Refer to my response to salmoneus, my situation sounds very similiar to yours. I will also say that I've changed.... a lot now that I think about it, one change of which is that im a lot more organised now.
Who had enough of who if you dont mind me asking, or was it mutual? If I had to guess I would say it was you bc ISFJ's seem to be able to tolerate a lot.
Meh, I'm not sure I agree with that in the very broad sense you've stated it. I found my ex really hard to deal with in some respects. As long as toleration aligns with the ideal Si and social Fe values, they'll tolerate a LOT to the point of martyrdom; but if it runs counter to those ideals, they're pretty inflexible. It's hard dealing with someone who feels fine with labeling other people's perspectives and values as always right or always wrong, who takes everything personally, who needs to obey authority as a starting point, etc. There was such a black and white quality to things especially in the beginning.
In contrast, while certainly I have my own standards (especially in terms of the creative and intellectual), by nature I'm far more open to what I don't know for sure, and I'm willing to find a meeting place in the middle for disparate views. There are problems with that approach too, certainly, but I was more flexible in some ways.
The answer is that we ended up having a dealbreaker in our relationship. This dealbreaker became evident in the first few years of the marriage, but to preserve the relationship, and because I wasn't 100% about whether it was a dealbreaker, I did my best for years and years and was the one to suffer and flex. Finally I reached the point where I realized things were doomed to fail regardless unless there were changes, and those changes were unacceptable to my ex. Although we had had the discussion for years, I was always the one who had flexed, and there was no longer a point to it -- either the relationship died as it was, or I changed things and it might die. So I picked the most viable route.
I don't want to sound harsh with my ex because this was just something where you either can change with each other or you can't, regardless of what you wish you could do, and in this instance we just couldn't change together. We were too different at that point. It did not help that we started with somewhat similar religious values and over the years my own perspective changed (conservative Christian -> theist agnostic at best), so we no longer were in sync that way. We were going in different directions.
Anyway, I stopped flexing, and so my ex said we had to separate; and then a few years later after my ex gave up the idea God would somehow fix everything [despite this huge track record of that not being the case], the idea of divorce was floated, and I complied because I didn't want to hold together a marriage that was already dead in everything else but name... and by that point I just wanted to move on.
To be honest, while I miss my ex and also the marriage in some ways, in other ways I'm really happy. I am glad to have had the experience, it helped me grow up and become a better stronger person. But there are things I will not miss from the relationship -- the guilt trips, the feeling that my way was always wrong, all the constraints about what I "should" and "shouldn't" do, the fear of new things, the value judgments. I have a lot more flexibility to be myself and explore the world than I did in that relationship. We
both seem a lot happier now, and while there were some good times in the marriage, so much of it was just a slog despite our both trying as hard as we could. I think I was right in the long run, especially seeing things now, but it always hurts to lose something you have both invested so much in and were serious about.
