What’s the line here? Either there is some kind of debilitating condition that very well might be a reason to hesitate trusting the sufferer of this condition with certain kinds of responsibilities (at the very least the kinds of responsibilities that require you not to piss off important people). Or it is isn’t and there should be an expectation of some degree of control. Which is it? Is it A for some group X and B for some group Y? Are they distinct groups? How do we tell the difference?
You guys keep putting more and more words in this thread but it all comes down to the following. The only person who can help you deal with your wife’s PMS is your wife.
So, bring it up with her when she is not PMSing, explain the situation and ask what you can do to help. If she goes off on you, wait through another incident and try again.
In other words, act like mature adults in a committed relationship.
Now that’s just crazy talk.
It’s all better than the tumultuous feast or famine of dating.
I have not suffered from PMS except during a two month period on a new birth control that had other side effects I didn’t like. I have suffered from depression and low blood sugar. My emotional problems that develop when I have low blood sugar are very similar to how several women in this thread have described PMS. I get very cranky, sad, outrageously frustrated, upset at my husband over tiny things, etc.
If PMS is anything like low blood sugar, then it’s a lot like depression in that telling people “just remember your ill mood is probably due to depression” helps somewhat, but not all that much. When you are depressed, the world is all flat and gray and knowing that it’s a disease helps somewhat, but it doesn’t make the world any colorful. When my blood sugar dips low I sometimes don’t realize until I’m in the middle of a fit. At least with depression you feel low constantly. If I’m distracted or busy, or eat poorly, I can go from having a normal day to being so ill I’ll faint.
When I’m in a crabby mood due to my low blood sugar, I’m more likely to go off on my husband than my boss. It’s not because I don’t respect my husband or because I can’t control my emotions/blood sugar around my husband, it’s because I relax around him and don’t tightly watch everything I say and do. Sometimes it takes a bit before I realize I’m in a snit. When I lived and worked with my coworkers I would warn them that if I stopped acting like myself, they should remind me to eat. There were a few times when they had to say, “You aren’t yourself, when have you eaten?”
All that being said, despite my blood sugar problems, I’m much more in control of myself and my emotions than many people I’ve met. I’ve been around a few men who screamed, threw things, and punched walls when angry and I’d be much more scared of having them in charge of a country than myself who does nothing more than get a bit snippy.
Seriously. It’s crazy how that idea was even brought up into this conversation when we know what kind of crazy things testosterone can lead men to do. Anything from murderous rampages to inappropriate sexual behavior. How do women cope with that?
It’s a totally different thing.
With men, what you get is some men who have anger issues (from too much testosterone, or whatever) and some men who don’t have anger issues. They usually behave the same most of the time, so you can weed out the ones with anger issues from jobs or positions that require a person who has full control of their faculties all the time.
With women who have severe PMS mood fluctuations, as some described in this thread, you have someone who is sane most of the time and then loses control of their faculties some of the time. It becomes more complicated how to handle these cases. Do you assign them positions of responsibility, when you know they might dump a diet coke on the VP or run out of the room crying periodically?
Basically, if X% of men have anger issues most of the time, and 100-X% of men don’t have anger issues, it’s a much easier thing to deal with than 100% of women having anger issues X% of the time and don’t have anger issues 100-X% of the time. I’m oversimplifying of course (since not all women have huge mood swings), but the point remains.
Full disclosure: I’m PMSing right now.
Well, I don’t mean to add fuel to this fire, but I do have PMDD. The biggest impact it has on me is depression, but sometimes I’m irritable, and sometimes even just having someone talking to me is overwhelming. I feel like a giant pincushion, and every little thing is a jab with a needle.
The feelings are intense. This is also when my worst symptoms of PTSD come out.
Sometimes I want to take a baseball bat to everything in the house. In my mind, it’s self defense.
I never do that - mostly because I grew up in a household with destructive anger and I’d rather slit my own throat than put my loved ones through that. So I think if you’re motivated enough, you can find a way to control it - not the emotions themselves, of course, but the behavior. I think it’s very hard - akin to living with a handicap - but it is possible.
OTOH, no way in hell am I going to embrace someone if that feels uncomfortable to me, nor am I going to be all sweetness and light if I feel like shit. I’m going to say, ‘‘I feel like shit,’’ and he’s going to respect that because that’s the kind of man he is. And while I’m not going to take my anger out on him, I’m not going to hide my crankiness from him, either.
Ex:
I’m hungry.
So eat.
There’s nothing to eat. I want a snack.
You can have an apple.
Apples aren’t a very good snack. They’re only like 90 calories and have negligible amounts of protein and fiber. (from down the hall) Fuck apples!
In retrospect I see I could have paired the apples with peanut butter for a more well-rounded snack, but I’m not capable of that level of strategy when I’m starving. As it stands, the apples are really the only things that bore the brunt of my aggression, and I don’t feel angry for taking my bad mood out on them. As far as my husband is concerned, this was a humorous exchange because we both knew I was being silly.
I do not operate under the delusion that my moods should never affect anyone around me. Part of being married is you share one another’s burdens. I may have been the one PMSing yesterday, but my husband was the one in the pissy mood, deflecting my affection with smart-ass comments. And that’s okay, because he has his qualifying exams next week and part of being married is giving your loved one the freedom to NOT have to hold it together all the time, and being willing to hold your partner’s shitty moods along with the happy ones. And of course he apologized.
It’s not even close to 100% of women that have severe PMS or PMDD with strong mood symptoms. It’s like, 15% at most (the prevalence of PMDD is 5.8%). You would knock me over with a feather if the number was as high as 30%.
So, given the untruth of your statement “100% of women have anger problems [some percent] of the time” — how is it any different than men?
And with women, what you get is some who have PMS that causes them to act irrationally (from too much/too little estrogen, or whatever) and some women who either don’t have PMS or don’t have it to the extent that they act irrationally. So…where is the totally different thing coming from?
If a woman has problems controlling herself several days out of the month, in ways that disrupts her productivity, do you not think she’ll be weeded out of occupations that select against disruptive behavior? Why would you think the same process that works against irrational men doesn’t work against irrational women?
If she has a history of dumping coke on her bosses, odds are she won’t ever rise in the ranks high enough to be dumping coke on the VP. Just like jackalopes who punch holes into walls because they’re overloaded on testosterone-fueled agression are less likely to become CEOs than those who can control their tempers.
I think you’re failing to appreciate that PMS doesn’t affect all women, and even among those that it does, it doesn’t cause all of them to act like crazy people. And yet when it comes to men you don’t paint with the same broad-brushed strokes that you do women; you take a more nuanced view towards them.
But they don’t; you’re just making this up just to assert something negative about women.
I’m probably coming from a different place, but I don’t see the “Just avoid her” and “Get a hobby” comments as saying that women are irrational and can’t be dealt with. I’m seeing it as shorthand for, “The best thing you can do for her is to give her the space she needs” as well as a caution that “the space she needs” may well be “all of the space.”
The ones phrased as jokes seem to me more the black humor shared by people in the same situation rather than ridiculing women in general. More along the lines of “You are not alone, welcome to our club.”
But then I don’t have much experience with women who use PMS as an excuse. Most of the uber-bitches I know are pretty upfront about the fact that they are rude/ selfish/ abusive because they are the most important person (ever!) and thus are entitled to be that way.
I think I’m going to make this my rallying cry. 
“Fuck apples!!”
+100. When I’m in that frame of mind, it is not that there is nothing to eat in my house, but there is nothing i WANT. And I could go get something, but i might have to stop at 2 different places, before i find what i want.
This often happens when I am at the beginning of a good PMS.
Me: I’m hungry.
Husband: What do you want?
Me: <thinking for a minute> I don’t know. <starts crying heavily>
The first time, he freaked out. Now that he knows what’s going on, we just let me have my (very silly) cry to get it out of my system. (I usually beeline for the bathroom so he doesn’t have to see it, either.)
This is my wife. Except without the middle part, about realizing that she’s being irrational, and apologizing, and crying. It’s just** RAGE**.
I swear it makes me want to shoot myself. For four or five days in a row, it’s pure unadulterated rage. Directed at me. Sure, sometimes (well, often) there are rants about other people, but I’m on the receiving end of the rant.
As others have pointed out, some women who suffer like this manage to control it at work and in other situations where acting the way they do at home would have extreme negative consequences. My wife does not shout and scream at the managing directors of her firm for three or four hours in a row. She does not engage them in conversations that go like this:
Wife: I told you to get milk on the way home. You didn’t. Why are you trying to destroy me?
Me: I’m not trying to destroy you. They were out of milk at the store. I’ll get some in the morning.
Wife: You’re trying to destroy me, and you won’t even discuss it with me. You always refuse to discuss any issues with me. Why do I always have to do all the work? You and your whole family, you’re all the same, you’re lazy and no good and you’re all trying to destroy me. A real man would take care of his wife and make sure she never had to worry. A real man would [insert other, possibly impossible, task she has assigned to me]. A real man would make enough money so that his wife didn’t have to worry about the economy and the mortgage and [etc., etc.]. You don’t love me. You’re trying to destroy me.
And then we’ll move on to how other men in her past have treated her, and how I’m just like them, and how all men are the same, and I’m responsible for every bad think every man has done to her at any time in the past.
And this can go on, uninterrupted, until she falls asleep. And then it starts again as soon as she opens her eyes.
I dread those days. I especially dread them when they fall on a weekend, because then there’s no way to avoid it. It starts the second she wakes up, and continues until she falls asleep. Without interruption. And I can’t leave. If I leave the house, she locks me out, and it might be days before I can get back in. If I have to work on a weekend, it will be trouble. She will accuse me of either not really having to work, and just trying to avoid her, or of having arranged it so that I can work and “ignore” her. I’ve ended up having to call in sick more than once on weekends.
And during the week, on those days, I’ll get something like ten phone calls during the work day. All of them angry rants. Each lasting five to 10 minutes. That’s an hour or more out of my work day. Between not being able to work weekends and wasting an hour or more on the phone with her, this is not helping me at work. It gets noticed.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to leave her. On other days, she’s the same brilliant, fascinating woman I married. And I take that whole “in sickness or in health” thing seriously. But this is killing me. Almost literally.
The funny thing is, on the non-terrifying days, she will say things like, “I know some woman get PMS, and it’s really tough for them. Fortunately, I’ve never had that problem.” She really doesn’t think there’s an issue with her, just that (when she’s in the grip of it) the whole world, and especially me, is out to destroy her (whatever “destroy” means).
Saintly Loser, have you tried talking to her about her monthly abusive behaviour? Is she aware that you are thinking of leaving her over it? There are medications that she can take that will probably be very effective, but she has to admit she has a problem first, and it might be your job to hold up the mirror to her.
I’m not thinking of leaving her. Well, maybe thinking of it. Other men fantasize about other women. I fantasize about living alone, all by myself, in a nice quiet little apartment somewhere. But I’m not going to do it. I married her, after all.
As to talking to her about it, it doesn’t work. When she’s not in the black hole, she has no idea that she has a problem, and can get quite confused by the suggestion that she does. When she’s in the black hole, I’m the problem, not her. Or maybe someone at work. Or men in general. But not her.
Really, I don’t think there’s anything that can be done. Wait it out until menopause, I guess.
Christ, Saintly Loser, that sucks. I have a really hard time understanding how anyone can suffer from this and not realize they have a problem. And even on my absolute worst days I can’t even imagine saying some of the things your wife said to you. I mean, I get that this manifests different ways for different people but that sounds completely intolerable.
I mean, if you made up a calendar and just made notes of the days where she behaves like this and then marked out the days where her period occurs and then showed this to her after a couple of months, you still think she’d be in denial about the correlation?
There is something that can be done. You can stop taking the abuse. The next time it happens you tell her it stops now. Either she stops the abuse or you leave. Either way the abuse will be over for you. At a minimum tell her she must seek medical or psychological treatment.
Why aren’t you thinking of leaving? Do you have kids? A marriage is not a prison sentence. You don’t have to be a martyr. If she is not willing to work on this issue then you don’t have to stay in the marriage.
Do you think you might have a bit of Nice Guy Syndrome. From they way you talk about having to take her abuse it sounds like you might. You will never change her. She can only change herself. What you can change is how she interacts with you. Tell her the abuse stops now. There’s no reason you have to put up with it.
No matter how bad the PMS is, there is no justification for lashing out like that. She can control her reaction to it. Right now she doesn’t even have to try because you are letting her do whatever she wants. Make her use her self control so you are not the target of her rage.
I’m not into ultimatums. And it’s not abuse. She may be somewhat crazy from time to time, but the root of that is chemical/hormonal. I don’t really think it qualifies as “abuse.”
Why am I not thinking of leaving? Well, most of the time she’s the woman I married, and want to spend my life with. Besides, it’s marriage, not cohabitation. There’s that pesky vow, and there weren’t any disclaimers. For better and for worse, in sickness and in health, etc.
No, I don’t think I have “Nice Guy Syndrome.” I’m generally thought of as a bit of a hardass, in fact.
All very sensible. But she’s not rational when she’s in the black hole. As women have pointed out above, she really, really believes she’s under attack, that she’s in danger, that horrible things have been done to her.