In this article I found an amazing quote from Sarah Jessica Parker. I’d have said astonishing but for the fact that it took me a minute to get google translate to recognize Passive Aggressive Voice (PAV) as a functional alternate language that just happens to use English words.
SJP was someone I’d seen nor heard from or about in media for a few years. I hadn’t realized that I didn’t miss her. See, that’s how that works. If you don’t miss someone…oh never mind. She has clearly mastered PAV, which is no small task given that it is always self taught.
SJP was doing the interview because she has a new program on HBO starting in October. The show is called Divorce. We around here already know the entire plot line including exactly how it ends.
The interview was divided into small subtopics, allowing it to go beyond just the HBO program. She made the PAV quote under the subheading Marriage and Divorce.
“For me, it’s really the investment in the other person. And it’s the expectations you have. They change and you get smarter, and maybe you think those expectations aren’t worth striving for with this person, and that’s when people bail.”
Expectations can be and often are a problem in marriage. Specifically too many and too high. We know this already. We know because men adjust our expectations lest we sink deeper into disappointment as the marital years pass. Women have outlandish expectations on their wedding day and, as my Psychologist/Minister acquaintance aptly explained, women see that as day one of the project to remake her man.
Parker feints in the right direction with her (platitudinous) statement that its about investing in the other person. She goes on to say, however, that a woman may end up being unable to redesign her husband. She may instead grow more aware how little progress she has made and decide the guy just isn’t teachable. That leads to divorce.
Empath she was not spouse-specific in either the investment comment or the expectations comment. How do you know that SJP envisions the woman investing in the man, and the woman having high expectations of the man?
That’s easy. First the topic is irrelevant. Women are in their frame of reference, always.
Women see themselves as investing far more than they actually do, and the man investing far less. On expectations, she hasn’t even considered that a man would even have a host of expectations. Because generally men don’t. We realize its a path to disappointment. Women see women’s expectations as righteous and worthy. She is telling them to not leave over her man not living up to her expectations.
Her efforts to get the expectations met are torturing the life and will out of the man. She is frustrated and, per SJP, breaks the marriage over it. No, Parker says don’t do that. Stay and continue increasing expectations. because after all, its about investing in the other spouse. Translation: Its about husband investing in wife. Wife already , like Gandhi and Mother Theresa, gives it all.
Empathologism 
Very well said!!
Women do tend to magnify anything they do, while minimizing what the man does. The man may have built the house by hand starting with felling the trees and dragging them to the site using a team of horses. But the woman picked out the window treatments so they each contributed to the project.
Men have been taught to expect an equal partner, who will be rationale, communicate clearly, and be willing to share the load. That is incorrect on all counts, so to kept the marriage going men change their expectations to meet reality. “I expect she’ll get exactly shit done today, but maybe she won’t have dug the hole any deeper. “
Welcome and to your final sentence, absolutelky