Reading the descriptions of female behavior some guys have listed here, I have to say that the real maxim that will determine the happiness of a marriage is this: Don’t marry an asshole.
If your spouse is playing these sorts of ridiculous power games, he or she is an asshole. If you’ve tied yourself for life to an asshole, it’s quite likely you’re not going to be very happy.
It seems many husbands are failing their bullshit tests. The game doesn’t end after you’re married.
I think you’ll find this to be foundation of civilization.
This is my reaction when women describe “Nice Guys”. When their behavior is described in detail in “Nice Guy” threads, I think “These guys are just assholes, why is there a need to invent a new word for that behavior?”. It turns out that that behavior is more common than most men think.
It also turns out that the female behavior described by multiple men in this thread is more common than most women think.
On another point, it seems a bit futile to discuss the fact that many women IRL debate emotionally, with women who are subscribed to a board whose members endlessly debate issues using logical arguments. The women on this board are self-selected to be logical arguers, so it’s not surprising that they can’t accept that many other women can be emotional debaters.
It’s like if there was a message board where mostly men like Niles Crane hang out and they hear stories about guys who drink beer and watch football every day and they think “No way!”
I only skimmed, I have a feeling some of the comments will be irksome in their tendency to overgeneralize.
No, I don’t think the axiom is correct. I am female. I am wrong at least 80% of the time. My husband is the easiest person on the planet to get along with, yet I somehow manage to fuck it it up occasionally. But fighting is stressful so when I find myself doing it, I make a point to try to avoid it in the future. That naturally starts with an apology, an admission I was wrong, and a brainstorming session with my husband about how we can avoid fights in the future.
For the record, I’m kind of a stereotypical female in that I often take things too personally, I’m overly sensitive and particularly when I’m PMSing I am emotionally volatile. I am an irrational fighter, but not abusive, verbally or otherwise. When I was growing up, the relationships modeled to me were total violent chaos, so I have all of these crazy instincts I must constantly choose not to act upon. I’m not proud of that, I don’t think it represents all (or even most) women, but I DO think it illustrates that you can have all of those tendencies and still choose not to be a raving bitch. I’d like to think I do better than most people in how I handle arguments, and with a much larger handicap.
I think the axiom exists because of people like my mother, and also perhaps because many couples still become entrenched in socially-reinforced gender roles. I can’t imagine, as in Dio’s example, threatening my husband with sleeping on the couch, yet I’ve seen my mother pitch her man’s clothes out the kitchen window, strangle him, and smash dishes against the wall until she gets her way, so I know it’s out there.
Agreed 100%
No women I know are like this, but maybe things are different in the US, which is where I understand most Dopers are from.
Kind of a newlyweb (newb) here, and we’re just starting to work out our own strategies for dealing with arguments. I agree that my wife uses emotional jabs to score points. But she now knows how much I hate that and we’re trying to resolve it.
We had an interesting one the other day, and she just said “OK, I’m leaving” and straightaway I said, “OK, take the garbage with you on your way out”. Then she turned around, grabbed my hand and took me with her. 
We went for a walk and cooled down.
1 and 2 have been harped on endlessly, and I pretty much agree with what has been expressed, so I’ll just focus on three.
I think some of it is extrapolated a tad, even if “wife is ‘always’ right” isn’t true, there are tiny little attributive gender tics in society/pop culture that can add up to appear to “give support” to axiom. For one, the whole “girl power” concept of withholding sex for misdeeds plays into it. Now before you jump on me, I have no problem with not wanting to have sex if you’re mad, and then following that feeling and not doing it. Being expected to always go along with it when you’re pissed with your spouse is… well, not “rape” maybe, but it falls somewhere on the wrong end of the spectrum. The problem is rather than acknowledging the simple fact that sex needs two people and both have to be willing, the attitude instead infantilizes men and treats sex as a commodity. It’s like offering a kid cookies for being quiet for 15 minutes. I mean yeah, guys will still keep their trap shut to appease their SO from time to time if they know it will make them mad and they won’t be getting any (granted, women would do the same oftentimes), but with this risk/reward system that we hold it up as it can’t help the image as women as cold gatekeepers who need to be appeased to get the prize.
The other thing is that men have little way to “retaliate” to an argument nowadays (edit note: I’m sure this isn’t quite as true in reality, but it’s almost law in pop culture, and that can be almost as dangerous when setting really subtle mindsets imo). Guy raises voice? “Treating her like shit”/“Emotionally abusive.” Guy mad but girl isn’t? “Well, if you don’t want to be with me, sleep on the couch.” Girl mad at guy? “I’m mad at you! Sleep on the couch!” Not to mention girls can lightly hit for a minor “offense” and cutting a man down a peg is much more likely to get a positive portrayal in pop culture than the man to woman equivilent. Hell, I see it at family get-togethers. Uncle jokingly cuts aunt down: laughs and joking prods about “ooooh he’s gonna get it tonight.” Aunt jokingly cuts uncle down: ooohs and jeering that is roughly equivilent to some variation of “burn” and “garsh, us menfolk are so stupid, it’s a wonder we get anything down without you.” Add that in with the fact that it’s perfectly normal to print something like “Behind every powerful man is a good woman,” whereas it would be, not bad, but maybe a bit strange to have something with the opposite* and you’re slowly constructing the image that gives way to the axiom, bit by bit. If you really look into it, the whole female reinforcement and cutting down of men leads to a somewhat subtly construction, that while it doesn’t overtly state it, basically says “women are always right, and men be damned.”
I know all the stereotypes I mentioned were against men, I want to not that I’m not blaming women for the image. It’s all something that’s reinforced all around the table, and it’s pretty ingrained. Those were also just the points that immediately came to mind, there are some against women (i.e. being emotional to the point of literal apocalyptic disaster) that also help reinforce the axiom in people’s minds. The best way to change it would to be a little more fair to the sexes, this means both subbing women out of the helpless role some of the time (I believe this possibly supports the “they’re wrong a lot” component that is in the axiom mentioned, on an account that “if they’re in any REAL trouble a man needs to save them”), but also putting them in more “dumb wife” roles (note: not “bimbo” House Bunny type roles, we have those aplenty, I mean a role reversal of the all too well known Sitcom Family pattern). Of course, we’ve been trying to equalize the media for years now, so I’m not holding my breath. I reckon by the time it disappears we’ll have something equally destructive readily in place. I’m sure there’s other contributing factors I didn’t list or notice, but those are my idle, probably not well realized thoughts on the subject.
I think I would agree with this more if domestic violence weren’t the primary cause of death for 18- to 44-year-old women in the UK. That implies to me that the “really subtle mindsets” are already set in the “it’s okay to hit your wife or girlfriend if you disagree with her”. Obviously no Doper men would ever do this, but I think the statistics bear out that in the real world, the trend described in this thread isn’t as pervasive as many of us think it is.
I agree that “Don’t marry an asshole”, no matter what their gender, is the best solution to both problems, but I think it’s not always easy to figure out who’s going to turn into an asshole after ten years and a kid.
I’m gonna need a cite on that one. Domestic violence deaths are a subset of murders and homicides in general, and I have never seen any statistics that show anything like that number of murders.
Sure. Here’s a PDF of a Home Office report from March 2005: http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/domesticviolence/domesticviolence51.pdf
I was incorrect; it’s not the leading cause of death, it’s the leading cause of morbidity. Still, it’s an incredibly significant statistic: as the report says, it’s greater than cancer, war or motor vehicle accidents.
That report is treating domestic violence as some kind of disease and says it affects for women aged 18-44 more than car accidents, cancer and war. While the number of women affected by domestic violence might be higher than the number who died in car crashes or of cancer, there’s no way those two things are equal in number of incidences. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
Especially when this report says there were almost 225,000 adults affected by car crashes in 2002 in the UK.
Justin_Bailey, I think it’s a really good sign and speaks well of you that domestic violence is so far out of your experience that you don’t believe it could happen as often as it does.
However, the statistics in the UK are fairly consistent. This 2004 Home Office report (PDF again): www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/hors276.pdf contains figures including:
921,000 women were subject to “domestic abuse, threats or force” in the preceding year
410,000 women were “pushed, held or pinned down, or slapped” in the same period
205,000 women were “kicked, bit or hit with a fist or something else, or had something thrown that could hurt [them]” in the same period.
Which is significantly more than the auto-accidents figure you cited. I should note that the first report I cited stated that it caused more incidences of morbidity than car accidents, cancer or war, not all three combined.
Look, I don’t know whether you’ve intended to do this, but you’ve set up an illogical argument here. In your OP, you proffer an axiom that applies to *all *men in *all *marriages (all subsequent emphases mine):
You then take the standpoint of assuming the axiom is true, in order to extrapolate the implications about *all *women. And you correctly note that if anyone can demonstrate that the axiom is *not *true (ie. “to have a happy marriage the man does not always have to be the one to admit he is wrong” or “if the man is always the one to admit he is wrong, it *does not necessarily *lead to a happy marriage”), it would be relevant to the discussion:
You go on to say that you fully *expect *this axiom to be disproved by the women on this board:
It’s worth reiterating here that your axiom applies (as axioms do) to *all *cases. So, if you can find even *one *case where it doesn’t apply, then the axiom isn’t true.
So, just as you expected, lots of women (and a few men) come here and say, Nope, it’s not true that “to have a happy marriage the man always has to be the one to admit he is wrong”, and I can prove it because I have (or had) a happy marriage and my husband *does not *always admit he is wrong, or I have (or had) an unhappy marriage *even though *my husband always admits he is wrong, or I have (or have had) an unhappy marriage *because *my husband always admits he is wrong.
They also go on refute the logical implications you suggest - basically, that all women are stubborn and illogical arguers - by presenting themselves as examples of women who are not these things. Now, you might protest that you never meant to say these implications are true for *all *women. But they must be, if they are to follow from the axiom. If they were not, then they would prove the axiom false on their own, or at least, be irrelevant to it:
If it is true that, in order to have a happy marriage, the man *always has to *admit he is wrong, then that implies the reason is that the woman will *never *give in (at least, not happily). Therefore, if some women are willing to admit they are wrong (happily), then either:
a) it is not the case that “in order to have a happy marriage, the man always has to admit he is wrong” OR
b) it may be that “in order to have a happy marriage, the man always has to admit he is wrong”, but the reason cannot be that " the woman will *never *give in (at least, not happily)"
So, it should be pretty easy to answer your first and second questions:
Do you think the above axiom for happy marriages is correct? (Are you male or female?)
No. It’s provably incorrect, regardless of anyone’s sex.
If the axiom is correct is there a way to interpret it and not have women come out in a bad light?
If we assume, for the sake of discussion, that it is correct, yes. It could be that this is true for some reason that has nothing to do with women. For example: It could be that men so detest being proven wrong by their wives that if they ever were, they would have an unhappy marriage. But they are fine with *saying *they’re wrong, as long as they can secretly know they are right. Therefore, given that wives will be right some of the time, the only way for men to never be proven wrong is to always give in. (That statement, though, is also provably false.)
But after a thread full of women demonstrating that the situation in the axiom is not always the case, you claim they’re actually saying it *never *happens.
If I say it’s an axiom that “Roses are red”, you need only point to the yellow rose of Texas to prove the axiom isn’t true. But this certainly doesn’t mean that no roses are red. The logical negation of “all” is not “none”, but “not all”. And I think you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone here who would say that this behavior is non-existant or even uncommon. You will find plenty of people saying, however, that not all women are like that.
No, it’s like if there were a thread that said, “If we assume it’s true that, in order to have a happy marriage, the woman always has to accept that her husband will do nothing but drink beer and watch football every day, then what does this say about men’s characters?” It would then make sense for Niles to come in and said, “I’m not like that, so we can’t assume that; it’s not universally true.”
Of course, lots of men have come in here and said that it’s true that in their marriages, they always have to admit they are wrong, or that all the women they know are stubborn and illogical. That doesn’t make the axiom true. The axiom is *not *that “in order for some marriages to be happy…” or “the man often has to admit he is wrong…” or even “It’s generally a good idea to cede an argument if you don’t really care that much”, which I would argue *is *true, for everyone.
But obviously, their experiences are true for them, and there are a lot of people here who have either said, “Yes, this axiom is true”, or “No, but it certainly applies to everyone I know”. This leads to your third question:
If the axiom is incorrect, why has it survived for so long?
I would suggest it is because there are sufficient numbers of men and women who believe or claim it to be true, either in most cases or universally. A woman may choose to believe that *all *women are stubborn and illogical in order to excuse her own behavior. Or she may have grown up seeing women always being stubborn and illogical, and men always acquiescing, and so never tries to argue with a man in any other way. And if a man believes that a woman can never be argued with, he will never try, and so will never find out differently. For example:
So I could never have a logical argument with msmith537, not because I’m incapable of it, but because I will never have the opportunity. He would never try to engage me logically, any more than he would a child, a crazy person, or a dog.
All that said, I concur with this point:
I think that Polerious quote is a misstatement of the issue. I don’t feel like I’m “expected” to apologize." I just don’t want to argue, so I let her have her way. It’s hardly ever anything very important, and she isn’t abusive, I just don’t care to have a long discussion. It isn’t that I can’t, or don’t feel allowed to pursue a conversation or debate, I just don’t want to have a conversation.
But that doesn’t mean he’s misstated the issue; it just means you’re talking about two different things. He’s talking about a situtation where the husband *is *expected to apologize. That is what the axiom (as he phrased it) states: “that to have a happy marriage the man always has to be the one to admit he is wrong.” I agree that if a husband is never permitted to be right or have his way, it’s abusive.
You, on the other hand, are talking about a situation where you choose to give in. Your case seems to be that it’s possible for you to win an argument, but you just prefer not to argue about things you don’t really care about. That’s not only *not *abusive, it’s very sensible.
Now, if you were to go on to say that the *only *way for you to ever get your way or be right is via argument - that is, that your wife *never *just gives in on things she doesn’t care about - then that would also sound like a somewhat negative situation. But IIRC, you’ve stated that she is reasonable, and will give in when appropriate. To me, that sounds like a perfectly normal situation that doesn’t really relate to the axiom at all.
Ah, if we’re defining it as “This argument is clearly not going to solve anything, and it is more important to the other person than it is to me, so I’m going to drop it and apologise,” as Diogenes says, then I don’t think that’s limited to any gender or relationship model. I do that with boyfriends, friends, parents and coworkers. I know many of them do it with me. Sometimes we will talk about it later, if it genuinely needs addressing; usually we chalk it down to “getting along with people –it takes work!” and move on.
But I think that my situation really is what most guys are talking about with the meme in question. Saying “she’s always right,” is a satirical way of saying you’ll have more peace in a marriage if you pick your battles and save your powder for stuff you actually care about.
I think both partners do that. When you have something you are using your powder on (to borrow the metaphor), which isn’t important enough to your partner to argue about, they say “Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry,” too. I do this to boyfriends. They do it to me. It is how people get along, and it is generally symbiotic. (Unless, of course, the Asshole Corollary described upthread applies.)
I agree. Although some people gave examples of ex-wives who were gleeful harpies, that’s not what most of the guys are talking about. But the thing is, if the message really boils down to “pick your battles”, then that’s just good advice for everyone, for life in general.
To present the message as advice *specifically *for husbands implies that they’ll be facing a lot of battles with their wives, and that these battles are all going to be pretty difficult, so if they don’t really care, it’s not going to be worth the effort to argue.
And I think this is what’s being implied, and in fact stated outright: not that these men are never allowed to win, but that women (or at least, their wives and all the women they know) are generally up for a fight, and are unreasonable when they do fight.
I’m not saying that’s not the case; I’m just saying, if all the women you know are like that, you’ve had bum luck, because there are lots of less combative and more reasonable women out there. And it might behoove you to know that, so that if you do happen to encounter a reasonable woman, you don’t piss her off by preemptively treating her as though she’s unreasonable.
I don’t say I’m sorry, I just say ok.
I think that women do it too, but guys just don’t really notice it. For instance, my wife never complains when I watch sports on TV, even though she hates sports. It’s not a spoken thing, it’sjust something she gives me. Confirmation bias causes guys to remember all the instances of them giving into their wives, but to take some of the things wives let them have for granted or not notice it at all.