A person reflects on staying in a marriage where their partner repeatedly denies problems, avoids responsibility, and refuses to change. No amount of goodness or effort can force someone else to change. Choosing to stay despite knowing it will fail is accepting loneliness as the price of not being alone.
If I accept that these patterns are patterns that my partner exhibits, then I also accept the consequences that come with those. If I want to be in a marriage with somebody who's dissociated, denies, evades, justifies, rationalizes, bargains, externalizes, makes excuses, acts like a victim, doesn't take responsibility— if I make a choice to be in a relationship with them because I'm just so desperate to not be alone, and should just be with them because I want this version of my family, then what am I accepting? That it all might look good from the outside, but on the inside it's bound to fail. Yeah. And it's not bound to fail because I'm not willing to try. It's bound to fail because of things that are outside of my control. No matter how good of a man I am, no matter how much I do I can't make somebody see or perceive or feel, or I can't force my moral and ethical code on somebody else. Absolutely. And love is a terrible price to pay for loneliness, man.
