Dear Carolyn: My husband and I disagree about covid precautions and have reached the point where we’re constantly fighting about it. I am more conservative and trying to have contact with only a few families I know are taking similar precautions. He’s exposing himself and his 8-year-old son, my stepson, to a lot more people, including one family that I believe does not take covid seriously. One child in this family had cold symptoms, and they refused to have him tested and continued to expose him to other kids.
At first my husband lied to me about seeing this family. After I found out, he said he won’t lie anymore but is going to do what he wants. He and his son are now spending several hours a day with this family, not social-distancing — driving in the car together, having them inside the home, etc.
I was doubting myself so I talked with a doctor, who assured me I am not being unreasonable or alarmist. She recommends having no non-socially-distanced contact with this family.
In order to protect myself, I have temporarily moved out and am not having any in-person contact with my husband or his son. This is not a long-term solution, but I don’t know what to do next.
I feel like this has uncovered deeper issues. Three days ago he promised he wouldn’t have anyone in the house, and I found out last night he in fact had one of the kids from this family inside. I am very concerned with what I’m learning about him, since he’s ignoring my concerns and not willing to take such steps to help me feel safe even if he doesn’t think it’s necessary himself. How do I move forward?
— Disagree
Disagree: You don’t even try to. Sometimes, not knowing what to do next is a step in itself: the one where you stay right where you are until you can envision what a step after this one would look like.
You have some obvious information to work from — that you can’t trust your husband — and some less obvious.
The trust issue isn’t (just) that he won’t “take such steps to help me feel safe.” That’s not necessarily as black-and-white as you suggest — since, for starters, he could write a similar letter to complain you’re “out-of-control anxious and treating me as if I can’t make adult risk-assessments.”
Left to wing it, groups of Americans everywhere are wrestling with this same conflict and not coming to tidy solutions. Couples, roommates, co-workers, families, fellow shoppers. Forget that everyone’s risk tolerance is different — that’s complicated enough to reconcile — but in this case we’re all living the consequences of everyone else’s risk tolerances in a way most of us haven’t seen before.
So while I won’t pretend his choices are at the responsible end of the scale, I will eagerly pretend covid will eventually stop running our lives and therefore disagreements on handling it don’t need to be partnership-enders.
Here’s the problem with your husband that would outlast this shining moment we’re in: His coping tactic for a significant disagreement is to tell you enough of whatever you want to hear so you’ll get off his back and he can resume doing whatever he feels like doing.
That lays bare such profound emotional immaturity that it’s a valid question whether you and he can have a marriage of equals again, now that you know what he’s about.
That is, unless one of two things happens: He recognizes how much evolving he has to do and then does it, or you decide you’d rather forgive this particular, fundamental frailty in him and stay married, as-is, than leave for good.
I don’t see the former happening given how far he seems to be from self-awareness — though lives take all kinds of surprising directions, so who knows. Wake-up calls schedule themselves. And it sounds as if you haven’t tried couples’ counseling yet, which exists to deliver the clinical version of one.
