To young people considering marriage to a specific person, one often overlooked attribute in your spouse is something you should consider. If you are a person who really enjoys and thrives on a network of enduring friendships, evaluate your potential spouse’s sharing of that outlook.

I am a person who thrives on such ending friendships. With my first wife, I wanted to invite acquaintances into our home, both to share time with them, and to consider the possibility of an enduring friendship. My wife would gladly accept invitations to dinner and parties, but did not reciprocate at all, unless I really strongly insisted and even then rarely. That largely limited my close friends to work colleagues and contacts with whom I had frequent contacts.

That I still regret. The reasons for her conduct would seem to be either insecurity about her own self-image, or desire to maximize control over me by limiting my contacts. There may have been some self-image problems, but I believe he issue for her was desired for greater and greater control. , borne out by more and more extreme control issues as our marriage went on. It got so extreme that in later years, she wanted fewer and fewer people outside of our mediate family in our lives, and more and more extreme attempts to gain total control over both our lives and finances.

I still deeply regret not having been able to establish those friendships. I do not regret reaching a point with her that I decided that enough is enough