My parents got married in 1959. In all my time with them I think I've observed contempt for my father from my mother. She admitted to me that when she was single she hated most men and only married and had kids because God wanted her to. She found the most mild mannered one she could stand.

I think my father has serious contempt for my mother but it is harder to observe in him precisely because he is so mild mannered.

Through richer and poorer, pedophilia, and post traumatic stress disorders these two people have "stuck it out."

And I've observed a few couples with people younger than me in some sort of "love to hate you" relationships.

Is this a thing? Most people I think move on when the hate gets legs. But my parents obviously love to hate each other. And divorce just isn't in their Celestial cards. So all 10 of us grew up with a really crappy example of coupling, pair bonding, and mating.

I guess "I love to hate you" might be a real human bonding phenomenon?

Yes, it’s common, I think.

I was born in 1964. My parents were maaried in 1956. Very similar dynamic as you describe with exception of pedophilia and my father was a rager. Divorced after 30 years. Catholic. Five mal-adjusted kids.

She was so contemptuous of him. He was so attached to her or her disrespect of him. Whichever.

People often reproduced their parents' relationships in their own, so consider your grandparents' marriages, both sides. They do it because it is, for them, "normal," however dysfunctional it may be or miserable they are. There are roles to play and "rules" to follow, including unspoken but powerful ones.

In your case, religion served as a binder. Corporate culture, political beliefs, sexual practices could be the binder for other couples.

The thing to do is identify and examine it, and take conscious action that this syndrome has stopped with you.

The analogy: Many women who were abused by fathers/father figures as girls seek out, or are vulnerable to, similar men who abuse them in similar ways, which are intensified ("binder") by a shared sex life and the use of children as pawns in their power play. We watch in shock and distress, but this is the way it goes for all too many people.

“Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him." (Michael Ventura)

When people claim hate is the opposite of love I think that they are wrong. Indifference is the opposite of love.

I have a life-long friend who became a psychiatrist. He and I were talking once, and I asked rhetorically why a mutual friend persisted in self-destructive behavior despite the pain it caused her.

He replied with a laugh, "what makes you think people don't like pain? They seek it out all the time."

It was a disturbing statement, but on reflection I decided it was probably true. It happens in life generally but, as Caffiend notes, adult relationships often seem to perpetuate painful childhood dynamics.

I read somewhere that the chemical reactions within the brain and body are nearly, if not, identical for love AND hate.
In other words, the sympathetic nervous system can’t tell the difference.
I thought that was interesting.

That name sounds like the title to a country western standard.

You could take up song writing.

:)

My folks were married for 21 years in a "love to hate you" relationship. On again, off again. Why it took them 21 years to finally divorce? Only heaven knows.

Dad's parents were lifelong TBM BIC generational Mormon pioneers. Never a problem in their 60+ year love affair. My mom's parents were married 40 years. Grandma used to say the first 20 years were a living hell. In their day divorce was mostly unheard of, so they stuck it out. Or they would surely have divorced if it had been say my parents or my generation.

However, the last 20 years of hers and grandpa's marriage worked out much better. It became much more harmonious. And they really enjoyed each others company. By then most of their children were grown and on their own, and the finances had eased up. So they didn't have as much stress or strain as the early years had taken on their marriage.

but both of them were very stubborn and they argued A LOT. There were times I worried that they were going to get a divorce. My dad could be really mean and my mother told me that she would have left him some times, but you just didn't divorce. In the end, they were glad they stayed together. They didn't necessarily work through their problems. They just stayed together. There were times I THOUGHT they hated each other, but they probably didn't.

In the end, I learned some things about my parents, especially after my dad retired and they spent a lot of time together, and then as they aged and died. I saw how much they really loved each other. My dad was inconsolable when my mother died. He should have died first, but I know he stuck around to be there for her. She just couldn't have him die first as she wasn't strong enough to live without him. So 2 months after she died, he left us, too.

I see too many people divorcing without taking the time to work through the problems. My parents had plenty of problems, 2 disabled sons (one at birth, one at age 42), my mom's parents were deaf and they took care of my mom's parents. They had financial difficulties. Religion was a problem, too, as my dad wasn't very active mormon.

I wish I could have had a marriage like my parents had and it was FAR FROM PERFECT.

My now-ex and I got married in February of 1970. We were very happy, and I adored him. Within a month or two, he got shipped out to Vietnam, until December. He sent home an allotment that I could (and did) live on very comfortably. This was in SoCal, the only home I had ever known.

I woke up when my body was ready to wake up (around ten or so), went out to swim laps in our apartment pool, showered, had breakfast, then hauled out my little Smith-Corona and worked until well into the wee hours on short stories for "confession" magazines. I had an agent who sold probably three out of every four that I wrote, and life was good.

Then the DH came home and demanded that I get a "real" job. He didn't care what I did, as long as it provided a paycheck every other week. I told him I was already doing what I wanted to do. We fought like rabid bears for weeks.

He began circling things in the "Want" ads. I was to apply for this one, that one, yada, yada. Every day, he wanted to know how many interviews I had lined up.

I wound up in a Federal job, typing up medical narrations at a Navy hospital for a couple of years, but once I had learned all the vocabulary I needed, I got bored. A friend told me that they desperately needed bilinguals in Social Security, so I applied there, and bingo. Thirty years out of my life.

The now-ex insisted that I could return to my writing in the evenings and on weekends, but every time I sat down and cranked a piece of paper into my Smith-Corona, he would say something like, "There's no dinner," or "The house is a pig pen." He would NOT leave me alone.

I wrote and sold a couple of stories after being employed, but eventually the Muse dried up. I tried my hand again after being retired, but it was like pulling teeth. While I do get a very nice retirement from the Feds, I deeply resent that my writing - the thing that I always felt I was born to do - has left me.

He cheated on me for a number of years with a woman he knew from work, and I wanted a divorce, but he resisted because he liked our combined incomes. We finally divorced, but it was very, very ugly.

He eventually married the other woman, but to this day, she hates me because he made her move out and support herself before and during the divorce proceedings. (It wouldn't look right, see, if he was living with "the other woman" during divorce proceedings.)

According to my son, who visits them occasionally, they might as well be two cucumbers in the produce bin, for all the interaction they have. Oh, well.

I found the love of my life and know what a happy marriage is, so I feel like after 17 years of depression, I'm heading for my 27th year of life with the sweetest guy ever born.

I think that the reason I was so deeply disillusioned was that the only example of a married man I knew was my own father. He and his brother were raised to deeply respect and love their mother (which they both did,) and choose their own life mates with care (which they also did.) I literally never heard my parents fight. I remember telling my best friend this, when we were 13, and she said, "That's not normal. REAL parents fight." But I cross-checked with long-time family friends and relatives, and they all agreed that they had never observed discord between my parents. So that's what I thought marriage should be.