Leaffan, I know you’ve been complaining for a while, here, about your marriage. I read your OP in this thread, and remembered the posts you’d made in the recent “staying with a spouse for the sake of the kids” thread.
IMNSHO, based on what you’re saying tonight, what you and your wife have been doing is no longer going to keep working for you. You’ve reached the end of what the two of you can endure from each other, with the tools you have available.
From this point, it seems to me that you have two options - seek outside help for your marriage, marriage and/or family counseling as a first choice, or simply counseling for yourself if your wife won’t agree to joint counseling; or seek a divorce.
Obviously, I don’t know you well, and I know your wife not at all. I’m offering advice based on very limited information. It may well be that my advice isn’t the best choice for you and your family. For that matter, I am well aware that counseling only works if the people involved go into it willing to make it work. There’s no guarantee, when dealing with other people, that they will comply with things that seem to be in everyone’s best interests.
The main thing I’ve got, is that it seems that what you have been living with is no longer working for you. And some changes have to be made.
First, perspective. YOU always change the roll on the TP and YOU always throw out the old veggies…maybe SHE always writes the checks for the bills and SHE always vacuums. There are so many things to be done in a household that you need to do a fair accounting.
And now that I’ve said that, there’s no such thing. Quantitatively, qualitatively, there’s no comparing what the husband does and what the wife does…it’s apples and oranges. But if you think a large divide exists, sit down and rethink it with her and revise as needed.
You have a couple of kids to think about. It’s in everybody’s best interest to work it out.
That said, some men would LOVE to have a few quiet, uninterrupted hours while the wife takes the kids to dinner.
Leaffan, your OP is the equivalent of “I have a suspicious lump. What do you guys think I should be doing?”
The answer is that this is way too serious a problem to be looking for advice on a message board. You and your wife have what appears to be some serious problems and the two of you should seek some real help from a professional.
I was so pissed at my ex once I left and stayed with my sister for a week because I was convinced I would kill him in his sleep otherwise. Why? Because he didn’t buy the right kind of cereal. Unimportant? You would think so. Something I could live with? Probably, if it wasn’t the millionth time he’d made a conscious effort to be a douchebag. Stuff like that adds up and when it gets to that point it doesn’t necessarily take something terribly significant to break you so I hear you, Leaffan.
Even so, I hope you don’t actually talk to your wife like that. Especially in front of your kids.
Before spending a bundle on therapy, there is one technique that probably most therapists would recommend, but you can try on your own. One of you raises a point, and the other must rephrase it and tell it back to the originator. It continues until you mutually agree that you both understand the poin. This performs two important functions. One is that when you do this, you can be fairly sure that your partner is understanding your issues and vice versa. The other is that while the rephrasing is going on, the rephaser has to think about the point pretty carefully, and it makes him/her more likely to understand and even agree with the originator’s viewpoint.
Another very useful trick is to switch places in your discussion after you have come to a better understanding of each other’s issues. In other words, you would try to argue it from her point of view, and she would try to argue it from yours. This can be an enormous aid in getting people to understand the depth of and reasns for other people’s anger.
Both of these tricks are frequently recommed by therapists, and I suspect would be very helpful in your case. It may be too late to save the marriage, but it’s certainly worth a try, and it doesn’t cost a penny.
But I gotta tell you, any time any man refers to anyone to whom they attribute jerkitude as a cunt, I more or less write them off my list. Bitch and idiot I could take, even though I certainly wouldn’t appreciate them. But with “cunt,” you’re not just insulting me; you’re insulting every woman in the world. Normally, I don’t give a damn about “naughty” language, but that particular word is one that seriously disturbs me.
[OT]
Actually, I’m in absolute agreement with Leaffan on that, although I don’t think it should be “hitting” your kids. It should be “spanking” your kids. If you’re hitting kids anywhere but the padded spank-spot conveniently placed there by nature, or doing that more than a couple of times a year max, you’ve got a problem.[/OT]
I’d like to know more details about how the wife’s homecoming from dinner worked out. Leaffan, did you discuss what happened at all?
For what it’s worth, I’d never take off like that without telling my husband where I was going and what I was doing with our son. However, I agree with many of the other posters that cooking dinner would be the last thing I’d want to do after getting bitched out by my husband for forgetting to throw old vegetables out and failing to change the TP roll out.
I also agree that it seems you have MUCH bigger issues than this. And, judging from your posts, you’ve been dealing this for - what? - 13 years? That’s a hell of a long time to build of a grudge.
By all means, you have a right to whatever emotions you have, no matter how crazy they seem to other people. But it sounds like you’re not dealing with those emotions in a healthy way at all. If I were your wife, I’d be scared shitless if you “confronted” me with so much obvious rage about something so miniscule. Is there a possibility she was a little spooked by your reaction?
Believe it or not, my husband has gotten mad at me (not to the point of screaming) to the point of picking a ridiculously long-winded fight about forgetting to bring up a new pack of TP after the old runs out. And it was at a particularly bad time because I had also just finished cleaning up our extremely messy house, a job that took me five hours. But we talked it to death and after we both aired our grievances (his for my forgetting the TP and needing to duckwalk, which I admitted would make me mad, too; mine for having just cleaned the house for so long only to be raged at for said forgetfulness) and felt better for it. It has never come up again - I listened to him and started bringing up TP when it was all gone and he started addressing things much more calmly and, instead of throwing out accusations, now attempts to start things with, “It makes me mad when” instead of “You never/you always, etc.”. (Making it about his feelings instead of my failings helps a lot and doesn’t put me on the defensive, so therefore helps to tone down our arguments instead of blowing them up like a geyser.)
Anyway, I hope you’ve had a chance to take a deep breath and do whatever it is you need to in order to calm down. And I hope you and your wife can avoid getting divorced over some rotting vegetables and empty TP rolls. I’m not you or your wife, so what you’ve described seems ridiculously miniscule to me. But it’s obviously important to you, so you both need to deal with it and hopefully move on (ideally without a lawyer).
Children’s Aid people can be as absurd as anyone else, sometimes more so, just as Animal Protection Agency people can describe as cruelty some perfectly normal practices for people keeping pets. There are people on this board who are convinced that the occasional spanking will do irrevocable psychological damage to children, even though most of us were raised by parents who spanked us once or twice in our childhoods.
You have been bitching for 13 years about something that bothers you, without figuring out it is not important to her. These are little things. You are making them big. Why? You want her to accept your judgment on how important these things are.
If you move the veggies around ,you would have fixed the problem. If you put a roll of TP in .you would have fixed the problem. It is not about that.
You’re right. We don’t know you. All we have to go on is what you’ve written here, which makes you sound like a fucking crazy person. I think that it’s a bit unreasonable to expect to garner sympathy with posts like “My (bitchidiotcunt)wife won’t change the toilet paper roll”.
Your wife may in fact be a bitch, an idiot, and a cunt. I have no way of knowing that. What I *do * know is that you’re never gonna come off as “the good guy” by saying so. I personally am not inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt to a guy who calls the mother of his children a cunt.
Oh, honey, I get you. Seriously. My boyfriend does the toilet roll thing, and also he just leaves his pants wherever he takes them off. Usually in the living room. And socks! You don’t want to know about the socks!
It took me years to realize that it’s not, as I was yelling, that he doesn’t “respect my house”. It’s that he’s a fucking slob. We’re trying to work together on acquiring habits of neatness. (Doesn’t help that every time I suggest something he says “Well you don’t ____!” Something else we need to work on.)
So I get complete brainwiping fury about the goddamned toilet paper. I even get the urge to seriously badmouth your partner when it happens. I send regrettable text messages when I’m picking up socks. So I’ve gotten it out of my system and I’m calm when he comes home furious because I’ve been sending him these nasty messages all day and we have a fight I was already done with in my brain.
So when I say “Is it really worth the fight?” I don’t mean “who cares if the toilet paper’s not on the roll.” I mean “was there a better way you both could have approached your problems?”
I get how some of you think these are small issues like hanging a new roll of toilet paper but they add up quickly. I was one of those guys who always left his socks at the foot of the bed even though the hamper was ten feet away. You know what? I changed my ways because I knew it bothered her.
My now ex knew that her leaving her toothbrush on the sink instead of in the handy-dandy toothbrush holder 6 inches away bugged the crap out of me. One guess if she ever changed on this one thing.
That is either the definition of contempt, passive-aggressive or bitch. I’m going with all three.
By the way, after a couple of years of this, he now takes his dishes to the sink. If I can just get him to go SIX MORE INCHES to the dishwasher…
In other words, I haven’t been able to change all of him, but knowing I was upset has gotten him to make some sort of effort. HOWEVER - yelling at him just makes him resentful. I know it does the same for me - even if I’m totally in the wrong, getting yelled at makes me dig my heels in.
What I meant, Oy!, was I wondered how he came into contact with a Children’s Aid worker at all. Perhaps their paths merely crossed at random. Perhaps not.
(or I should say that I’ve rarely seen this type of frustration so well put. Thank you).