The dynamic between my husband and me is as common as it is depressing.
He doesn’t do chores I ask him to do as timely, reliably and well as I would like them to be done
I nag, get frustrated, get disappointed, and, given enough stresses, I become unhappy and unpleasant;
Husband withdraws, I alternate for a while between trying to find better ways to get from him what I need, and venting my frustration when I don’t, and I increasingly do without his help and support;
We both seek emotional warmth and pleasantness elsewhere.
Of course, who started what is up for debate, as each spouse thinks they are just reacting to what the other starts. That’s called interpunction.
Well, up until now, I was the one in therapy. I’m a psychologist myself, so therapy, for me, is what car maintenance is to a mechanic. Sensible, familiar. Something I understand, something I do.
But I think I am getting at the end of what I can change about myself. My husband, on the other hand, has never been in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, to him, is…well, like psychotherapy seems to a car mechanic. A man who tinkers with cars all day would be unfamiliar with the idea of tinkering with thought and behavior patterns. He would would probably think he already knows everything there is to know, from watching a couple tv shows and reciting some trite psycho-babble. He would be unfamiliar with how therapy actually works and how to behave to get the most out of it. He would be doubtful the therapist knows what they’re doing. And above all he would see therapy as something to be avoided because it sounds an awful lot like blame-assigning you have to pay for.
So it’s no wonder my husband has avoided therapy like the plague.
I would like my husband to do some therapy. Maybe some sessions together, but focused on him. On how he experiences my “demands” for emotional support and reliable help with chores. Why he balks at those, other then that I don’t ask nicely enough. How he could think of it all differently.
Does anyone know of a method or… well any type of marriage counseling that is husband focused in this way? Or is it really up to me to fix it all?
I can’t answer all your questions (I’m not a therapist), but one thing I’ve learned through my marriage is that you cannot make the other person change, nor can you make them do what you wish they’d do. You have two choices: Keep making yourself crazy trying to do everything or loosen your expectations. I’ve done the latter with a lot of kicking and screaming, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t like it one bit, but it sure beats wanting to constantly nag. I don’t like nagging. My mother was a champion nagger. I never want to go down that road.
My husband thinks similar. He could use therapy for his own issues but he won’t. I can’t make him. He has to be the one to initiate it or else it’ll turn into a sprawling blame game.
One of the most difficult life lessons I learned, (and I went round the track an embarrassing number of times, before it really sunk in!), was; “You can’t push a rope!”
We are all, come down to it, grievously flawed human beings. And no matter how we try, or wish it were so, we cannot be all the things our partner needs. Nor can we shape ourselves into another person’s ideal.
The thing to remember about partners is they mostly have other charms. So, yeah, they may never put the clothes in the hamper, or rise to your standard for contributing to household chores, or be there as you’d prefer emotionally. But they must have other charms that drew you to them. Focus on those and let these go. Because, whether you can see it or not, (no you can’t!), they are doing the same for you. Because ultimately that’s the true nature of successful loving relationships.
Think of two people climbing up a mountain. It’s a long, hard and trying task. You wish he could keep up to you. He wishes you could slow down so he could keep up. But the truth is, and if you’ve ever climbed you know this to be true, both of those solutions make someone horribly uncomfortable. It would be torturous for you to try and slow down to his pace. Equally so for him to try and go faster than he’s comfortable with. What’s required is that you care enough for each other to say, " You go at whatever pace you need to! I understand."
Hmm. I recognise myself in the OP’s description of her husband, to a large extent. The difference is, my wife and I have recently had a few couple’s counselling/therapy sessions, which we both agreed was a good idea. Having only had a few sessions, I think it has really helped. By talking through things via someone independent (and we have been largely talking to each other, the counsellor has not said a great deal) it has helped us realise each other’s emotional point of view and brought our expectations closer together. The challenge now is to keep this going in the long run, but I’m confident we can do it.
Now, how do you get to that stage if your husband is not willing to play along? I think it’s worth trying something like “I don’t like where our relationship is at the moment and I know it’s partly my fault, but I don’t know how to fix it. I think spending some time talking through a few things with someone independent could help us get back to where we were when we got married - i.e. a happy couple. I want to be with you more than anything else but we can’t carry on with things as they are. Are you willing to give it a try?”. He may still resist - for example, he might feel that any need to ‘see someone’ is a sign of weakness, or indeed insanity (my wife said after seeing an individual counsellor for the first time - before our couples counselling - that it “made her feel like a nutcase” - I was quick to assure her that wasn’t the idea at all). You could try explaining that marriage counselling is considered the norm in the USA (so I’m told) and viewing it otherwise is a bit old-fashioned.
If you haven’t already, you may want to see if your or his employer has a programme that provides a few free sessions, if he has any concerns about the cost of it.
Just a thought, IMHO: Beware of a dynamic in which one spouse is trying to enlist the counselor as an ally against the other spouse - that is the impression your husband may get, even if it’s not what you’re actually trying to do - because nothing destroys the trust needed in counseling as much as one partner sensing that he or she is being set up in a 2 vs. 1 situation - that his wife is taking him to the counselor so that the counselor and wife can team up together against the husband. That may not be your intention, but if it feels to your husband that that is what is happening, it will immediately destroy any good the counseling could have done and generate a lot of ill will.
Also, you don’t want your husband to feel that this is a mother-son dynamic. I may be reading too much into this but the “He doesn’t do chores as timely, reliably and well as I would like” part sounds like a recipe for resentment. In this dynamic, the person who is nagged feels that they are in a lose-lose situation - if they don’t comply with the demands, then they get nagged; if they comply, then they feel subservient.
Honestly, the nagger is also in a lose-lose situation. If they nag, they feel like a bitch but if they simply shoulder a disproportionate amount of the household burden they feel resentful and like they are being exploited.
As always, cases matter–the spouse who insists all flat surfaces be disinfected daily is not making reasonable demands and the imbalance in expectations is the root of the problem. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of spouses who are unwilling to help maintain a quite reasonable level of basic hygiene even though they definitely prefer and benefit from that level of hygiene. And if you have that kind of spouse, it is beyond frustrating to have them fail to do anything unless asked, and then when asked, accuse you of being a nagging bitch.
Put it this way - if you go to a therapy session, and the therapist says to you “The problem is that you won’t do what your husband tells you, the way he tells you to do it. Let’s focus on how to fix you so you will do as he says”, how would you react?
Sorry, that is one of the problems. Another one is your idea that counseling should focus on your husband. If he doesn’t live up to your expectations that’s not his problem.
Determining reasonableness should not be her job, though.
At one point my ex-wife tricked me into attending a couple’s therapy session. She regretted it. She thought she was clever for tricking me into being there, but the therapist lambasted her over that to the point where I almost wanted to defend her.
When she complained about me not helping around the house, he explored our attitudes toward housework and explained to her that I was comfortable with a different household than she was and it was her problem, not mine.
You are not your husband’s therapist. You are too emotionally invested in your own needs to know what his needs are. In these sentences, you are asking for a therapist to “fix” problems so that your husband behaves the way you want him to.
My sincere and un-snarky opinion is that you still have a lot of unresolved issues as well. To assume that really, the problem is your partner . . . well, if you had a client who came to you and said, “I’m looking for couples counseling but really my husband doesn’t do what I want, so let’s just look at his issues” . . . what would your response be?
My wife and I saw a few different people for marriage counseling. The only one I had any time for was a minister of religion that we were recommended although neither of us was religious.
At the first session after a brief introduction he said, “Before we start can I just have a quick guess what your problems are?” We agreed and he proceeded to lay out the complaints in the OP pretty much as they are described by Maastricht. He said my wife felt that I didn’t do my fair share of the household duties and didn’t do them properly; and I was cold and unresponsive. He knew that I thought my wife was becoming a nag and was making unnecessary drama out of minor matters.
We were surprised but he stated that nearly every couple he saw had some variant of the same complaints. Basically his solution for the problems was to allocate household duties on the basis of who cared more or could do a better job and leave the timing and performing of the job to whoever was meant to do it. If it wasn’t done to the other partners satisfaction that was their problem and they could take over the job without complaint.
I thought that was a fine system and I developed my own routines for dealing with the washing, cooking and transporting the kids. I helped with the general cleaning on the weekend and chipped in with stuff I hated like yard work. Although the level of nagging declined my wife would still occasionally accuse me of “doing nothing around the house” no matter how much I did.
So despite the attempts at counseling there was no happy ending. Years later we divorced. When we separated my wife complained to me how hard it was trying to run a household on her own. I had to bite my tongue to not point out that if I did nothing my absence shouldn’t have mattered.
Why not just hire someone to do the most disliked chores? Housecleaning is a typical way for low income people to get a bit more money, so you’d be helping the local economy while you’re at it.