QUESTION:
Here’s a case where there’s a couple who have been married for many years, have married off children already, and they Baruch Hashem live a Torah-dig life together. But the husband and wife have very glaring different personalities. The wife is mainly “fire” and the husband is mainly “earth”. The wife [is very growth-oriented and] likes to learn sefarim, especially the sefarim of the Rav shlit”a, but the husband has no interest in inner growth like this. They actually have a peaceful relationship, but they aren’t deeply connected with each other. Rather, it’s like they are each living their own separate lives from the other, each of them involved in their own little world. The wife [being the more proactive one in the relationship] has two choices in front of her:
(1) Either she can really work on herself and get more in touch with her own inner world, and just do everything she’s supposed to be doing in order to run the home, and she can just paste a smile on herself all the time to her husband and not even ask him to grow together with her. She can be passive and refined towards him. (2) Or, her second option is that she can ask her husband that they should work on themselves together and learn about the inner world, together, and, she will ask him to be more sensitive to her needs and care about their relationship more. She will ask him that she wants to see a change in their home, that is should become the loving and warm atmosphere that she’s craving. (She has tried to do this for the last 20 years by asking her husband to be more proactive and to invest in their relationship, but she hasn’t gotten anywhere).
Which option should the wife take to improve her marriage – the first option or the second option?
(1) Either she can really work on herself and get more in touch with her own inner world, and just do everything she’s supposed to be doing in order to run the home, and she can just paste a smile on herself all the time to her husband and not even ask him to grow together with her. She can be passive and refined towards him. (2) Or, her second option is that she can ask her husband that they should work on themselves together and learn about the inner world, together, and, she will ask him to be more sensitive to her needs and care about their relationship more. She will ask him that she wants to see a change in their home, that is should become the loving and warm atmosphere that she’s craving. (She has tried to do this for the last 20 years by asking her husband to be more proactive and to invest in their relationship, but she hasn’t gotten anywhere).
Which option should the wife take to improve her marriage – the first option or the second option?
ANSWER:
She should take the first option [She should only work on herself and on her own inner growth, and she should not try to get her husband more involved in her growth].
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