Comfort Zones

I think relationship difficulties (person-to-person or group-to-group) reflect differences in comfort zones. Admittedly I have a wide comfort zone and I have an instinctual tendency to resist being boxed in in any way. I look forward to waking up every day to a truly new day unlike any that has gone before it. I hunger for new discoveries, both within myself and the world about me. For me if life is reduced to repeating predictable patterns, then I don't feel like I have a life at all.

My wife has a very narrow comfort zone. Unfortunately for her the things that made up that narrow comfort zone don't even exist for her any more. Gone is the little boy that she single parented - he is now 27. Gone is the job that allowed her to provide well for her son and her while she was raising him - she is now disabled and medically retired from her job after 17 years working 3rd shift in a cereal factory. Gone is the person that was always in control and exercising from power - she is now a lost and empty shell battling a myriad of mental disorders (diagnosed bipolar, then borderline, then obsessive-compulsive and now major depression) on the crest of every psychotropic medication ever produced. She knows neither how to nor does she wish to survive outside her narrow comfort zone. Her anger makes its ugly way to the surface and bearing the brunt of it are my kids.

Perhaps it is because she has lost so much of her comfort zone that she lives such a narrow and rigid life. There are only a few places she will go out to eat at and when she does she will always order the same thing - a grilled chicken sandwich. She has never cooked - that role has always rested with me - but she is not interested in trying new things. Sometimes I think she is more finicky than my two kids.

The house we live in was her house. She wanted me to give up mine even though we would have found ourselves more financially secure. I can understand wanting to live in your home and can understand the urgency for her as she tries to cling to the only thing that is left from her narrow comfort zone - memories.

How do you or is it even possible to reconcile such radical differences in comfort zones?

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