• Moving around house speaking to no one with no eye contact.
• Going to library and reading or listening to podcasts for a few hours.
• Shutting door to his bedroom/former guestroom and doing whatever.
• Attending basketball games alone.
looks like the sort of thing a depressed person might do, trying to recharge*. If so,
My expression has been that he wants me to take action so he can still be the good guy whose mean wife divorced him.
Your idea that you can intuit his wants from his actions (or lack thereof), is going to be deeply unhelpful to you, here.
I feel confused, a secondary emotion compromising of sadness/anger/surprise/disgust with numerous thoughts condensed to, “After 30+ years you only now realize you’d prefer to be a permanent-bachelor?!”
Or, after 30+ years of not fitting your expectations for how he should fill the roles of husband/father, he has given up trying.
Not meeting expectations can feel devastating. My personal experience is that I find it intolerable in any core part of my identity. So I must either find a way to exceed expectations, or I need to shift that role outside my core. Failure to do the first means I will ABSOLUTELY do the second as self preservation, and I will rationalize any shitty behavior along the way. I
know I will do this, I've seen me do it.
As one who has suffered greatly from Expectations**, I am going to ask how long you are willing to punish yourself with unmet expectations before you are willing to do the mental/emotional work of reconciling your expectations to reality? This is long term, exhaustive work. Not something to be tried before fully charging.
So long term, if you choose to try to rehab this marriage, building an image of your future husband and relationship that is appealing and achievable to both of you seems necessary. Right now it seems he doesn't have anything like this, nor is he capable of generating such for himself, with a long history showing that failure is inevitable, and trying a waste of effort. And effort/agency is at a precious minimum, nothing to waste on known failures...
So I would say, "Drop the rope". You have work to do for you, before you can even get to a path forward for anyone.
Don't expect this to fix any damned thing your husband is doing. But do protect yourself from same.
After you are in a good place, consider where you want to be going and pick a path.
Now this wouldn't be a proper riggerjack post without a completely unrelated story plus awkward analogy combination.
I own a 40v Husqvarna chainsaw. The engineers at Husqvarna designed the electronics such that the battery will discharge if left in the tool for storage. Almost all battery chargers include a circuit to ensure the charger is attached to a battery, for safety purposes. A fully discharged Li ion battery will not produce enough voltage to read as a battery to the charger. Husqvarna's tech support says the battery is unrecoverably dead, buy a new battery, $200-300, please.
So I got a couple of 20v Dewalt batteries (cheap knockoffs, actually), some wire, and hotwired the 20's to each other, then to the 40. Angry pixies changed places, as the smaller 20's equalized with the discharged 40. Soon, the 40v battery was charged enough for the charger to take over. Now I have a fully charged 40v battery again.
Once again, I'm the owner of a functional Husqvarna battery powered chainsaw. To get here I had to ignore conventional practices and wisdom. I had to improvise a solution for my situation, accept that my efforts could result in failure to resuscitate the dead battery, with all the hazards of hotwiring batteries, meaning real hazards of greater loss than mere time and effort. Even if I were successful, odds are good the battery's capacity as a battery may be reduced. Perhaps by enough that the battery will still need to be replaced. I had to factor all of this against a replacement cost.
My chainsaw works, but I haven't used it enough to discharge the battery. I don't know what it's capacity will be. Maybe I will still replace it. But for now, it works, I'm happy with it, and my investment feels recovered.
But if I don't change my own behavior, if I leave the battery in the tool, I will have this same problem. This battery, some new battery, it doesn't matter.
I'm 53 years old, now. If I find myself with a dead battery, and I don't change the circumstances and behaviors that lead to a dead battery, I think I'm going to have a battery problem, again.
...
So, long term, if one were invested enough were to try to revive a depressed family member, (despite all of the very good reasons not to try) I would recommend:
1. Be fully charged, with maintaining that charge as first priority.
2. Be protected. Shitty people do shitty things. Expect dealing with shitty people to be unpleasant and messy. Refer back to 1.
3. Get the help of the personality gurus on the forum to get a good feel for the
rewarding parts of experiences that fit your husband's M-B type/Ennigram type.
3. Find a personally rewarding activity your son and you want to do together. It doesn't need to appeal to your husband, nothing will. But if this activity is done in his presence, where he has to expend energy to remove himself...
4. Strategize with your son to find ways of introducing your husband's rewarding experience opportunities into your daily life. Success here won't be pleasant or fun.
5. Repeat, in hopes that your husband gets charged enough to begin searching for rewarding experiences on his own before you lose interest in supporting him.
This may feel gross, like rewarding shitty behavior. Inviting someone who has been shitty, to spend time with you is not generally considered good practice. But learning to be you, even among shitty people with the will, knowledge, and desire to share their shit with you, is how you assure yourself that this is a broken personal pattern. This is how you move forward, knowing you did all that could be done. You will know how to maintain your own battery under stress. You will know how to spot charging and discharging patterns, and how to intervene before a crisis forms. You will know that you won't need to repeat this pattern.
But that knowledge will come at a very high cost. And there's no shame in choosing not to pay that cost, or choosing that your son not pay it. Sunk costs are no reason for further investment.
Peace.
* Well, except for the basketball, alone thing. WTF? If I said that to Mrs. Riggerjack, it would be her signal to surreptitiously begin the search for mind control devices...
** Expectations I have of myself. Expectations I have of The World. The World's expectations of me. Two of these are under my direct control, the third, with enough work, indirect control. From this perspective, unmet expectations are a self inflicted wound.
