My husband is Catholic and was raised Catholic. He goes to church on the important holidays and sometimes throughout the year if he’s feeling up to it.
When we first started dating, I was Christian. But by the time we got married I was atheist. We have been together for over 15 years and married for 6. I am 7 months pregnant with our first child.
We got married in a Catholic church and I made sure that the pastor (priest?) knew that I’m atheist, and that we are not planning to raise our children in the traditional Catholic way. He married us anyways. The compromise that I made was that she would be baptized. If she took interest in church that I would not prevent her from going. He can teach her “about” his religion but not preach his religion to her. He and his mom are not allowed to make her go to church if she doesn’t want to go or is too young to consent.
Anyways, yesterday I woke up wonderful. We cuddled on the couch, had coffee, I made him breakfast. He went to Easter mass with his family and came home all fucked up. He started saying things like “if the gender’s were reversed, you would be Catholic by now”, ” I feel like a failure because my religion tells me that the man is supposed to lead the house in the faith and that the wife is just supposed to support the house”. “If I want “a break” he could take her off my hands and take her to church with him on Sundays”
I told him that we are equals in our marriage. He gets his belief systems and I get mine and when it comes to our daughter, we compromise. I also told him that belief systems are not like a t-shirt that you can just put on. I’ve gone to church with him before. I would literally just sit in church and pick apart everything the priest said in my head, I didn’t think it was respectful for me to keep going so I stopped.
As I said earlier, we’ve been together for 15 years. We have a wonderful marriage. We just want to spend all of our time together and every year I love him more. But it just feels like he goes to church and he gets messed up sometimes. I don’t have any intention of stopping him from going to church or being Catholic, but he can’t use his religion as an excuse to make ultimatums in our marriage.
Is anybody here been in a similar situation?