i.e. anyone who thinks that two years apart during marriage is totally reasonable. Take it from someone who is married and wants to save the world: my marriage always comes first, no matter how many orphans are hungry. Your goals don't end when you get married, but preservation of the marriage should take priority over individual pursuits. There will come a time when your dreams/job/etc. will be more important, and times when your spouse's will. The decision is made as a couple, and you always do what is best for the couple. The LW's situation isn't a consequence of marrying young, but it is definitely a sign of profound immaturity. Your wife is thinking about herself, and not her family, which you are a part of. Either she is too selfish and immature to be married, or she wants out and can't find an honorable way to say it. Let her go, her priorities obviously lie elsewhere.

You were both obviously too young and immature to get married in the first place. Undo this mess before you make things worse in a way that that will hurt someone else.

I love to travel! For vacations, to live... I love the thrill of somewhere new. Wanderlust mixed with a good dose of social justice is integral to who I am, thus when I do marry this is something my spouse will know from the get go. I would hope that my spouse too would have the travel bug. If not he would have to be open to it. Naturally there would have to be compromise on both sides- sometimes a move may just not be feasible, but the possibility of a move should never be a shock to my partner.

It seems the LW's wife wasn't completely honest with herself or the LW before they married, these dreams are often an integral part of a persons makeup it takes a certain kind of person to want to join the PC. Why didn't she share them? This is the real question. We can only speculate because all we know is your side of the story, maybe she felt you just always knew this is how she felt and who she was. In any case, you two need to sit and have that discussion y'all should have had before you married, perhaps in the presence of a counsellor, figure out each others dreams, yes they change but there are some basics that will form the foundation of how you both lead your lives, as a couple or as two individuals who love each other very much but aren't necessarily supposed to be married.

that the LW's wife is fighting like hell to be away from her husband for 2 years? Counseling would likely help get to the bottom of what's really going on here.

We're talking about this fellow having a potentially lifetime commitment to this woman. But what is her commitment to him so far? Very little. She is committed to her own ideas and plans, and in her mind her husband just along for the ride -- or not.

Were the marriage to survive a Peace Corps stint, my question is what happens next? I can guarantee you what will happen. The resources of the marriage will be used to give this woman various educational or developmental experiences. For her the marriage will be a kind of crash pad where she's able to hang out and do this or that. But she will be interested in building HER life, while her husband will be trying to build THEIR lives as a married couple.

Anyway, wife comes back from Peace Corps adventure. Then -- she's going to have to go to graduate school to get her master's in whatever-the-hell (because you can't just go to the Peace Corps and leave it at that. You have to follow that up with some cool thing). So that's two more years. And oops! The graduate school is a thousand miles away, so hubby will have to pack up his life and move. Then grad school will be done, but wifey realizes that what she's always wanted to do is to be a stained glass artist. So it will be hubby's job to support that. And so on.

This goes on for about ten years. One day, out of nowhere, wifey announces that she's leaving in order to study shiatsu massage at a school on the other side of the country. Over the years they've grown apart, she says. He wants a conventional life. She wants a more interesting life. [The fact that hubby has funded the interesting life for her for ten years will not be mentioned.] So the house will be sold, wifey will get half the assets, half of hubby's retirement account, and a piece of his Social Security. She will get the nice car; hubby will get the beater. A sympathetic divorce judge will stick hubby with all the bills, because he has a job and wifey doesn't. This is what hubby has to look forward to.

I haven't read all 45 letters responding to this, so forgive me if I repeat someone. I recently got married at 26--not terribly young to be married. After getting married, I had a lot of thoughts such as the LW's wife, basically thinking abotu all the things i had to "give up" by getting married. Of course I know I gained a TON of wonderful things, but getting married is a huge change, and it's impossible to know how you're going to feel after such a change until you take the plunge. So I don't think LW's wife is necessarily immature or dishonest with her husband. I think that getting married is freaky. It's a scary thing. And getting married and then living in a foreign country without your spouse might make anyone think thoughts like, what am i giving up and will i regret it? I think that through some counseling and talking, both people might come to see that getting married means you have to make big sacrifices, but that you get a ton more back.