“My Husband’s Changing — and I’m Not on Board”

When I first got married several years ago, my husband was a top guy in his chaburah — really serious about his learning and shemiras hamitzvos. I was completely on board with his dedication to minyan and his sedorim, and his dikduk b’halachah. This is what I wanted for myself and my family.

We have a few children by now, and I can pinpoint exactly when things started changing. When we had our third kid, I needed more of my husband’s help, which he gladly provided. He started davening at a later minyan to be able to help me get the kids out in the morning. A few weeks later, after things started falling back into schedule, I told him I’d be okay if he wanted to switch back to  his regular minyan. But he brushed me off, saying he really liked the guys in the new shul and really connected to them.

Things started spiraling downward from there. The “new guys” may have been nice people. but they certainly didn’t share my husband’s learning ethic or tight schedule, and I started noticing how much later he was going to yeshivah. Then he began to daven Maariv in this new shul as well. Maariv often stretched out to a “deep schmooze” as my husband described it, and he’d come home all pumped about “loving mitzvos as opposed to just living mitzvos.”

These thoughts may ring true in a solid mussar shmuess, but somehow sounded full of air when I wasn’t seeing any growth in avodas Hashem based on this approach. At the Shabbos seudos he shares new niggunim as opposed to new chiddushim. While I’m not against any of these practices alone, it just seems to me he’s become happy and enthusiastic about slogans and phrases, without anything to show for it in his shemiras hamitzvos.