Would you say that at some point in your marriage either you or your spouse has put their foot down, said “no”, or somehow did something that forced you to change something?
For example I know a man who was prone to getting into trouble, mostly fighting, and landing in jail. She gave him an ultimatum to either control himself or lose her and he never went back to jail.
Another where it was a wife and she really had never done much with her life and made a living doing crafts or reading to kids in libraries. A kind of eclectic, hippy kind of life. He persuaded her to get a real job so she could have regular income.
A man wanted a motorcycle but his wife said no and when he pushed it, she said yes, provided he take out a $250,000 life insurance policy.
A man was cheating on his wife and wanted to leave his wife and 2 young children and she said no, your not leaving, and used a baseball bat to get her point across (no i’m not kidding, dont ever mess with Texas women). He decided to stay and give up the other woman.
Their was this woman who had been carefree you might say with her money and the man said he would not marry her until she paid off all her credit card bill and college loans.
A case where the wife had some toxic friends that were bogging her down with their problems and he pushed her to take a tough stand with them and to not burden her with their problems if they were not willing to change.
So do you married Dopers have any stories when either you, your spouse, or another couple where one person forced a change in their spouse AND that person was better off for it?
Now really? In all your relationship your partner hasnt had this great idea or had something they were doing and you didnt feel right about it so you told them no?
So nobody? Nobody ever had a spouse who was doing something or about to do something… lets just say not so smart and you made them stop?
I mean we all do stupid things or have some bad habits dont we? People pay big money for doctors, therapists, or counselors to tell them what to do or not to do so what is the difference? What then is wrong with your spouse pointing them out and putting you back on track?
“Put my foot down” implies no discussion, no nuance–it’s how an adult treats a child. I didn’t marry anyone who does things so stupid that I have to do that.
That said, I am way, way more likely to ‘put my foot down’ for the little shit–stuff that I know doesn’t really matter to him, but does to me. So yeah, I guess I put my foot down once and said “No more CRT monitors coming into this house. Not even–hell, especially–if they are free”. But if stockpiling 60 lb+ electronics were really THAT important to him, we’d have talked it out. And the “put my foot down” verbiage was mostly to make him laugh (which it did, but he also obliged me).
I didn’t marry the kind of person who whores around on me, or gambles away my money, or anything like that.
Not really, no. We talk about things we need to work on, but it’s never an ultimatum-style “you can’t do that” kind of thing. I’ve always understood putting your foot down as a very rigid stance (more like a demand) that isn’t a conversation or persuasive argument, and it just isn’t how we communicate.
Eh. Ha. Well, in our first house, we both tried putting our feet down about things that seemed very important, like where the bookcase was going. We’d been married about 4 years at that point. It went really, really well. So well that we both tell anyone buying a house NOT to do this. Furniture can be moved people! It’s not worth fighting bitterly over. For weeks. Just saying.
Ultimatums are generally worthless in a marriage, especially when used as a threat, because now you’ve boxed yourself into a corner and if the other party doesn’t back down and the one who issued the ultimatum doesn’t go through with it, they have lost all the power. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword and all that.
To me an ultimatum has a threatening connotation, but maybe its just semantics I don’t know. But if in a calm rational state of mind you tell your spouse that cheated on you that you can move past this, but if it happens again you will leave/divorce them that could be taken not as a threat but just a statement of the facts of the consequences of their actions.
My Wife has given me ultimatums at times in our marriage during rough patches but I always ended up doing the thing she warned me against eventually, and she didn’t follow through on her ultimatums to me.
No. Never. We are partners in this and are grownups. We can discuss issues, understand each other’s ideas and opinions, and reach a reasonable compromise.
I instituted a 3 Bird Turkey Cap, after discovering our downstairs chest freezer was full of the damn things! Because they were ‘a deal!’. I like turkey, we cook it a lot, but there have to be some boundaries sometimes.
Also, the ‘more than one motorcycle’ issue has been a challenge for us both, quite the hairy issue!
I thought of another. I did finally tell my husband I was simply not going to participate in his obsessive need to maximize our soap expenditures by melding scraps into the next bar, and that if the opportunity presented itself I was going to throw away the scraps without a shred of guilt. So far he hasn’t left me over it, so it seems to have worked out okay.
“Putting your foot down” is not the start of a conflict or the end of one. It’s a stage in the middle. And, honestly, probably not a healthy stage. Which is not to say that you can’t have standards or boundaries.
One classic is fidelity. We would prefer that our mates be faithful, sexually. However, infidelity almost never is the start of a problem. It is, again, an intermediate step… and, most of the time, not a healthy one.
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s say that one partner says to the other, “One more affair and you’re gone!” Well… that’s not the start of a conflict. By this point, you’re well past where you needed to make adjustments.
One classic conflict, which I am relating to try to bring a little levity, involved a male person I once knew who lived with (had a long-term relationship with) a female prostitute. He told her that whatever she needed to do in the course of business was fine, except for his bed. She must not use his bed. We all have boundaries - and this was his. Of course, she didn’t respect his wishes, so he would get angry, they would fight, and I would end up fielding a call. They would get back together a week or two later, and the cycle would repeat.
There are times each of us has asked the other for help in improving. “Hey dear, the next time I try to procrastinate dinner to 8pm, fuss at me.” So she does until my bad habit is broken and we’re better for it. Although as I write this it’s 6:30 and the steaks are still 30 minutes from defrosted. Oops.
All the OP’s examples except the last are misbehavior between the two partners and already indicate a marriage so broken that I would have been long gone by then. More probably I’d never have entered it.
The last example was the OP providing advice to his wife about her interactions with a third party. Advice the wife seemed happy to take, at least in the OP’s telling in another thread.
So was that really “putting your foot down”, i.e. forbidding her to do something she wanted to do on pain of a (verbal?) beating? Or was that you two working together willingly to improve a less-than-ideal habit the person agrees they have? IMO there’s a big difference between those two. Maybe the OP just uses harsh terminology. Or maybe he thinks spouses often need to be broken like saddle broncs. Hard to say.
My dad did this for a while when I was a kid, ostensibly to make extra money but it wasn’t working out that way. My mom finally gave him an ultimatum - give it up, or give us up.
He chose us.
It never reached a point where we had no food, but we were giving up a lot of necessities during this time - family time being one of them.
