Is the opposite of contempt kindness? It seems to me that mutual respect and kindness are really critical to successful marriages. Kindness to me ties into really being able to communicate and listen well and see another person’s side of things. And I don’t buy that the success lies mostly with the husband. That seems on the surface to be some sort of paternalistic model of if the guy just steps up and acts right the little wife will be happy. I think true partnerships make for strong marriages.
Interestingly of the couples that I know personally who have divorced where the husband had an affair and left for a younger woman, none of the wives were overweight or had let themselves go. They all were lovely women who were aging gracefully and took care of themselves and were blindsided by their husband’s infidelity.
I think there is a fine line to be drawn between not nitpicking and criticizing every little annoyance vs. tolerating something long term that grows and becomes a deal breaker. In at least 2 of the cases I know of where the husbands left abruptly and had affairs I think they were probably tamping things down long term and the wives were unaware that the guys were unhappy. From the outside looking in though they acted like jerks to their wives and families and all have permanently damaged and/or destroyed their relationships with their children. That’s very hard for me to understand, I can see growing apart from someone in a marriage and wanting to end it but I don’t understand people who treat their children so badly.
I think saying that 90% of the issues with marriages boil down to men is a bit simplistic (and not having read the book, I will admit this is just based on what I have seen and learned). The issue of contempt is a huge one, and I think with many men (again, just based on the men I know, grown up around, etc) they often do show contempt even when they may not mean it. I have a good friend whose behavior towards his wife reminds me a lot of the way I grew up in my family, where putdowns and the like were considered ‘good fun’, and I think a lot of men grow up learning similar behavior (no, that doesn’t mean women can’t have sharp tongues or show contempt, one of the worst marriages I ever saw was a woman who defined a shrew, and a husband who was one of the nicest, sweetest guys you would ever want to meet, when they finally got divorced (she filed for divorce, and went around telling everyone he was abusive, disrespected her, etc, trying to get sympathy, funny thing, absolutely no one believed her, several wives in our circle told her guy married this amazing woman after her, he got the woman he deserved).
In any event, a lot of men have grown up with not learning how and when to fight the battles (and no, I am no saint, I can say things quickly I regret, though thank God thanks to therapy I also learned just how messed up my own family was and didn’t pull the put down crap with my wife and kid). One of the biggest things that can be hard to learn is something little league coaches and bosses should learn, to take a step out of the moment when something happens that irritates you, take the time to cool down and then if it still bothers you, then address it. The other thing is the old compliment sandwich, putting an issue between two compliments, it works.
One of the biggest things I think that makes a marriage work is feeling safe with each other, comfortable, that no matter what you have to talk about you can talk to the other person and know you can talk about it and not face a storm. That goes along with contempt and the other things I have, but it is also about having the other person’s back as well. It isn’t easy, and to be honest my wife has told me she feels like I am her safety net, she can talk about anything and that she knows I will not cause a dumpster fire over it, but in many ways I don’t have that with her entirely, because I know she has emotional mines from a lot of the things that happened to her that would blow up if I tried talking about them…and that isn’t entirely healthy, but it also is a reality that dealing with an emotional storm (and I am not talking minor irritation or even anger, I am talking full scale, irrational freak out) also triggers things in me I would rather not face.
The other thing seems so obvious, that kind of goes along with this, it is the assumptions we make about the other person, assuming they know what we want, knowing how we feel, and those things are major problems, because the other person is not a mind reader. I don’t know how many times my wife has said something like 'you know I don’t like that" and I looked at her and said “no, I don’t, you never told me that, you assumed I knew”). A corralary to this is letting go of old wounds, often they fester, until they blow up, then the person will tell you “I really hate that, you remember X when you did Y? I still hate that you did that”.
The other big breakup point is sex and I think over time that does a number on people, there are a variety of reasons why, knew marriages that broke up because the wife had notions of sex as a duty, others that broke up because her drive surged as his waned, it is a major one and one that people still have a hard time talking about.
This has been an interesting thread. It has made me think about friends who divorced and why and about my own marriage and when it felt fragile and why.
Our marriage was tough when the kids first came and when my in laws were alive. We struggled with the change in roles when the kids came. We both had big careers. I opted to stay home with the kids at least in the beginning. I loved being with the kids and thought I did a better job caring for them than any one we could hire. But I missed paid work and felt the loss in power in the relationship (see other thread!). H didn’t help and I felt very isolated and overworked. Part of what restored the balance was when H got a life threatening illness and I had to do everything for a while. It showed both of us how important I was.
My MIL felt like she needed a say in every part of our lives and my H wouldn’t stop her. He would ignore her and then she would target me. I had to be tough with her. Luckily we moved an ocean away. After she died, everyone came forward and talked about how difficult she was. I felt vindicated. Where were all these people when she was alive? I felt alone in handling her.
Interesting about contempt. I remember during our rough times that’s how I felt.
Among the divorced couples I know, except in one case, it was the wives who ended the marriage and I am not aware of any infidelity. The exception was a husband who left his wife because he couldn’t deal with the chaos of three children under six. He moved out the day after a family vacation to Disney. He was an only child. His parents provided all kinds of support to their former DIL and grandchildren. She remarried a man with a couple of kids of his own, a few years later. They divorced after all the kids left for college. She told me she should never have remarried but she thought having a boyfriend stay over was a bad role model for the kids, and she needed to be home with them, not out in a hotel, or his place. She was a really excellent step mother. Then her Ex came back around desperate to get back together. She let him wine and dine and entertain her, but no way was she ever letting him move back in. I admire how she held it all together for her kids under the circumstances.
I learned this from my dad, who could be controlling, manipulative and insulting under the guise of “humor.” Then he would get super-offended if you didn’t respond to the “joke” they way he wanted and you would end up apologizing to him just to keep the peace. It wasn’t until after he died that I recognized this pattern and stopped it. My H and I are much better friends now.
And regarding love languages - the dominant one in my H’s family of origin is work. It doesn’t matter how affectionate or compatible you are, or how much fun you have together, it’s all about how hard you work. My BIL once even said the most romantic sight in the world was a woman pushing a lawn mower. This took a lot of adjustment too, but things improved once my H realized that things like paying bills, etc., counted as “work.”
I didn’t appreciate my father enough while he was alive. One of the things he did when we were kids was to enforce the house rule that the kids had to treat Mom with respect. Not that she didn’t enforce that rule, but if he heard us speak disrespectfully to her, it was a Very Big Deal. Not something that we’d do without thinking through the consequences. I learned the importance of that from hearing tales my DH told about his childhood, where that rule was not enforced, and FIL was one of the prime offenders. Not abuse, but not always respect. I was truly shocked, and lost respect for FIL because of it.
Having each other’s back, and knowing someone has your back, are pretty important in a relationship. I suspect my dad had to enforce that rule in his own family, which could be a little judgy, to put it mildly.
In the marriages that I have seen break up, one or both partners will bad-mouth the other, to their face or behind their back. Maybe that is the “contempt” part. When I hear that, I start the divorce countdown.
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One of my friends from HS (male) recently separated from his wife. Unfortunately he regaled me with the details -- he claims it was because she didn't want much sex anymore, while he did.
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I really didn’t need to know that.
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Lol…ick!! You can’t help but assume that he immediately began sleeping around.
There was an earlier mention of Viagara. I’ve read that V has caused some divorces because the sexual appetite of a couple becomes toooo unbalanced. When a 50+ year old woman is suddenly living with a 20 year old libido, it would cause some annoyances on both sides.
I felt like I did a lot to help out my H while we were married, but he didn’t have my back, particularly with his own father, who frequently was rude to me and who has made clear that he thinks he and his wife (H’s mom) should be much higher priorities to H than me and our daughters.
^^^That’s interesting. For me, my sons’ significant others should be more important to them than I am.
Yep. What was even more ironic was if that was done to them, if someone did a put down joke or they felt slighted, it would be the end of the world, they would be furious that when they did it to someone else, would be considered “a joke”. In my own marriage one of the biggest lessons I had to learn was the boundary between my family of origin and my own family, and in many marriages that is a problem, while there are a lot of wonderful parents and families who understand when someone gets married that is now their primary focus and the rest have to take a back seat to it, but there are a lot of families due to family dynamics, culture and religious belief that see when a kid gets married as that being an extension of the ‘family’ as a whole, and it leads to all kinds of conflict, because they basically expect no boundaries when it comes to them and if there are, they unleash the hell hounds.
I have to admit getting back to the put downs in my family thank God both for my wife and my instincts and also our therapist. Growing up I played an instrument, had some talent, but i never practiced because I was too self concious, because my delightful family thought it was funny to make fun of the inevitable slips and bloops and whatnot. It wasn’t until I had my son who has turned into a high level music student that I realized what those ‘jokes’ did to me, what that meant, and seeing the obverse, when we would never even think of doing that to him and how far he has come, made me realize just how stupid and screwed up my family was…and why a wife or husband would walk away from that. To a lot of people that would be ‘hah hah that is family’, but family of origins are often some of the most toxic things in our own relationships. If you subscribe to Harville Hendrix’s Imago theory, we choose people to love who let us recreate our family of origin to work out the problems, and while I don’t necessarily think it applies as a magic be all, I think there is something to it.
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felt like I did a lot to help out my H while we were married, but he didn't have my back, particularly with his own father, who frequently was rude to me and who has made clear that he thinks he and his wife (H's mom) should be much higher priorities to H than me and our daughters. <<<
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We’ve seen this a lot here on CC. Folks upset that their spouses didn’t defend them when the in-laws crossed boundaries, had unreasonable demands, or were rude.
Not sure if spouses don’t defend because they were trained not to “talk back” to their parents? Surely that feeling shouldn’t exist as adults. Or, maybe some spouses just want to stay on parents’ “good side” and don’t want to become a target of their inappropriate behaviors/demands.
@momof2collegekids:
Like many things, it is complicated (and I am talking from bitter experience, and it went both ways in our relationship), it is very easy to think that shouldn’t exist in an adult, but what that doesn’t take into account is the way many people are raised, where kids are emotionally undercut by their parents or are raised to believe that blood is thicker than water, in the idea of making them obediant and compliant, and that doesn’t go away easily. being raised by parents where the punishment often didnt’ fit the crime and where often any kind of pushing back was met with anger and rage (especially with my dad with his POS family), it doesn’t go away when you magically become an adult, and those wounds run deep, take it from me, and it isn’t just abusive families where this is true, and it goes beyond the parents as well, all the ‘blood is thicker than water’ nonsense, or what is instilled in kids by certain sectors of the religious community, that no matter what your parents do they are your parents and therefore are above normal consideration , or ‘you owe your parents’ crap. It is hard to describe, the people who as adult who understand those boundaries and that their spouse is and should be above their own parents, likely grew up with parents who themselves properly handled their own parents, but I suspect if you look around closely at the people you know, you will find the same dynamics in generation after generation.
And cultural. Some cultures assume in laws play a bigger role than others.
With my H, he was the only child of refugee parents and even though he claims they didn’t talk about their childhoods, I think he felt a heavy burden to “make it right,” to bend over backwards to help them. His dad was a gem, his mom a PITA. If we had stayed in the same town as them, our marriage would not have survived.
I’m surprised that this didn’t come up until page 16 of this thread. Superficial as it may be, I think this is a factor in many of these mid-life divorces; or at least it’s a factor in the infidelity that ultimately leads to the divorce.
By the way, when I see a middle-aged guy in a new sportscar, my thought is, “Well, that’s better than having an affair to deal with his mid-life crisis.”
At one point in our marriage, H was getting the full court press from his mom. Help out your siblings more, financially. Not so subtle hints that the house wasn’t clean enough, the laundry not pressed and folded as she would have done it in her time, and noting I was not too keen to be cooking and hosting.
A lot of this was the combo prize of cultural AND generational differences.
I could not understand why H would not nip it in the bud and get his mom to zip it. It seems he has a LOT of trouble dealing with conflict. He gets very agitated and wants that feeling to go away. It’s one thing to have to fire an employee at work (done, probably never going to see you again, it’s business), and a whole other matter to steer and navigate an impending conflict between the two women who matter most to him (not counting the kids who were wee at the time).
Naturally, the “easiest” solution, to him, was to try to convince me to “try harder”, “ignore her”, “she’s only here for a short visit”, “let’s just make her happy” anything quick he could say to try to make the problem go away so he wouldn’t have to feel the stress of conflict. Instead it had the effect that he agreed with her!
Some book, can’t remember the name now, something the therapist recommended, was the importance of the husband communicating that the wife and his kids come first. It didn’t have to be heavy handed and unkind; but subtle things work well and go a long way to set boundaries and keep the peace.
When my ex and I started dating, he was 30 and I was 23. He wanted us to start living together almost immediately, and I agreed to do so. He never told his parents we lived together before we got married, so I wondered what they thought when they arrived at our apartment on the morning of the wedding. This reticence was concerning to me at the time, and in retrospect is part of a long pattern in ex’s family of not talking about issues and ex avoiding conflict with his dad, at all costs.
I’ve wanted to divorce for years but my kids begged me not to. But I’ve recently taken steps to go back to school for a year to get new credentials and then leave at the end of 2018. The clincher was a job assignment for my home care job. I spent seven hours with an elderly couple watching the wife living in fear of upsetting her husband. I saw my future and decided I can not do this to myself. I need to get out at almost 60 while there is still a chance for a good life.
Very similar to my sister. She has been married to a mentally ill man (undiagnosed bipolar). He is hateful and makes her life miserable. She does not have the job skills to support herself. So she has decided to go to school. She is 48 y/o and has not had any schooling beyond high school
She is now taking prerequisites for RN school making straight As. I am sure she will get accepted into the local ADN program. I am so proud of her.
((((HUGS)))) @KKmama
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The clincher was a job assignment for my home care job. I spent seven hours with an elderly couple watching the wife living in fear of upsetting her husband. I
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Oh wow…very sad.
Makes you wonder what happens when mean-hubby becomes too weak to be a bully…payback can be a %!+&#. I’m not saying that she would be abusive in return, but boy, the temptation to not be very attentive or helpful sure would be strong.
I recently learned that my widowed aunt used to be frequently physically abused by her husband. Shocking to learn this. We saw them somewhat frequently and never heard him even raise his voice to her or saw any bruises…he must have hit her where clothing would cover. Thankfully, he died about 20 years ago while she was still young enough to enjoy life (and their huge assets). Their children now absolutely despise his memory…they’re the ones who told us. It was especially shocking because another aunt would VERY frequently visit them for multi-night visits. I guess he managed to behave when an outsider was in their home.
I only have one close friend who divorced in mid-life. It was initiated by her ex-H and it hit her out of the blue. They had been going to counseling for a long time but she assumed he was committed to it, as she was. He just said, “I don’t feel like doing this anymore”, and left.
It turns out that he had latent narcissistic personality traits that she hadn’t recognized for years. He became famous and they became stronger and he just left. She felt abandoned and hasn’t really recovered even though it’s been several years.
One main reason they were in counseling was that he never backed her up, not with his mother and not with their son. The son ended up blaming the mother for the split and usually will not contact her or allow her to contact him. He was in high school when they split and he’s a lot like his Dad. I can’t imagine going on with all that pain and rejection. She has health issues and had been unemployed for a few years to deal with the S, evening home schooling for a while. Now, she has trouble landing a full time job and is very grateful for the ACA.