Corri, finances & respect were never an issue in our relationship, so we didn't have to establish boundaries in regards to money or respect.
NOP's issue was anger and when Michelle pointed out to him that he needed to get rid of it, he did. So, if there is a comparison it would be NOP's anger toward me to HD's financial responsibilities to his wife.
"In your face" denotes anger and agression to me, so that doesn't ring true to our situation. What he did do is make it very clear that this issue was not going to go away. We dealt with it almost *daily*.
Once NOP dealt with his anger, it threw our relationship out of the balance it had been in. I couldn't keep excusing/blaming the state of our relationship on NOP's anger toward me - that particular issue had been diffused.
Oddly enough, I began to have an issue with anger. It's damn difficult to not notice that the dynamics of the relationship have taken a detectably different turn. It made *my* contributions to the problems more obvious. Once that occurred, it started a positive feedback loop. One person is enough to unbalance the status quo. The other spouse will start to respond/fight and leave or start to respond/fight and work on the problems.
Once both spouses acknowedge that there are indeed problems, once each spouse identifies what those issues are, then it's just a matter of cleanup.
