Hi gang:
Spouse and I recently celebrated a milestone anniversary. As some of you may know, we have had a rocky relationship, especially recently. Here's the situ: My mother has very kindly offered to host a party for us. She was ill at the time of the actual date, so would like to do it later this summer.
Spouse suffers from social anxiety, but when he gets to events, he does pretty well. Let us just say, he is displaying a lack of enthusiasm for this event. I can boil it down to this: "If this is what you want, and what your mother wants, I'll go along with it." This does not really make me feel great. I'd like him to be a bit more on board with it. Not in the sense that he should take part in planning, as that will mostly fall to my mom, niece and sister, but that he should actually CARE about the durned thing. I told him I wished he felt differently, but he's entitled to his feelings.
I should add that my mother is still not entirely well. She has lost a lot of weight and she tires quite easily. We discussed this and thought that perhaps it would give Mom a break not to do the party. On the other hand, if this is a gift she wants to give us, perhaps we should not hurt her feelings and refuse it?
THEN spouse says these things: 1) How come he's "giving me what I want and I'm still not happy"; 2) why hasn't Mom talked to him directly about it? and 3) If Mom wants to give a gift, why doesn't she just do something for me? In fact, maybe he will call her up and talk to her about it.
This is the point in the discussion where I kinda snapped and said, "You know what? This is already too much trouble." (He's a champion procrastinator and I can just see him putting off that phone call as he generally takes weeks to call people...) Then he tells me that I basically "pull the misery switch" whenever I can and make a mess of things at times.
We're not really speaking at the moment. This party has been "dumbed down" from what I wanted it to be in the first place (which was a total fantasy, BTW) and I'm not sure I see the point in celebrating three months after the actual date. He never really wants to do anything for our anniversary as it is. If I asked him five ways he'd like to acknowledge it, I'll bet he wouldn't come up with five.
Sorry, I am ranting a bit.
But am I nuts for wanting him to be more on board with this thing? Is bowing out such a bad idea? There's actually a party of me that feels that the whole thing is phony, considering how poorly we've gotten along the last couple of years.