Name changed, I've discussed this with a few friends who read MN and I don't want them to know my usual posting name if they happen to read this.
I have been with my husband for 15 years, married for 13.5. We have three dc. We've had our share of arguments and ups and downs, but we've always been good at making up and we've always been committed to being together.
A few months ago my husband took up meditation and soon after that discovered an individual who claims a bunch of things about reality, consciousness and so on. He's really got into that stuff. He has made huge, sweeping changes to his life. He is a different person.
He says he feels so much happier and better, and he says he is a better person now.
I am so unhappy. I feel like my husband disappeared overnight and a stranger took his place, and that because many of the sweeping changes he has made (such as suddenly becoming teetotal, going vegan, cutting out sugar, getting up early every day to meditate) are objectively healthy and 'good', it is seen as unreasonable for me to say "but you are not the man I married and I am not happy".
Everything has changed. If I met him now, I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with him. That doesn't mean he is a 'bad' person or is doing something 'wrong'- it just means that the attraction would not be there and he would not be someone I would want to start or have a relationship with. I seriously doubt the man he has become would want to be with me if he met me for the first time now, either!
The biggest problem we have, I think, is that I have lost an awful lot of respect for him as a person due to the stuff he has started to believe. Once your respect for your partner is going, what hope does a relationship have? I know people will think I am a horrible, stuck up bitch for this- and maybe I am, but that doesn't change how I feel. I cannot magically develop an 'all opinions are of equal worth' approach, I'm not someone who thinks "I believe the stars in the sky are made when God crumbles up the full moon at the end of each month" (this is not one of my husband's new beliefs, I've just nicked it from a brilliant book as an example) is a belief of equal worth and status and is as deserving of equal respect and attention as the belief that "stars are luminous spheroids of plasma held together by their own gravity". One of those beliefs is backed up by scientific observation and evidence and research and experimentation and one isn't.
I've said to him today (by text) that we need relationship counselling. But what the hell can any counselling do for us? He has become someone else. I have stayed the same- and I cannot be the partner the new him wants, surely. And he has attached himself to a set of beliefs that to me demonstrate the holder is really quite fucking stupid. Whether or not I am right about that (perhaps he is 100% correct and I am the stupid one and a bunch of hallucinating meditation aficionados know much more about The Truth than the world's scientists), the problem is the contempt I feel and the fact that if he truly believes the things he says now, he is not the man I thought he was.
I don't want this to be a "who is right?" thing. I'm not looking to parcel out blame. It's not a case of, let's have an argument about it all or invite others to argue it, and the 'winner' gets to choose what happens next: it's a case of I am not happy. Imagining divorce breaks my heart, I've started crying even writing this. I don't want divorce, I want the marriage and husband I thought I had. But imagining this for the rest of my life is also horrible and miserable and makes me feel sick.
Should we go for counselling? What should we do?
If you want to be blunt, be blunt, but I'd be really grateful if you could also be kind, because I feel dreadful.