H made the comment "You aren't much of a counselor." which gave me the opportunity to say in really a very kind manner "I'm not your counselor. I'm your wife."
Do you happen to remember the tv show, "Chico and the Man"? Freddy Prinze played the Puerto Rican auto mechanic to Jack Albertson's Jewish auto shop owner. Sometimes, when the boss would ask Chico to do something particularly unpleasant, he'd reply, "It's not my job, man." Except, of course, Prinze would deadpan it and lay on that great Chicano accent and it came out sounding like, "Ees not my chob, man."
I like that you told him "ees not my chob, man." And I like, especially, that you told him "I would appreciate it if you would do a better job taking care of yourself so that you could do a better job meeting my needs/wants as your wife." This is very schnarchy of you.
Fran is right. Don't help him out of that tree. Don't avoid the evening sales because you fear him starving, or fear his confrontation with you upon your return. He needs you in a lot of different ways, but I think the most important one is what Fran said in her post, "they really need someone who trusts them to climb out of the tree on their own."
Sorry but he has. He steps up to the plate on things that HE wants to do but he reneges on EVERY deal he has ever made with me. Often by the old PA tactic of doing it badly.
I am not saying that he cannot and will not do difficult things or that he cannot be a man, yes he can. But he cannot do anything that I have asked him to do.
Even his committment to never ever leave me again - he just stayed but with bad grace.
I don't want to get all nit picky about this. He and I are doing much better of late. But he does have serious issues about control and at root I think these are down to having an engulfing type 2 mother.
I now feel that I do not have to make deals with him. Deals are a form of control. If you do X I'll do Y. It's like bribing your kids to eat their spinach. What I need to do is leave gaps for him to fill. He can work out on his own that they need filling and I can have a firm belief in his ability to fill them.
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
I'm picking a fight that I want to lose just like I'd be committing a transgression for which I wanted to get "punished" if I was playing "naughty". So I am expecting the man to be as much in touch with his "top"
Ever pick a fight that you wanted to lose? If you havent then youll never understand a girls sex drive. You dont have to understand it.
Just dont lose. It sure is tiresome though. Who wants to beat down the person they care about. And what person in their right mind went into a fight with the intention of not hurting the other one. Every good conqueror thats who. Whatever you wreck you have to fix. Thats expensive and time consuming.
Ok ya'll - this has been a very interesting thread. I must admit that all the Mom talk positively "skeeved" me out. My H had a very neglectful, semi-depressed and negative Mom. His reaction to that seems to be to place me on some kind of pedestal of "ideal Mom" (he hates it when I fall off) but he doesn't tolerate me "mothering" him in any way. That being said, I struggled mightily with being placed in the Mom role by my x (he had a narcisstic Mom and really needed someone to re-Mother him). Being the "super-coper" in a marriage seems to just kill the other person's committment to their own "becoming." OTOH - the "super-coper" gets to avoid their own stuff pretty handily. MJ - this role you play in the marriage is totally counter to your goal of sharing your "essential womaness." Do you journal other than here? This would be a great topic for journaling. Where does the natural nurturing instinct of being a woman start and stop and the over-compensating Mothering begin?
Yes - your contract is perfectly reasonable. However, I would wager that it would make no sense to your H except as a yardstick that he could measure his failure against. Therefore, he either won't do a dang thing or he will rebel against it - "I would except your shoes are ugly".
MJ, you are a very remarkable woman and this latest series of posts resonated with me in a way that many of your others have not. Perhaps it is because I am operating at a very primal level myself (8 weeks until this baby is due, I am the very picture of a fertility symbol). Regardless, I strongly identified with your descriptions of your girlhood sexuality. I was physically a late bloomer (not enough body fat to tip the scales of puberty) but I can hardly remember a time when I didn't mb, search the homes I babysat in for porn etc... I wasn't promiscuous by any stretch but it wasn't because I wasn't feelin' it if you know what I mean.
I guess I can sum up my feelings about your recent posts by saying - be "you".
Though I know we are playing a game here, the impression I got was whoa…. Mojo can really turn up the jets when she catches a whiff of maleness in the air. That sudden jump of assertiveness puts you in the top position very quickly, and if we were to take this game into reality, I would feeling like I have to top your top.
I was thinking about this and although the reason that I threw a "contract" at you was because I remembered that you once posted that you thought arranged marriages might be a good idea and I wanted to josh you out of this theory, I think there is some truth to your theory that there is a certain amount of "self-protection" in my sexual assertiveness. However, it's not that really that I'm using sex to protect myself from intimacy (I really do want the sex too), it's more like I'm sending out my "women" to make a deal for my "girls". What I really should have said in response to your proposal is "I don't know. What do you have to offer a girl?".-LOL.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Your H is SOOOO much like mine. He too has a type 2 mother.
Does your H have an emotionally repressed Type 1 father also?
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No sh!t. Of course he hasn't, he has never had to since the day his mum told him to hang his coat on the hook and he got away with pretending he couldn't. Again my H is exactly the same way he has broken every agreement we have ever made that requires him to step up to the plate in some way.
Yes, it is maddening. As I have posted before if I asked my H to commit to drinking beer and watching football with me every Sunday, he wouldn't keep that deal either. I thoroughly believe that a man shouldn't constantly kowtow to his W if he wants to earn her respect but there is a difference between supplicating and honoring a contract and why should we want to be in a marriage, an institution which is a contract, with men who won't honor contracts? We would have to be idiots or martyrs or quite possibly both.
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I can well imagine Mojo that your have been exactly the same way with your own kids.
Well, I have had to do a bit of the "momma bear who won't catch the fish anymore for the cub" with my Type 5 son but my daughter is a self-sufficient Type 9 like you so it really wasn't necessary.
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So why can't we do it with our H's? Because this kind of manipulative behaviour in an adult is alien to us, and therefore we don't see it for what it is, we kind of believe there really must be something wrong for a grown man to be acting that way. When your H acts like he will starve to death if you don't leave him dinner in a crockpot he is ACTING LIKE A 3 YEAR OLD. Next time your H is stuck up that tree resist the urge to lift him down, maybe even give the tree a bit of a shake (he he he).
Brilliant insight and advice.
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And they can be REALLY convincing. Your H's suicide threats are precisely in this modus operandi.
You know I did have the thought that it was kind of like a kid holding his breath or banging his head against the wall but, like you said, it's difficult to believe this version when you're dealing with an adult. The thing to remember, I'm thinking, is that even when you are dealing with a real child in that sort of situation, the child believes that his feelings are absolutely valid. Adults are just much more convincing. Also, we believe that we shouldn't have to do that sort of mothering for an adult.
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That's his tree. Leave him to climb out of it on his own.
Yeah, but when you leave a stubborn adult in a tree, you might have to walk real far away before they believe that you aren't going to come back and help them.
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p.s. Anytime you want to come and visit the gardens of England let me know we can go round them together and then come back to my place for afternoon tea (or gin whichever )
Sounds great, I'll put it on my schedule for right after my honeymoon with Cobra.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Its not a low point its an opportunity. Mojo: yes they will. My kids give me a medal for it everyday, and I give myself a medal. You get a big red 'F' for being nice though. Im going to buy myself something pretty, and Im Not doing the dishes. Bye.
It's interesting to me that you found my H's remark to be mean. I just thought it was depressing. Also, if I don't do the dishes I'm just punishing myself because they'll just be twice as nasty in the morning. (There's a definite analogy here but I'm not going to go there.)
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'Oh you want me to act like a man.... Um. (head scratch) uh ... but look, I did all that other stuff you wanted... '
Don't confuse supplication with honoring a contract. They are opposites. Supplication can be defined as not honoring a contract that you made with yourself. If I ask my H "Will you have sex with me on Friday?" and he say "Yes.". It's his problem with his manhood if he didn't want to say "Yes". If he doesn't show up on Friday night then it becomes my problem with his manhood.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
I like that you told him "ees not my chob, man." And I like, especially, that you told him "I would appreciate it if you would do a better job taking care of yourself so that you could do a better job meeting my needs/wants as your wife." This is very schnarchy of you.
I thought it was very "feminine" of me. Though I guess it was my attempt to translate Scharch into "girltalk".
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Fran is right. Don't help him out of that tree. Don't avoid the evening sales because you fear him starving, or fear his confrontation with you upon your return. He needs you in a lot of different ways, but I think the most important one is what Fran said in her post, "they really need someone who trusts them to climb out of the tree on their own."
True.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
I now feel that I do not have to make deals with him. Deals are a form of control. If you do X I'll do Y. It's like bribing your kids to eat their spinach. What I need to do is leave gaps for him to fill. He can work out on his own that they need filling and I can have a firm belief in his ability to fill them.
I don't really agree with this. You are doing just what you told me not to do. You can't make a deal with a child but you should be able to make a contract with a man.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Clipped this and moved from HPs thread over to here.
Mo:
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Excellent. Have you been reading some sex manuals that I don't yet have in my library.-LOL.
I don't think so... LOL!!!
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This brought to mind the time that my H told me that I was "blocking his manly desire". I wasn't telling him what to do but I was asking him to tell me what to do. I was actually saying "What do you want me to do now?" in a teasing voice. So maybe I was telling him to tell me? I'm really beginning to doubt my sexual communication skills.
I guess I could see that approach, most especially with your H, as a tad bit aggressive... and for him to respond to you... would require him to be way more vulnerable than I think he is willing to be.
One of the things I have been learning, which has been incredibly difficult for me... is this whole vulnerability stuff. I've been in sitches with my bf where I have felt so humbled and humiliated (not from anything HE does to me, but just in giving up control of my own body to another... whew). And I go to sleep thinking, 'how in the heck am I ever going to be able to look him in the eye come tomorrow?' But then... tomorrow comes, and the emotional closeness I find there is so astounding to me that I get over myself. And I think... 'huh, I must be onto something here.' The more I do it, the more 'humbling' experiences I have, the less afraid I become of them.... for me, I always have to stay just outside my own comfort zone... when I don't... I start to feel pissy and resentful, and the sex isn't so great, at least emotionally.
Being secure sexually doesn't mean that one is secure with vulnerability. I don't see you being vulnerable with your H, but OTOH, I'm not so sure that he'd be comfortable with it, either. Maybe Blackfoot can comment on this.
And obviously, what makes me feel vulnerable, and what would make you feel vulnerable, are probably different things.
