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Hmmm, It does go both ways. I think laying down the law simply means you want respect and don't want to be walked all over and be made to feel guilty for being who you are. For the most part that should be decided in the beginning but over time people do change. If you are comfortable being with the other person you should be able to have grownup discussions and hash things out. Let each other speak and listen.
I know I have made it sound like my DH is an ogre but we really only have maybe 3 issues that keep coming up and other than that he's great. I miss the days before he became ill. We were best buds. Over the last 12 years of health issues it has taken a toll. Tough for both to get through. I go through it with him and it's emotionally and mentally draining but for him it's all that and also physically painful and draining. When you are sick all the time you tend to get a little grumpy and be more focused on yourself. He has been near death 4 times and pulled through but he pretty much has had enough. When you go through that with a loved one I think people tend to subconciously push others away since the reality of them passing would be too painful otherwise. I tend to do that so I'm really working on that so I'm not an ice cube. There are lots of times I think about chucking it all but we have been together more than half our lives and raised 2 boys. If something happened to him and no one was around for him I wouldn't be able to forgive myself.
Illness complicates everything: the worst times in our marriage have been when one of us has been severely ill for a while and the other has finally, completely, run out of reserves of energy. Which you think that this last go-around would have broken us since I started with no reserves left (I'd dislocated a kneecap last summer and wasn't even able to walk more than a block on concrete) but we'd gotten to the point where we could let go of things, ask for help, hire help, and, for me, say "I can't do that" when people assumed I was just going to suck it up and take on the load. It was tough: the medical pros are so used to dealing with very elderly people and wives who are younger than their husbands that they consistently assumed I was 10-15 years younger than my real age, and fat and lazy, and I had to lay out several facts so often I should have just put them on a tape loop. Two of them are in use between us every day: "Just because you got sicker it didn't magically make me less sick" and "If I don't take care of myself first, there won't be anyone here to take care of you."
The worst time was when we were in the process of emptying out our first mobile home and shopping for/buying/getting site prep done/moving into this one. He had been assigned to clean out the crawl space under the computer lab at CCC about six months after a flood that had put the campus under two feet of water and then a very hot summer, and ended up getting mycorrhisal pneumonia from exposure to the crap that was growing in the wiring vault (something which would have been reported to L&I if it had happened in a private business or even a public school or a jail but colleges get away with all kinds of dubious safety stuff). That little dance ended up costing us thousands in taxes and loan origination costs and wages for two high school boys who ended up working for us for four months (our kids were five and seven) and made it impossible for me to put in hours at my job because of taking care of him, and the house, and oh, yeah, that was the year I was homeschooling the elder spawn, and Mom had a TIA and so I was doing her housework while she got better...
You get through stuff, or you don't. We have, so far. At this point in our lives, we're so shaped around each other that it would take a decade of disentangling us to break up, so why bother?
Who lays down the law
