We had the same pattern for 20 years.
I would feel overwhelmed, invisible and unloved. I would approach him with the same 3 requests:
- Please bathe
- Please treat me like your sweetheart
- Please help me
I honestly blame myself for the bathing thing. He had issues bathing from day one and I made it my mission to change this. Fun soap, fun poufs, getting in there with him, “rewards” post shower. It was actually humiliating for the both of us. But, he told me I was shallow and didn’t love him if I didn’t accept him just as he was. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of the movie “Roxanne” (A modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac) with Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin. I was not going to lose out on a man who loved me because he “had a large nose”. But the problem is, I had the nose. And I could smell him. But it was “part of the package” and I was supposed to love him unconditionally. I could be the bigger person. And I feel guilty for sweeping this under the rug, because it became a huge hindrance in how we connected. I wanted to pretend it wasn’t an issue.
He was always overly formal in his communication. Not romantic, not sweet, not thoughtful or endearing. We didn’t have pet names for each other, really. We had an amazing friendship, but everything past that was just non existent. We tried, but failed. So, I would remind him ever so often to please be softer with me. Sign emails with love or have a nice day or anything else besides the boilerplate work template. I didn’t appreciate ‘best’ or ‘regards’. Add a heart to a text, anything! I wanted to feel special, noticed, wanted, loved, seen, appreciated. It rarely happened and I celebrated each time that it did. But I had to put in requests often.
The not helping thing was a doozy. I was overwhelmed with the daily management of our life. I usually only had my business or a part-time gig, but I was tasked with maintenance of the house, cars, bills, dog and any other surprises that were thrown our way like moving cross country, again. The shopping, the cooking, the cleaning… all on me. As we got older, the houses got bigger, the bills got more complex, the moving got more daunting, people in our lives were encountering illnesses and there were more funerals. I would beg him to show up, to be there emotionally, to be a support for me. He would just opt out. He was always annoyed with my emotions, he never knew what to do with them. He would just turn away from me. It was very frustrating.
But the most frustrating thing about this pattern is how it played out. I would go to him and tell him I was overwhelmed or not feeling loved, he would say I was attacking his character, pointing out his flaws. I would say no, that I needed help, this was me begging my husband for solutions to our problems and he would always talk talk talk then land on that it was mostly a me problem and to “live and let live” and leave him alone.
From here, I would do one of two things:
- Explode in a rage and list off all the things I had done over the last number of years without his help. All the times he hid in the bathroom, suddenly had to work overtime, would oversleep or disappear. All the times he let me down. Then I would cry and explain again how overwhelmed I was.
- I would do what he said and leave him alone. Only for the overwhelming feelings to build up and explode again in 3-5 months.
The advice the internet and one marriage counselor gave me was that I needed to have a sweeter start up. I needed to understand that he is reacting from a place of trauma. That he *wanted* to help, bathe and be more endearing with me, but he just could not because of the way I was approaching it. I needed to schedule a good time to address it, come from a place of vulnerability and kindness and maybe, maybe I’ll finally be heard.
I challenged the marriage counselor and right in front of him I said, “I honestly believe he just doesn’t care. How do I get him to care?” She stared at me blankly and he had nothing to offer or interject with.
And I have dozens of working theories as to why he always ignored my requests. He didn’t respect me, he didn’t like women, he saw female emotions as inconsequential, he believed that women’s work was a joy to women, he believed his time was more valuable, he wanted to be in control, he knew arguing for hours would wear me down like it did his parents and he could just walk away… (but he’d always come back wanting intimacy). But at the end of the day, I believe he just didn’t care.
In the end, when we were trying to actually repair the marriage, it came up in counseling that he argued with me. That it was so exhausting, fruitless and made me feel crazy. It also came up that he thought I was mean and verbally abusive, to which I countered that my anger was a reaction to his stonewalling. I also mentioned that it seems like he enjoyed arguing and debating since he would drag it on for hours. This was never fully addressed. Again, I left marriage counseling with more questions than answers and he was validated again and again that my experience didn’t matter because we always avoided it.
As a gesture of good will, he thought it would be cute to buy a little wooden judge’s gavel on Amazon and present it to me. He told me, holding the gavel with a big smile, “let’s burn this as a symbol of me not wanting to debate with you again. I will no longer be the arbiter, judge and jury.”
That sentiment did not scream “my wife is verbally abusing me! help!”
I think he knew what he was doing. I think he knew he was controlling the narrative and emotionally abusing me. And that realization made checking out of the marriage a lot easier.
