Muddle's Muddy Waters

[MuddleThrough]

I see what you're getting at - but I think our sitches differ in that it appears to me that my W really does get a sort of ego boost out of exerting what she sees as control, and she acts very entitled and often gives me a hard time if I ask her to return the favor. Example: I go to get a glass of water before bed and she asks me to grab her one. No problem, glad to. Another night she goes and I ask her - I get resistance in the form of looks or excuses.

I believe that entitlement gets you nowhere in a R. I know when I do something I'm not accumulating any sort of emotional currency that I can redeem at a later date. But knowledge and feelings are different, and I wonder if I am expecting something because of what I do. On another note, I wonder if my W's reluctance to do for me has to do with her feeling that she has done/does do so much for others, and doesn't get what she feels she needs in return. I have read Mars/Venus and I found the idea that a woman needs to put up boundaries so they don't give too much really important.

I feel that resentment is something owned and controlled by the person feeling it - and if it gets out of control it really hurts the R. So, as I have often found myself doing since in this situation, I've taken a look at a R dynamic that I feel is less than what it should be - and I recognize that conclusions I'm drawing might not be at all valid because I'm basing this on my assumptions of what my W feels and thinks - and I'm focussing on her part. My W tends to look at things in our R and in the A as if they are fixed and exist objectively - so there are problems with the way we relate, that's just the way it is. I understand that there are two different perspectives, and a problem may only be a problem in one of them - in this situation, it's not really a problem to me because I'm comfortable with my actions (if I wasn't I wouldn't do it), but looking at it from the overhead perspective, I wonder if it's a problem in the R or not, regardless of my perspective.

What do you do when you come up with things like this, when it seems that a problem seems to be so one sided? Do you file it away as something that you might deal with later if your S decides to work on things? Or do you pick it to pieces and try and figure out what tiny part in this you might have that contributes to the problem - running the risk that you'll almost certainly be accepting more responsibility for it than you are due?

You mentioned that you don't see a problem doing for them as long as it goes both ways. I think that the fact that fairness (as in M/V) is calculated differently by the different sexes means that there's no way to know if equity exists, even though I clearly feel that it doesn't. And how do you determine the equity of the score breakdown? Clearly, there's the specific act based score and the residual running score. I may have gotten 10 glasses of water to my W getting me 1, and yet my W might still feel that she has done more because the residual disparity is so great. At some point it takes an act on her part to purge the residual stuff and start fresh, otherwise there's no way to equalize the score again. I guess I feel that my W's resentment is so great that I'm in an enormous amount of debt.