I’m curious if she’s always been the dominant one and he’s always been the passive one. If so, perhaps she’s getting frustrated with the way it’s always been. Maybe she shouldn’t have married him in the first place if she didn’t want to be the dominant one. You say your dad was very assertive. Perhaps she picked up on her father’s assertiveness, so she’s naturally very assertive. If she found an equally assertive partner, she would spend all her time fighting with him because he’s trying to run her life or whatever. Maybe she needs to realize that assertiveness isn’t a gender-specific trait.
Otherwise, if this passivity is a new trait, she needs to get him to a therapist. He could be dealing with his own issues, and can’t handle her issues and their marital issues on top of it. The shutting down, the passivity, could be his way of “not handling” it because he just can’t.
She hasn’t said she distrusts him, and it wouldn’t make any sense for her to be mad at him in this example if this were an issue.
He’s always been this way, and I don’t think they would have gotten married if not for the fact that she became pregnant early on in their relationship.
But the thing is, for the greater part of their marriage, she (and presumably, he as well) has been able to successfully look past their differing personalities and work to keep things together. They sought counseling, started going to church together, and it seemed, learned to accept and really love each other. They’ve been presenting a happy front for quite a while now, which is why I was taken for loop when she revealed the depth of their problems to me.
She has many of my father’s traits, and I do think she feels “efeminized” by his passivity. Meaning, she doesn’t feel like she is playing the role of wife that she envisions is right for her. It is extra annoying to her that even he considers her as being the “man in the relationship” while he calls himself the “woman”. From my vantage point, though, the true issue isn’t that he’s being the “woman” (ah, how this portrayal irks me). I say this because women are stereotypically more nurturing and shoulder most of the burden of childcare decisions and home-making, and these aren’t his roles in the household. So while I can’t say why he calls her “the man”, I will say that I think my sister’s own anti-feminine bias is causing her to mistake his collection of personality traits as a woman thing, when really I think the obvious problem is the parent-child dynamic that characterizes their relationship.
I struggle with what to say to her now, knowing how unhappy she is. I don’t think her feelings are unreasonable, but I don’t want to suggest a divorce if there is any hope for a better tomorrow.
That’s the spirit! Mine too. They’re from a different time and country, you see, where people didn’t think they needed to be bothered with such trifles as happiness.
Bolding mine, since that’s the portion of your post I’m addressing:
Is she actually asking for your advice, or just venting? If she’s venting, then it’s highly likely that you’re getting a skewed picture, since you only hear about their argument and not the subsequent apology, reconcilation, compromise, etc. (if there is any).
If she’s asking for advice, tell her she and the husband need to go to marriage counseling together and/or individual counseling, uh, individually.
My sympathies to the kids.
Let’s say these folks go the route so many posters’ parents went, and dig in their heels for a decades-long grudgematch. How would you like to be the oldest kid, and find out that your very existence is the only reason for all that misery? Ugh.
Why would the responsibility be solely the oldest kids’? I’m the youngest of 5 and believe me, there is enough shame, guilt and impotent rage to go around for all the kids.
My parents added twist to this lovely scenario: they took 6 years to get divorced, then after 7 years of having been divorced, they got remarried–to each other. And the break didn’t teach them one damned thing about relationships.
They’ll be 80 and 78 this year and they still play mind games, kvetch and don’t talk directly to one another. Good times.
She’s was venting, not looking for my advice. Which is smart of her, because not being married I feel like my advice would not be the best for her situation.
I did suggest counseling, though. She said it didn’t really help the first time. So then I starting wondering whether therapy can even fix something like contempt.
And I do feel bad for my nieces no matter how this plays out. (I accidentally screwed up their ages in the OP, FWIW. They are 12 and 16.)
Why couldn’t both of them go to the ATM, get the money, and he drops her off back at home before he goes out? Never mind that I assumed that she only knows the password to the account and she has full control of the account… otherwise this is a moot point.
It really must be bad when an obvious solution was staring both of them in the face. (err…no pun intended)
Contempt AND Resentment…the odds have decreased substantially.
Sometimes when you get stomped on for anything you say and do, you stop trying. You just avoid the situation. You stop asking for help, you stop offering to help. I mean really, what’s the point?
Meanwhile, they’re teaching their kids that this is what marriage is.
This is why I rarely load the dishwasher anymore. In the big scheme of things, its a minor point, but to me it aint worth the grief.
If the SO wants to go batshit crazy over how I load it, every time I load it, and no matter how I load it, and wake me up at 4 in the morning by noisily rearranging it, it is just WAY easier to just not load it in the first place and take a minor hit for being an ass for not loading it in the first place.
That “looked at her expectedly …” part is your sister’s opinion. I’ve known many people who seemingly bitch at everything they can because they are bitchy people. Could it be that instead of looking at her expectedly, he was instead lost in thought thinking about plans of when to go to the ATM?
We went camping once with this couple. Many weeks later my wife and I were together with the camping wife. She was bitching endlessly about how incompetent her husband was about every aspect of the trip. He didn’t bring everything they needed, his cooking sucked, he didn’t pack up things right, etc, etc. Nothing was wrong with what this guy was doing–it was all in his wife’s head.
You many need to move away from thinking your sister is perfect and it’s all the fault of this dufus, lumbering idiot of a husband. “If only he would get his act together then things would be better,” you may be thinking. I personally think the sister is way out of line to be bad mouthing her husband like that. If she has a problem with him she needs to work it out with him, not blab it around.
Spouses should never bad mouth each other unless the problem is so bad they are asking for help to solve it. “My husband is beating me and I’m scared” is appropriate to say to other people. “My husband couldn’t find the milk in the grocery store with a map” is not.
Both have full access to the account. He just checks in with her because she is more financially savvy between the two of them and stays on top of the budget. This arrangement was mutually agreed upon a long time ago. I’ve never heard her say that she doesn’t trust him to make the right decision, though, which is what I’d expect to hear if she was a control freak nag.
To those who are suggesting he has been hen-pecked to death, there’s little evidence of this from my admittedly limited vantage point. She wants him to put on his big boy pants and take some control, and seems self-aware enough to know you don’t get this result by being overly critical. I don’t think she’s completely blind to her own flaws.
Is it that hard to believe that a non-hen-pecked man could prefer being told what to do? Or it always safer to assume that a passive man is a victim of an overbearing wife? Not asking this snarkily rhetorically, either.
Sigh. I don’t think my sister is perfect, and she hasn’t been “blabbing this around”. Read the OP. Up until Sunday, I thought their marriage was happy specifically because she has kept things to herself. I don’t think my BIL is a “lumbering idiot” either. Just because they are incompatible doesn’t mean he or she is a bad person.
Just looking for some insight from other people to better assess their prognosis from just the little information I do have.
Sometimes (says the voice of experience) when your wife wants to do something, and then you do it, you’re then criticized for not having done it correctly (aka:, the wife’s way.)
After a while, you get trained to simply not do it.
Yeah, it’s really important to learn (not just with spouses) that it’s much better to have someone pitch in and help in a way other than ‘the right way’ than to not help at all! My sister moved in with me a couple of months ago. She’s got cancer, is undergoing treatments, and a lot of days, she doesn’t feel up to doing much of anything at all. But if she gets a bolt of energy in the middle of the night (she’s much more nocturnal than I am) and decides to empty and re-load the dishwasher, I am not going to bitch and moan because she doesn’t put the dishes exactly where I would put them, or load the dishwasher just the way I would do it!
Still, no matter what the source of contempt, it’s rough on a relationship.
My take is that he’s being passive-aggressive, at least in the scenario described. It’s one way to escape being responsible for consequences. I’m sure if she called him on this–“Honey, why would I go to the ATM at this hour? It might be dangerous” etc–that he’d deny all intent to have her do so. (nitpick: it’s “expectantly”, not “expectedly”). Of course, none of us can know with 100% certainty just what the dynamic is between them. My advice is much like yours: marital counseling. Or at the least, counseling for her, because he may well not go (been there, done that). IMO, she needs to learn how to deal with someone who seems both immature and passive/aggressive. Just my 2 cents.
This part - the avoidance - is what told me my own marriage was over. I could take the 9 years of fighting and constant criticism. When we *stopped *bickering was when I knew we’d really given up.
I don’t get the ATM thing. There are machines everywhere, so he could just get money on his way to the bar. Why would either of them have to go get it before he leaves? I think that might just be her contempt clouding her perceptions. And not to throw this all on her, but while you say bitching and nagging are not her style, people can act very different when locked into a relationship that they quietly hate.
I’m also going to go against conventional wisdom and say they should try to hold out until the kids are out of the house. If a twenty dollar night out is a worrisome expenditure, they can’t afford to get divorced.
The ATM example was just one example she threw out at me, yall. There’s a whole laundry list of things going on between the two of them, so there’s really no point in focusing in on that scenario. Especially since I may have recounted it wrong.
The thread is about contempt in a marriage, not where to assign blame. I mean, let’s assume she is nagging him to death. Well, why do people nag? Either because they are meanie control freak bitches. Or because they’re dealing with a person who won’t do anything unless they’re nagged. So even if we all agree that she’s nagging him (and I don’t although I haven’t excluded the possibility), it’s still not a foregone conclusion that her feelings are unjustified and unreasonable. That is what makes this line a questioning an irrelevant sidetrack to me. I don’t know who’s to blame, but what I do know is that rightly or wrongly, my sister feels like she is married to a man-child.
That’s what I’m thinking as well. And would marriage counseling be prudent when money is this tight? I don’t know. Maybe it could help them hold out for 6 more years until the youngest graduates, though. And in that time maybe she could work towards getting a better job.
Well, I just focused on the ATM thing because it seemed blown out of proportion and I have a feeling that a lot of things on the laundry list are as well. That’s not laying it at anyone’s feet. I’m just saying that if they are going to trudge through another 6-9 years, they’re both going to have to let the little shit slide. She’s going to have to actively discourage feeding her contempt and just roll her eyes and move on instead of thinking “AARG! Yet another example!”.
I’m the youngest of 5 and believe me, there is enough shame, guilt and impotent rage to go around for all the kids.