Quote: ----------------- His books are filled with common sense style advice, as well as much biophysical information that was gathered at his clinic. For instance, men will sometimes "stonewall" when they are mad...they walk away or shut down and refuse to talk. Dr. Gottman researched this and there is actually a flooding of the brain that occurs with men and they become so overwhelmed that it is literally fight or flight. Since most are not inclined to punch their W's lights out, they sit there stonily silent or get up and leave. Prior to reading this, I assumed that my H was just being an ahole when he did these things. Once I read about the actual biological happenings inside him, it made it easier for me to just back off when I saw this happening to him--no matter how mad I was at the moment--and take it up later. ---------------
Yep that sounds familiar to me (from when I read teh book a while back. So here is a tough question for ya to that end. How do you relay that information to your spouse (from your view point) without comming accross as trying to avaoid the problem being discussed? I have tried that a few times in the past, the one instance I remember I told W that I thought I should go for a walk to let things cool down, the return comment was, "dont get me worked up then want to take a break, im not gonna want to talk about this later, ive got my toughts organized right now!", she even went as far as to follow me out the door! It wasnt a pretty sight.
quote: ----------------- We had an interesting incident yesterday. We are having killer weather here in the midwest...80 degrees I think it was yesterday. So I wore shorts and sandals, fully aware that he is a leg man and would surely notice. He did. At one point I went down to talk to the neighbors and he stayed in the driveway with our baby. I returned home after a few minutes and cooked supper. As I was doing that, he said that his "blood pressure was going up as I watched X and Y (our male neighbors) watch you walk back home." I sorta downplayed it because truly I had no idea if they did that or not, but mostly I wanted to fill the 'dead air' because I know from experience with my H that the next words out of his mouth would be instructions on how NOT to dress, so that I don't inadvertantly turn on our neighbors. I was internally cringing and preparing for these words and I found myself talking to fill the space so he couldn't do this. IOW, we both try to control the other, I guess. Bottom line: H didn't say a word about my clothing, Yay H, and I eventually shut the hell up and gave him an opportunity to either rise to the occasion or sink to his usual low. ----------------
This is interesting, I seem to have made a mistake in this area in the past. So here is the next question. From your viewpoint, if H perceives W clothes to be inapporpriate (revealing etc) when she is going to work (in an office environment) should he comment or keep them to himself?
I had two sepparate instances where I obviously should have kept my mouth shut, but didnt (the old hind sight thing). First one was where W bought a shirt that showed a fair amount of cleavge, I mentioned that it may make other males in her office uncomfortable, more info on her job, she works in corperate circles that is mostly male dominated. She took it as, you dont like this shirt and it obviously came accross hurtful. Second incident, she bought some low rise blue jeans and wore them to a clean up that we had to do for our D5's gym club. While cleaning (and any other time she wears them), there is a fair amount (understatement) of butt cleavage shown, I mentioned it to her, first comment was no its not, I had to return no im sorry yes there is a large amount when you bend over. I also said I thought that you would like to hear it from me as opposed to someone else. KABOOM not a pretty thing. I guess in hind sight is it best to just keep our (males) mouths shut when it comes to items of clothing that you spouse wears? Let me know what you think im am very interested.
The more insights I can gain from the opposite sex the better!
