Where everybody knows your name...but not really

[MJontheMend]

You are too surrendered too your H. (I am only speaking to Mojo. )

Yes and No. Remember, overall things are going quite well in my situation. My tears on Wednesday were really an aberration, signs of an old mood that I really haven't been in much lately. I would say that 90% of the time lately my H has been behaving like a man who is very much committed to his marriage. He has been doing many of the types of things you mentioned that a man might do for a woman to whom he was grateful for sex but he does those things because he wants to be married to me for reasons other than sex, I guess, though given his nature he will never be the "offer a massage" type guy. He has mostly been doing things along the line of "manly acts of service" which he knows that I would appreciate.

I think that lately I'm more "surrendered" to the notion of being a "wife" than I am "surrendered" to my H. It's kind of like I'm taking pride in the fact that if I were to participate in a "Wife Swap" type show, the guy that ended up at my house might never want to go home (LOL). I realized that there was somethig illogical and perverse about my thinking. Let's say I felt like I was unhappy in my marriage because my H was cranky and LD. When I asked him why he was cranky and LD he would tell me the reason was because I didn't dust enough and I didn't fix my hair attractively. Now it might be the case that I am an adequate duster and my hair is reasonably attractive, so my natural response would be to bounce the ball back into his court. But what if instead I were to ask myself "Am I capable of doing a better job of dusting and fixing my hair?". If I answer "No" what does that say about my own self-esteem? If I answer "Yes" then I need to think about the scenario in which I am married to a man who is naturally good-natured and high drive. If I was married to this guy would I let my dusting and hair care go all to hell because I know that it won't make a difference in his good-nature and high drive? If I react negatively to my H's complaints because I think I shouldn't "have to" be super-dust-and-curl woman in order to get laid then I am likely to also be the type of woman who become the type of woman who slacks off on "dust and curl" if I was with an easy-going man. Thus, I would be the type of woman who rewards a man for bad behavior and punishes a man for good behavior. OTOH, if I punish my H for bad behavior by passive-aggressively neglecting my dusting and hair care then I am going to end up damaging my own self-esteem and contributing to the downward spiral of my marriage.

One great bit of wisdom that I picked up on the FlyLady site is that when somebody says something critical to you, you can either react or respond. She uses the analogy that if you take a medication and you "react" to it that has a negative connotation but if you "respond" to it there is a positive connotation. I think that maybe the more differentiated you are, the more likely you are to "respond" than "react" in any situation. So, if my H says "Wow, this place is really dusty!", I might "react" by saying angrily "Well, nobody ever dusts around here but me." or "I might have more time to dust if I didn't have to do the mowing for you this week." etc. or I might "respond" by saying "It is pretty dusty, maybe we should have a family meeting to figure out who should take on this responsibility" or "You're right. I've been neglecting that responsibility. I need to add it to my written weekly schedule so that I don't let it slide." etc.. Because I've taken on this attitude, my H has pretty much run out of complaints. When he was being cranky Wednesday morning it was about something that could not be construed as "my fault" in any rational fashion. His complaint was that he hates his job. My "response" to this was to say a few things along the lines of "I'm sorry you feel that way. Let me know if I can help in any way in terms of brain-storming or internet searching for something new." which is pretty much all I can/could do for anybody in that situation. I think I was hurt/angry when he copped to avoiding sex later because it was demoralizing to me to think that maybe he was acting all depressed about his job in order to avoid having sex with me, like a kid who fakes a belly-ache to avoid going to school. Also, he did find an irrational way to blame me in this scenario. He said " I don't understand how two people can live in the same situation and one can be so much more unhappy.". Thus, the fact that I like my job is why I am HD but if I felt his pain about his cr*ppy job more keenly than I would be more LD. Totally fused thinking IMO and therefore the best I can do is ignore it.

mojo> you seem grumpy
H> grunt
mojo> yeah well its Wed, so-- Mr. grumpy, you better get in there and blank my blank..

Perhaps I have managed to thoroughly confuse myself or I'm just in a very different mental state than when I set this bounday but I have very little desire to enforce the boundary in this manner. The quality of our sex has been fine, so it's not a reduction in drive on my part, more like a reduction in my desire to play the role of the HDW. I don't think I'm wrong to go with this feeling either. My H's response to my not pushing the issue was actually positive, even though I reacted in a negative fashion. When I started crying he said "What's wrong? This is a good thing. When have you known me to call myself on this type of thing?" and he attempted to comfort me. This is unusual, new type behavior for him.

He stuck to his part of the agreement for a few weeks. Did you meet him on the things he had requested?

I am on my way to being the perfect wife in every way possible (LOL). (With the possible exception of my tendency to b*tch about my marriage on the internet )

I think he was testing you, and personally I want to give him a high five. Im not being indifferant to your frustration, but when you relate stories about your H, I almost always <chuckle> He is an azz. Lucky you.

You may be right, but this was mitigated by the fact that I was unaware that I was being tested. Kind of like when a kid doesn't eat his peas and you don't even notice because you're involved in a phone conversation while you're scraping the plates and you're happy because he did his chores that morning. Then the kid comes up to you later and says "I feel guilty because I didn't eat my peas at lunch. I just wanted you to know.". My reaction was bad because all I heard was "Your peas are yucky!". I guess the reason that I don't want to enforce the boundary in the manner you suggested is that I believe that ignoring temper tantrums is more productive in my situation at the moment than enforcing rules about eating vegetables or maybe I just don't care if the kid dies of vitamin deprivation anymore since he's not actually a kid and I'm not actually his mother. Minor bursts of tears aside, my dependency on this relationship is truly on the decline.