I'm still sorting all that out for myself, actually. I've learned a few things, but I still don't really understand how it works in the sense of why a woman works so hard to manipulate a man, but demands that he be immune to her manipulations or she'll lose respect for him. It still seems to me that it would be simpler to choose a good man and then not try to manipulate him or "test" him, but I accept that it's not the way things are done. I'm cursed with a need to know why things happen, and I can't let them rest.
But I know a few things now that I didn't know a couple of years ago:
1. I cry when I've reached my breaking point. If I'm crying, someone is probably dead or a bone is broken, or (especially since my youngest son was born) I'm looking at something that deeply touches me emotionally. She cries a LONG time before her breaking point. If someone managed to make me cry by saying something to me, one of us would probably be about to get hurt. But if she cries because I said something to her, I can't assume that she's badly hurt at all. She might just be mad. Or worried. Or feeling guilty.
2. She's perfectly capable of feeling real remorse and terrible guilt over our problems while we discuss them. This feels deep and permanent to her at the time. But if I relent because she feels that way, she will take that as my acceptance. We'll fall back into the same rut in no time.
3. My wife is a child of divorce--an ugly divorce. Her parents can't stand each other; her mother particularly despises her father. She always lived in fear of the end of our marriage, when I would get fed up and leave. She would lose control and cry wildly because she was sure that every time I told her about something that bothered me, I was leading up to telling her that the marriage was over. As long as I didn't do that, she would cry tears and promise whatever to keep the marriage going, but it was always hanging over her head.
4. I am the child of a long, happy marriage. That's my ideal--that you choose someone great and then you make it work, whatever it takes. When we got married, I couldn't imagine any good reason we would divorce. I thought that if we ever divorced, it would be over a failure of the will to stay together and make each other happy. Because I have a bad Nice Guy problem, that mostly meant that I gave up a lot of things that made me happy and tried everything I could think of to make her happy. But I can't *make* her happy, and that's a bitter pill, believe me, but it's true. I told her that I would never leave, no matter what. That I wanted her to help me and work with me, but that no matter what happened, I would never leave. Like you, I thought I was being kind. I thought I would take away her fear of divorce and then we would be free to deal with our problems honestly. What I managed, as I'm sure you've figured out, was to show her by word and deed that I didn't really care what she did, since there was nothing she could do that would drive me away and no degradation I would not accept in order to be with her (for sufficient values of "be with.")
5. I'm a Nice Guy, White Knight, and whatever other pop-psych jargon there is for a man who puts women on a pedestal and keeps them there. I can't stand to see a woman cry. I couldn't stand to see her cry. I feel sick at the sight, and my first thought is that I'm causing this by not putting a stop to this. I sincerely believed that if she started to cry, I had gone too far. The truth is that she was crying because were beginning to get at the truth.
6. I have not mastered any of this by any means, but I do this much right now: if she cries, she cries. If my problem is not serious enough to warrant a few tears, then I shouldn't have brought it up in the first place. I just have to bull on through and keep going. And here's the magic part: you don't have to proceed past the tears many times before she catches on that tears don't stop the discussion anymore. I don't know how much of this involves conscious thought or ploys, but I can't deny that the waterworks dried up considerably after I told her a few times that I'd get her a kleenex but we still had a lot to talk about.
Now, only once or twice did she actually get up and leave. She never left the house, just went to another room to collect herself, and I usually let her go. But I waited for her, and when she came back it was clear that she understood we were picking up where we had left off.
If she has found out that she can end the conversation by crying, you don't have a chance--except that you don't have to keep letting her do that. You don't have to be mean, you just hand her a tissue and keep going. She may actually be shocked enough by that to tell you that she's crying and you should stop, and that's when you tell her that what you're talking about is too important. Obviously it's important that you choose an appropriate place and time when you both have time for a discussion, partly because that's just common sense and partly because if she has an excuse to avoid the conversation, she will--as DanceQueen said, this conversation is painful for her the way the first mile is painful for an out-of-shape smoker. It hurts to change your habits and demand more from yourself, even if they were bad habits.
If she leaves, my completely unprofessional and untested advice would be to resolve that when she comes back, the conversation picks up where it left off. I have no idea whether that will work, but it can't hurt.
You have less to fear than you think you do. If the rest of your marriage is as good as you think it is, or even pretty close, then you have to know that she has a lot to lose if the marriage ends, too. The classic Nice Guy thinks his wife is his superior in most ways and that she's a fool to stay with him. He's glad she stays, but he doesn't understand it. He thinks he has to tread lightly all the time because he never knows when she might get fed up and leave for good. But that's all in his head.
That's a long post, but two more important observations before I toddle off to bed:
1. You already know this, but the more you write, the more important your wife's history of abuse seems to move to the fore. That's something my wife didn't deal with, although she had some horrible boyfriends (And I rescued her from those awful brutes! Isn't that great?) I realize you say she's had therapy dealing with that issue, but do you believe she's made any progress toward resolving it so she can really live with it? It doesn't sound that way.
2. You said this:
Quote:
I don't think in terms of who's at fault, or to blame.
You wouldn't be human if you didn't, but it's clear when I read your posts that most of them come around to all the ways she has wronged you. That's normal. I'd be shocked if you weren't furious deep down. Nothing changed for me until I got so furious that I couldn't stop thinking about it and I had to do something about it. But you'll have an easier time if you acknowledge openly that you're mad about the way you've been treated. People like me think a woman will respect us for our wisdom and calm kindness, but they just wonder why we don't respect ourselves enough to get mad when someone walks on us.
And don't ask me why they don't just stop walking on us and avoid the whole issue; these are the mysteries. (This is the part where DanceQueen informs us that men do the same thing and I'm a sexist.)
