I think it boils down to what you want front the relationship. You can either try to “fix” the problem, as you see it, or simply ignore it. If she misplants the ginger, so what? Does your life depend on the ginger being planted properly? Go ahead and plant some ginger of your own, and maybe she’ll see there’s a better way, and maybe she won’t. If she screws up a baking recipe, you can just thank her for the effort and not eat the cookies. If she’s insulted, just explain why you don’t want to eat them.
It sounds like you no longer want to put up with her mistakes, she doesn’t want your help, and you’re at an impasse. Marriage counseling might be in order if you want to try to make the relationship last, but it takes time an effort, and one or both of you may not be willing to make the changes necessary to improve the situation.
I’ve been divorced twice (so far) and I’m currently happy living on my own. In many ways, being single made things better for me, but I also enjoyed having a life-long companion. Life is hard.
I am not holding my experiences or my relationship up as anything to be aspired towards, but I find it interesting and useful that you are getting opinions from both folk who have been in longstanding relationships and folk who have decided to end relationships. Would be interesting to see if there are any distinctions between the 2 groups… What advice you follow may reflect what you expect and desire of your current relationship.
I seldom meet anyone I have much in common with so the chances of finding a woman I have a lot in common with is very slim. I am a bit of an odd ball in that I latch onto things and can’t let them go until I reach some kind of conclusion. Sometimes this takes minutes other times it might take decades. I see how happy she is when she does a good job on something and I try to create scenarios that almost guarantee success. I do my best to play down my involvement but there are times I see her headed for disaster and that makes her feel stupid when something totally fails. It takes a few days for her confidence to come back up. Maybe I am looking for validation.
Not comparing women to dogs here so I hope nobody takes this wrong. I trained bird dogs for many years. A couple of my strong points as a trainer were that I was good at starting puppies and young dogs and I also did well with soft dogs that didn’t take well to discipline and were hard to train. My approach was very basic, the discipline was always consistent and quick and then we moved on. The dogs never had a chance to mull over a bad situation. I think people are the same way. When I pussy foot around too much I may be aggravating the problem instead of helping it. Maybe I should just say what I have to say and then quickly move on. I hate having to dance around someone.
Dogs are sorta hard-wired to want to be trained. People not so much.
Even as much as she seems dismayed when she does something which turns out badly, it seems evident to me that she is more dismayed by your attempts at fostering learning & improvement.
Said another way, she’d rather wallow in her routine failures than learn to not make them. Lots of people are like that. A single failure, even a repeated one, can be blamed on bad luck, a simple inadvertance, etc. None of which excuses call into question their own competence as a doer of e.g. cooking, or their competence as a person overall. Which they’d have to do in order to learn or improve.
You may recall there’s a common saying that comes in various forms but which all amount to: “Insanity is doing the same thing the same way over and over while expecting different results.”
That saying is a saying because it says something very true about human nature. Most people would rather keep doing [whatever] the old way despite bad results, than endure the ego pain and learning effort of doing [whatever] differently.
Her die is cast; you aren’t going to change any of that. The question IMO is whether you can learn a) to behave differently in these circumstances, and b) to not be seething internally while doing that new more restrained behavior.
When I left my 2nd wife one of my comments has been that we were two great tastes that did not taste great together. And that there is no dishonor to either of us in being too different from each other.
Neither if you is a 20-something with a still-forming and hence highly malleable character.
Very good reply and you really nailed the heart of it. The part about going back and doing the same things and expecting different results really hit home. I have a tendency to go for fixer uppers with lots of potential. I am just not very good at fixing them up. I have to look at what I get out of that. It means I can spend my time doing whatever it is I do and not pay as much attention to them as I should but still feel good about myself because I know I have greatly improved their current situation. But it never works out in the end. I feel like I build their ego, Introduce them to a new life style and then things start to fall apart. Once I feel even a whisper of contempt, I am ready to move on.
Because you can’t. You cannot change anyone but yourself
I had a couple of fixer uppers before I married my first husband, then I spent 12 years in a bad marriage before I learned this.
Then, I looked for someone who I didn’t have to fix, and he was the best thing in my life. I am still a fixer, and I tried very hard to avoid that in that relationship.
If you think you have a fixer upper, she either doesn’t want fixing, or… she wants to have an excuse to fail at things - she could have “taken your advice” but you made her mad tends to be the pattern in these cases.
Not to toot my own horn, but I recommend reading this
With sufficient resources of your own, you can readily “fix” the things external to the other person, like give them a safe place to live, and enough money to afford food and a decent car or health insurance or needed dental work or interview clothes or …
But you can’t even make them feel gratitude for those gifts. Much less alter their trajectory so they remain self-sustaining rather than self-sabotaging. You might see some of that self-sustaining outcome, but it’s sure not the way to bet.
If you give them money “for rent” they might decide to snort it instead. If you rent them a place, they might decide to trash it or let their scurvy crew flop there or start selling drugs or turning tricks from it.
Pretty Woman was a fairy tale. Difficult people from difficult circumstances or still trapped in difficult circumstances do not blossom into well-adjusted winners just because their immediate burdens are lifted. No matter how generous and magnanimous the lifter makes themselves out to be.
That does not mean such folks are merely write-offs to be ignored until they join the ranks of the homeless. But it does mean that you can’t enter into this rescuing business with rose-tinted glasses.
Honestly, showing her the egg carton to force her to ADMIT her LIE, Googling in order to SHOW her she’s WRONG, and then threatening her with ending the relationship all sounds pretty fraught to me. I know you didn’t mean any of it that way but I have no doubt, based on her history you’ve told us, that she takes it that way.
The cookies had nothing to do with it it was her reaction to trying to find out what was wrong that upset me. Actually I never told the whole story about the cookies. It started out I was walking by as she was putting them in the pan and I noticed there was too many to a pan they were too big and there was no spacing. So I said honey I said why don’t you make him a little bit smaller and only put 12 to a pan that way they won’t run together. So she kind of nodded and four pans later no change was made so I was already kind of ticked off. They didn’t look like cookies they look like a sheet cake they all ran together and after the first batch it should have been obvious that I was right. That’s just pure hard-headedness
You didn’t make a suggestion, you gave a command and she didn’t comply.
I could discuss this all day in context of the drama triangle, but it boils down to you being controlling and picking victims. You can re-train yourself to healthier interactions within this relationship or the next, but until you understand what you are doing wrong, this is what your relationships will be like
I don’t buy that here at all I think it’s actually more the opp that I probably should have been more direct from the very beginning and I wouldn’t be dealing with these problems now. If I have been any more gentle with the suggestion it would not have even been a suggestion. Next time it will be at command I’m going to say if you don’t do it right don’t do it at all!
I don’t care about the damn cookies I’m mad because she does not want my input into anything. I’m glad I started this thread because I’m looking at it more realistically right now she is very well aware of what she is doing she’s making me walk on eggshells afraid to say anything until I blow up that’s where I am right now it’s got nothing to do with the cookies and everything to do with being allowed to communicate
FWIW I left my second wife when I woke up to the fact that I never spoke to her without having to run my intended sentence through a whole series of filters to try to find, and correct, any possible way it could be misunderstood or misconstrued. And despite that effort, she’d find a new way to object. Which really always amounted to the same thing: “I (her) believe you (him) are attacking me.”
When “Good Morning” delivered in a pleasant tone after she emerged from the bedroom was taken as an attack, I was done. So exhausting and depressing.
I was a new man the morning after I moved out. The other people in my life before and after were not / are not like that. Somehow I’m a much better communicator with them than with her. Just sayin’
And that is her prerogative as a fully fledged adult human. She gets to make her own decisions AND her own mistakes. Love her for WHO SHE IS RIGHT NOW, not as someone you can mold to your idea of the perfect mate.
This sounds like something my wife would do (adding extra eggs because eggs = “nutrition”). My wife has lots of experience cooking food Chinese-style (e.g. stir frying or steaming), but when she attempts a new western dish the results can be unusual (like adding extra eggs for nutritional purposes or adding lots of water for fear that something might burn).
The difference in our case is that I have no interest in cooking so I just keep my mouth shut (other than perhaps saying “I liked it better the first time”).
Why are you getting upset over something so trivial?