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I get this a lot on TikTok and Reddit.

“You must not be some big prize if you say he was that way.”

“Men are more physically abused in a marriage than women are emotionally abused. What is emotional abuse anyway? It’s made up.”

“I feel sorry for him, you sound horrible.”

One commonality I see in men like this, they have no idea who their wife is. What she likes. What her story is. They see her as an appliance. If she starts acting up, time to get a new one *or* they are stuck with that woman and get to complain about it loudly until the day they die. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand the animosity toward women who want to be seen as human, to be heard, to be respected and to be cherished. Instead of rolling your eyes at the idea, give her a divorce so she can be free. If you don’t like her, if you don’t want to listen to her, if you see yourself as a million times more important than her, if her aches and pains are an inconvenience to you… please let her go.

These men are miserable and will not do anything to change it. They need friends, they need a wider perspective about the world. They need to be less self centered, discover empathy, discover respect for how rich a woman’s inner world is. Stop trying to control and dominate her because you think it’s your birthright. Be honest with yourself. It’s tragic that they live such shallow lives.

My ex husband complained that he didn’t have any friends. But he hated sports, called blue collar guys “meatheads” and he would only attend meetups that were centered around his very specific hobbies. Then he would go, realize he was smarter than anyone else and he’d stop going. He was constantly learning new things and joining groups, only to leave abruptly because he felt superior. I thought it was going well, I thought he had found camaraderie in something new. Nope. He would stop going for one reason or another. But later, he would blame me for not having any friends. I was dumbfounded. He loved being around people, described himself as an extrovert who loved people but later said the opposite.

He was so incredibly loud about his political opinions, pop culture, the latest fad or his take on history, music etc. But when it came to relationships, how he saw women, how he saw me, he was a huge mystery. It’s only when we got into marriage counseling that he started expressing how he saw me and how he saw himself as a husband. I had honestly assumed his intentions to be SO MUCH more benevolent and benign. But this is what he revealed to me:

1. Sex isn’t about connecting emotionally or bonding. It’s about a release. It’s like getting on a treadmill to release energy. It doesn’t matter who it is with or how it is done. It’s just a biological need. We should still do it when we are mad or if I’m hurting, because it’s just like a handshake, and to insinuate that it was anything more complicated or violating, even for the woman, was a joke.
2. His reason for not bathing was that he was looking for unconditional love from me. His mother was awful and I was supposed to make up for that. Women are here to dote on and comfort men. That’s what we are supposed to do. And I wasn’t doing it to his standards, therefore I didn’t actually love him.
3. I told him my cooking, cleaning, caring for him and tolerating his bad behavior was me showing love. He said, nope. That’s inherent to ALL women. All women do that, all women are nurturing and he doesn’t have to be grateful for such things. Men do NOT reciprocate care in this way. What he really wanted was sex and unconditional love, and I was failing at that.
4. He said to me, “Marriage should be easy. I’m going to go find true love. You’ve made it too hard and complicated.”
5. I wanted to separate. He told me that I couldn’t leave because I was stuck. That marriage was forever and he did not have to change or be kinder to me because this was a permanent situation. He later asked me to leave because I wouldn’t have sex with him, which is beyond hypocritical. I thought *we* were stuck? Nope. Just me.
6. Our marriage counselor asked each of us what we liked about the other. I said I liked his confidence, how he could figure out big concepts, his sense of humor and our friendship. He had no answer to what he liked about me. A day later he sat me down to read his journal to me. To show me that he truly loved me and cared about me. He read several pages describing my breasts, how I was walking around in “nothing but a t shirt”, how my body looked, how I was comfortable around him semi-naked. He talked about sex, my orgasms and more pages about my breasts. I had a panic attack and started crying. He said I was rejecting the most vulnerable part of him and it hurt him deeply.
7. He would aggressively check out 19-23 year old women while we were out and about. I started avoiding going out with him because he would blatantly stare and contort for an uncomfortably long time and it was embarrassing. Our waitress noticed because she was trying to get his attention to order and he was in a trance staring at the girl behind us. He would go on field trips and hang out at the local college campus on the weekends with his camera. He finally admitted in marriage counseling that he did this, but it was never discussed further. All this told me is that he was no longer attracted to me and he felt entitled to act this way.
8. When I would ask him point blank if he respected women, he would be purposely evasive and vague.
9. He believed he should never do chores in the house, but he didn’t want anyone coming in to clean because it would be invasive and they would probably “steal his stuff”. But he refused to come to some middle ground with me on this. Either I did it all with a smile or I let the house go to shit. (“I bet your standards were beyond high, you probably wanted everything perfect!” No. Not even a little. I didn’t want mold or smells. Clutter didn’t bother me that much, but if it was in a hallway, was a hindrance or rooms were no longer livable, I would get angry. We had 3 rooms full of crap and unusable otherwise, the whole house didn’t need to be like that. I was completely reasonable in my requests.) After I left, he went full hoarder. His mother is also a hoarder.
10. He announced he was a people pleasing introvert. That he had major anxiety about keeping me happy all the time. That he was stressed, depressed and exhausted at the energy it took to keep me happy. But he never lifted a finger, would be combative, argumentative, contrarian and debate me endlessly to tire me out so he would get out of anything I asked of him. From picking up dog poo to answering his phone when I called, everything, and I mean everything, was an argument and even though he ALWAYS won, he always got his way, he was always antonymous and never had to show up for me, he would still complain that I even had the audacity to ASK. And even after all of this, he purchased a wood gavel and said we would burn it as a symbol of him giving up the judge, jury, arbiter, debate club, litigation kink persona he had. So, what was it? He was a meek, attacked, tired people pleasing shell of himself or he’s the one pounding the gavel furiously? Which is it, friend?

And what was my contribution to this mess? I got smaller, I got quieter, I never used him as an emergency contact. He didn’t help me when I had a flat tire, he didn’t go to funerals with me. He would get irritated by a simple request like “call me when you get there!” I would get an earful about his family, trust and independence and calling upon an arrival was insulting, so he wasn’t going to do it. He was the opt out king. He got to live exactly as he wanted to live while I was scrambling to make sure everything got done. I buried my fears, my worries, my needs, my sensitivities and became as masculine and logical as I could. He started feeling like an angsty teenage boy to me. Unpredictable, annoyed by everything, the slightest inconveniences made him rage. I started out scared of him, then it just grew tiresome. And SO unattractive. Just beyond ick.

I blame myself *daily* for letting him. I am so angry at myself for not advocating for me. But I was met with a tantrum, stonewalling and that annoyed stance that tells me loud and clear that I’m a burden and a moron. His goal was to be free and train me to only come to him with the blank stare of happiness and dinner ideas. That’s what most men want, right?

Should I have put out more? Sure. But it was awful and why should I have to? If you’re a man who believes the way my ex husband did, you should get into therapy immediately.

But I was tolerant, never told him to stop spending $10k a month on bullshit, I let him do what he wanted, I let him not bathe, I let him not clean, I let him not do the 2 chores he promised he’d do. I. Let. Him.

Yet, he can still somehow say I was a bad wife. That I somehow let him down. That I somehow didn’t do what I was supposed to do. That I wasn’t sweet enough, sexual enough, tolerant enough, absent enough. I’ll probably never understand.

I know I don’t need to prove that I was unhappy, that I have to show men that their endless defensiveness for men they have never met is preposterous. Bro Code. But it’s still annoying. I lived in this hell for 23 years, conditioned to believe that it would get better, there would be a reward of us in rocking chairs, gray hair on a porch holding hands. You know, the big lie.

Men like this want us to stay naive. Hopeful. To expect less and less. To turn ourselves inside out trying to keep him happy.

But then our outside looks like our inside. We let ourselves go, we stop caring about our appearance, our health, our happiness. We’ve centered the man for so long that we forget who we are. We have finally accepted the role that our husbands have been forcing us into for decades. Quiet, meek, uninterested in our own health or appearance… and he starts complaining. “She looks horrible”.

We stop sleeping with them. They complain more.

Why is this so hard to understand?!? Why??? It’s so frustrating to see this dynamic play out over and over and over again. And for what?? A mediocre, unevolved man with back hair he won’t trim who thinks he’s the most amazing human being to ever float into anyone’s life.

I didn’t see it for decades. But I see it now. And being alone, in my smaller house, not having to deal with the emotional manipulation, gaslighting, disrespect, the added hours upon hours of chores AND he wants to crawl on top of me every night?!?!?!? Hell no. Just no. Never ever ever again.