Yeah, it would be a very, very hard thing to do to build a happy and enduring marriage with a woman like Vanessa. Perhaps not impossible, but it would require a man with a LOT of patience, and even then, it might be one of those situations where everyone knows the wife is the one who really wears the pants in this family. She most certainly WAS controlling. The house had to be just so -- the house looks like it's out of a magazine, and you see her putting the finishing touches on the decor when Juno and her dad are about to arrive. She lets Mark have one room in the whole house to call his own, and he tell Juno in one scene that she rides him whenever he just tries to relax and have some down time watching movies or doing something that she doesn't think is "contributing."
Relationships are hard work and require a lot of patience, flexibility, and willingness to compromise and overlook small nuisances from both parties. It's a lot easier when the parties involved have basically flexible and generous, giving personalities; when a one or both of the partners are highly structured and controlling, it's a lot harder.
Mark and Vanessa were simply a bad match. They doubtless got married based on physical attraction, and at least some common interests, but in the end, a laid back, unconventional, musician like Mark was never going to work with a very structured, demanding woman, who would be satisfied with nothing less than a regimented, ordered, respectable, picture-perfect upper middle class life. It's sort of creepy that Mark's obviously attracted to the teenage Juno, but on the other hand, she's got precisely the sort of weird, nerdy, unconventional personality to appeal to a guy like Mark. And after years of being stifled by a wife he can't EVER completely relax and just be himself with, he's unhappy and desperate for the company of a female who understands him and likes what he likes. If they were the same age, they'd be a good match.
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