cally and blackfoot: I appreciate the message you are expressing to me to stop coddling her, be the "man", etc.
Quote: But now try to think of it from a females point of view and see this scared man standing before you and you are the bully time and time again. You put out your demand or nasty comment and he does nicely what is told of him. How much respect do you think she could have for you.
Yep. You're right. I need to get rid of this fear of confrontation, fear of abandonment, fear of her reaction to my not doing things her way.
Maybe the answer right now is to not fark her brains out. But the answer at least is to tell her how you feel? Why is it you have become so scared of her? What is the worst that can happen by you speaking at least the truth to her? By hiding your true emotions right now this cycle will never stop. Until you stand up to her you will be like this even 5 years down the road. Meanwhile the rsentment and anger is only going to build up more and more. Pretty soon maybe you will even grow to hate her.
Yell at her tell you are so damned confused by her no's, non sexual interest, then sexual interest, then intiate confident statements. Hold her to it to explain what the heck she means. Well, maybe not yell but darn HD you have got to do something. Your wife pushes you around like you were some teenage boy.
Quote: For example, your story about fixing the house fan. You included and made your daughter a part of the team. I read that and I kept thinking...ok... where is the part where he hollers at his W to make them some lemonade?
I think this is a good suggestion but when you're trying to do the Alpha Male thing with a woman like MsHD (or me for that matter) you are better off going with a post-feminist rather than a pre-feminist approach. For instance, my H gets it right when he good-humoredly says "Beer me, wench.". It might also be effective to use your natural sense of humor in the opposite way when MsHD orders you around. For instance, if she started b*tching that you did a half*ss job mopping the floor you could do some sort of Monty Pythonesque oppressed housewife drag thing saying in falsetto "Oh dear me, my floor is not pristine. What will the neighbors think. Ohh..Mr.Clean please come help me..". Doing this will probably make MsHD feel uncomfortably butch in her behavior and cause her to stop though she might get angry also.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
'beer me, wench'. almost every friday I walk into the club, go behind the bar, raise my hands over my head, and holler, BAR WENCHES. Lets makes some driiinnnnks and soME MONEY. ..Oh they hate it. LOL. invariably, they throw whatever is handy at me. I saw a lot of ways to include HD W when I read that story.... I was trying to convey a concept, a general idea. HD may prefer ice Tea (the drink) for all I know.
The important thing for HD is that he 1) learn to be able to look inside and and identify his feelings, and then 2)verbalize them without self deprecating, personalizing, or trying to protect her from his selfishness, irritation, needs, blah blah, and without worrying about her reaction. How he does it exactly is going to be a manifestation of himself, that we allready know she thinks is attractive, just like he did in the beginning of the R. Takes us back to WWNRHDD.
HD you said, I was the good little kid who watched all my siblings make the mistakes while I did all the things that made my dad happy. your used to identifing and then proactively doing what makes others happy. This was your way to get validated, positive attention from your dad, parents. Its a ingrained, personality and associative behavior for you. Its not and wont ever work with your W though. Crap. that sucks. Doing this with your wife, without getting/receiving appreciation from her though, puts you in what appears to her, supplicating, placating type behavior. I bet its not the tack you took when you were assesing her, when you were dating.
another thing. your inner voice. look at these two remarks by you. An invitation to be slaughtered? Oh, joy! what a b!tch this wimp married, eh?
Your humor is this huge strength you have. It takes just a little tweak to it, so that its not P/A in reference to your W (soemtimes is ok), and self deprecating (unless its about your looks, cause your a damn good looking guy ).
I dont think your wife is a b!tch, and I definitely dont think your a wimp. If you were, you never would have attracted your wife in the first place. I think you need to work on being ok with asserting your needs and having higher expectations, and seeing your wife thru different eyes.
I have a question for you. Can you identify, how you felt about your W, when you were dating, and the way you felt, the way you decided you were going to treat her, after you decided to marry her?
To me, she looks like a woman, who is really strongly affected by strength and power, and struggles against the effect it has on her. somewhere along the way, this attraction caused her some emotional pain.
Dude, you're killing me. I see so much of myself in you, and some of my W in your W. We need to fix this, eh? You are a fcukig awesome guy, with a sense of humor that could probably put meals on the table if you wanted to. I'm ready to get real with you, on a base level. I'm not perfect, I don't have all the answers, and I'll probably screw up advice as often as get it right. But there are others here to correct me. I want to help, if you want it? Think about it and let me know.
Let me relate a story to you about my childhood. I am a people pleaser like you. My father was very abusive, so if you didn't tow the line, you got smacked, hard. I remember one time he smacked me and my younger brother upside the HEAD for about 5 minutes (hard to know exactly how long when you are getting hit in the head) alternating between punches and open-handed slaps ... because we had lied about taking naps earlier that day. I remember being nauseous and dizzy for about a day afterwards, and throwing up several times that night. I was about 7 at the time and my younger brother was 5. My dad is 6'3" and was in the military, so you can imagine the blows weren't light.
At the same time, my mother was always distant from us. No matter how hard I tried to get her to recognize me, to say how proud she was of me, to say she loved me, nothing. So I got it elsewhere. I was the guy who all the teachers liked. I ended up becoming very involved in sports, music, science. Luckily I was rather large, and in sports, or I'm sure I would have been a punching bag for bullies. As it were, my people pleasing ways alienated me from most of my peers.
Well, one incident sticks out in my head. Every year the top sophomores in terms of academics, athletics, service, etc. were selected in my high school to be essentially hosts (or hostesses) at the junior/senior prom. It was considered a real honor, even the cool kids wanted it. So you can imagine my glee when I was selected to be one of the hosts. I went home and told mom (dad wasn't home yet) and she only had to say "don't let your dad find out about it, I'll try to find a way to sneak you off that day." Well Dad came home and my excitement was too much to contain. When he found out about it, he issued the proclamation, "as long as you are in my house, you will NEVER go to prom, its nothing but a bunch of drunk teenagers getting drunker." I was crushed. The next day at school I had to go tell the prom organizer that I had to decline. I refused to answer why, because in an earlier incident a few years before I told my teacher "because my dad won't let me." She called home and I got one of the worst beatings of my life that night.
But I started to learn a lesson that day. No matter how hard I try, some people won't be pleased. It has taken me years to learn it in my heart, and I'm still not 100% there (as witnessed my my M). I now stand up to my dad, and he respects me. When he tries to pull some Rush Limbaugh, conspiracy theory, creation science BS on me, I call it what it is.
You've admitted to self-esteem problems, and they are clear in your posts. I've been fixing mine, so I know you can fix yours. You have problems with respect in your M. Same here, and I'm working on that too.
Still want to be my "workout" buddy? Let me know.
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
Hairy, I'm pullin' for ya too. Uhhh, no, not pulling THAT . Well, you know what I mean. Chrome and I both want you to join our club here, but to do it you need to strap on the brass ones and show MrsHD who's da man You've been stuck way too long, and it is time to get out of her sh!t and dump it back on her.
Hairy, One time my Six husband and I were having a talk and we were discussing this very thing in him..how he will say what he thinks I want to hear and that I should be happy that he at least tries to please me. I told him that it wasn't necessarily for me, though--it was to protect himself from having to do something that he finds inherently uncomfortable: being direct. The fact that he thought I liked it was an added bonus, really.
I won't say that I don't like it cause sometimes it feels good to have a person go along with you, kwim. It is the Final Answer of "Well I didn't really mean that I would go to your second cousin's third wedding; I was just saying that it sounded like a nice time for YOU" that I find infuriating. He is a Time Buyer...if a situation arises that he feels uncomfortable dealing with, he gives me an answer designed to buy him some time and we both know it. It is frustrating.
Anyway, I say all this just to point out that if you can get real with yourself and know that you are not doing her any favors with the people pleasing stuff, but rather doing what makes YOU feel most comfy, then I think it may be easier to change. When we deceive ourselves--and convince ourselves that the other person likes it--inertia becomes all the much more attractive.
Honeypot, a C answerer to the "world" and recovering B answerer to my H.
Stop trying to please her. I think that us guys have this natural tendency to want to please our women, and this is NOT what they want. My guess is that women in general are wired to test their men, to push them as hard as they can, to break them. Women are indecisive by nature and they can't stand having husbands that ARE indecisive, or try to APPEASE them. She wants YOU to make the decisions for the family, she does NOT want to be in that position. I guess we all have to learn how to step up and be the man.
I've been at a seminar all morning. Yuck. But, a free lunch afterward, catered by one of my favorite local barbecues! Yes!
1st: Mojo...you're right, she'd probably get mad if I pulled the Monty Python thing. But hey, she's mad already. And it would amuse me. I like, especially, the "beer me, wench." I'm using that this weekend.
2nd: blackfoot. When we first met, she and I hit it off well, bantering back and forth, lots of humor. She was the one who contacted me at the match.com site, and I, seeing that she lived two hours away, replied with a comment that reflected my initial reaction: that I thought she was crazy to think I would consider dating someone so far away. Then, when she told me that she was a prof at a university that was the rival of my alma mater, I continued to poke fun at her, i.e., "as if I would be caught dead ever dating someone from Mizzou!" My attitude was total confidence, I had nothing to lose because I had absolutely no doubt that the emails would go anywhere.
She, of course, ate it up, continued to email, then we called each other on the phone, then she had to come to the airport in my town to drop off her visiting sister, so we met in person. Pretty much from that point on I was hooked. I started to take the "relationship" more seriously, and began to feel that I didn't want to lose it. That's probably when I shifted into "wanting to keep her happy" mode. It was a subtle change over the course of a few weeks, but it went from an amusing little distraction, to something that was important to me. And of course, once it shifted to that, the pattern was set.
I'm not sure about her affection to strength and power, except for the fact that her dad, when he divorced her mom, did some big threatening to her mom that convinced her to let him have full custody of my W and her sis. After about 5 years of that, my W and her sis convinced their Dad to let them go to Mom's custody. I think he was so fed up with her stubborness and the negative effect it was having on his new marriage, that he agreed.
Now go and chew on that for awhile.
3rd: chromo - jeeze, what an azz your dad was. That story was pitiful. Real Pat Conroy-type stuff. Anyway, I get the message about not being able to please some people. That's my W for ya. And I'm working on the self-esteem stuff. Any help you can provide is much appreciated. Teaching by example is good. If I hadn't been already dressed this a.m., I was almost ready to open the shower door and say, "Is there room for two more?" Ha ha....love that one.
4th: honeypot. Yeah, get real with myself, I know. You're not the only one telling me this. I really appreciate it when you drop in to b!tch-slap me into listening to you. Don't drink too much beer this weekend, hp.
5th: Cemar and others: yeah, but it's so easy to let her make all the decisions! My C asked me why I picked my ex and my W, both strong women. One reason, I said, was because, on most things, I didn't really care one way or another, and I knew that by marrying these opinionated women, I wouldn't have to make so many decisions. Yep, I'm here, because I'm lazy.
However, I agree about my need to be decisive, to let her know what I'm thinking even if I know she doesn't want to hear it, to be strong, to be confident, and to not waver. And I think I'm supposed to be clean and reverent and obey the law of the pack, too, but I'll get started on the other stuff right away.
One last thing: yesterday, she called me to ask about a situation with a friend of ours who she thought was acting strange. She gave me the facts, from her perspective. I paused. I told her I thought she was being paranoid. She didn't like that. I told her that, if she wanted me to be more open, I was going to share my perspectives on things with her, and she might not always agree with me. At first, she said that she appreciated that, but she ended up hanging up on me when I stood my ground. She called back, trying to prove that she was not a paranoid individual, by citing examples from the past. Regardless, I told her that my perception of the conversations she had with her friend, and her conclusion, seemed like she was being paranoid. She hung up again. I didn't call her back.
By the time we saw each other again, she didn't even mention it.
And hey, the world didn't end when I stood up to her and didn't try to spare her feelings, make her happy, or agree with her. And that's cool.
almost every friday I walk into the club, go behind the bar, raise my hands over my head, and holler, BAR WENCHES. Lets makes some driiinnnnks and soME MONEY. ..Oh they hate it. LOL. invariably, they throw whatever is handy at me.
). 
. Well, you know what I mean. Chrome and I both want you to join our club here, but to do it you need to strap on the brass ones and show MrsHD who's da man 
You've been stuck way too long, and it is time to get out of her sh!t and dump it back on her. 
She didn't like that. I told her that, if she wanted me to be more open, I was going to share my perspectives on things with her, and she might not always agree with me. At first, she said that she appreciated that, but she ended up hanging up on me when I stood my ground. She called back, trying to prove that she was not a paranoid individual, by citing examples from the past. Regardless, I told her that my perception of the conversations she had with her friend, and her conclusion, seemed like she was being paranoid. She hung up again. I didn't call her back.