Are women done with men?

[Metalcat]

Many years ago, maybe in the ‘90s, there was some good research on failed female-male relationships and divorce that showed sex, drugs/alcohol, and money problems to be at the heart of more than 90% of the breakups.

I wonder if this has changed.

You could add internet porn to that list now.

Those are also all common manifestations of more foundational problems.

[former player]

Many years ago, maybe in the ‘90s, there was some good research on failed female-male relationships and divorce that showed sex, drugs/alcohol, and money problems to be at the heart of more than 90% of the breakups.

I wonder if this has changed.

You could add internet porn to that list now.

Those are also all common manifestations of more foundational problems.

Internet porn is so ubiquitous to men, and to boys at such a young age, that it has itself become a foundational problem.

[LaineyAZ]

I dunno.  Having a partner who you can work through all of life's problems with rather than trying to go it your own.  Helping someone else to grow as they help you, and working for their success as well as your own.  Sharing in all your wins together.  I'm a pretty average guy and marriage brings so much happiness to my life, it's hard for me to buy the idea that having a happy marriage is super rare.

The stats are pretty clear man.  50% of marriages end in divorce.  Of the 50% that make it, obviously they are not all happy.  Let's be generous and say half of those 'survivor' marriages are actually happy. 

If being happy is the thing we're trying to get, then marriage has a 75% failure rate.  That's actually quite terrible.

And it's not like 2nd marriages fare any better.  Divorce rate of 2nd marriages is over 60%.  And for 3rd marriages, divorce rate is 73%.

I think you're missing at least one important piece from the above.  What percentage of single people are happy?

I have a lot of older women friends, most of whom are either widowed or divorced, all of whom say they are happy with their lives (subject to the usual physical niggles of getting older) and none of whom have any interest in remarrying,

[/b]

This is my experience too.  Although there are still some women in the Boomer generation who feel they're a failure if they're not coupled, most are happy or at least very content in being single in their senior years. I think that says something very powerful.

And to add to Metalcat's point, I wish our society would dial back on romanticizing marriage (and the wedding day, don't get me started!)  and normalize other forms of living together as humans.  Maybe that's too much to ask, especially when raising children takes 18+ years, but with so many unhappy couples something has to change.

[Metalcat]

Many years ago, maybe in the ‘90s, there was some good research on failed female-male relationships and divorce that showed sex, drugs/alcohol, and money problems to be at the heart of more than 90% of the breakups.

I wonder if this has changed.

You could add internet porn to that list now.

Those are also all common manifestations of more foundational problems.

Internet porn is so ubiquitous to men, and to boys at such a young age, that it has itself become a foundational problem.

Absolutely, it's a massive issue that really isn't being addressed in any kind of productive way.

[GuitarStv]

I dunno.  Having a partner who you can work through all of life's problems with rather than trying to go it your own.  Helping someone else to grow as they help you, and working for their success as well as your own.  Sharing in all your wins together.  I'm a pretty average guy and marriage brings so much happiness to my life, it's hard for me to buy the idea that having a happy marriage is super rare.

The stats are pretty clear man.  50% of marriages end in divorce.  Of the 50% that make it, obviously they are not all happy.  Let's be generous and say half of those 'survivor' marriages are actually happy. 

If being happy is the thing we're trying to get, then marriage has a 75% failure rate.  That's actually quite terrible.

And it's not like 2nd marriages fare any better.  Divorce rate of 2nd marriages is over 60%.  And for 3rd marriages, divorce rate is 73%.

I think you're missing at least one important piece from the above.  What percentage of single people are happy?

I have a lot of older women friends, most of whom are either widowed or divorced, all of whom say they are happy with their lives (subject to the usual physical niggles of getting older) and none of whom have any interest in remarrying,

[/b]

This is my experience too.  Although there are still some women in the Boomer generation who feel they're a failure if they're not coupled, most are happy or at least very content in being single in their senior years. I think that says something very powerful.

And to add to Metalcat's point, I wish our society would dial back on romanticizing marriage (and the wedding day, don't get me started!)  and normalize other forms of living together as humans.  Maybe that's too much to ask, especially when raising children takes 18+ years, but with so many unhappy couples something has to change.

The romanticization of the wedding day has always deeply disturbed me.  It's just a day where you have a party.  It's not the most important day of your life.  It feels like sometimes people focus on the importance of this day way more than they do on the whole rest of their marriage, which should go on for a half century or more.

[LaineyAZ]

Yes, the cultural pressure to get married starts early.  The first Disney princess who didn't have a love interest was from the movie "Brave" which was only 11 years ago. 

The Hallmark movie ideal of instant and lasting attraction to a soulmate means we are conditioned to look at marriage with rose-colored glasses and ignore red flags.  No wonder so many people can't choose wisely, in the movies it happens effortlessly.  Years ago there was a book titled "Lies at the Altar" which outlines some of these unspoken expectations partners bring to being married.

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.   

[dividendman]

Many years ago, maybe in the ‘90s, there was some good research on failed female-male relationships and divorce that showed sex, drugs/alcohol, and money problems to be at the heart of more than 90% of the breakups.

I wonder if this has changed.

You could add internet porn to that list now.

Those are also all common manifestations of more foundational problems.

Internet porn is so ubiquitous to men, and to boys at such a young age, that it has itself become a foundational problem.

Just like in the thread Lainey added on to: why are break ups something we want to avoid? Why is keeping people together a virtuous thing? Relationships form, and they dissolve... I don't see a problem. If someone wants to spend all their time watching porn instead of being with their partner, dump em.

[GuitarStv]

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

[Sibley]

This is a classic article.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/she-divorced-me-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink_b_9055288

There's others that are also very good, but in the moment this one came to mind and I could google it.

Except in my case, she was the one the left the dishes by the sink.  And I cleaned them.  I was also the one that cooked the meal and I was also the one that shopped for the food and I was also the one that cleaned out the dishwasher the next day.

I'm speaking about generalities.  There are all sorts of good and bad relationships.  They fail and succeed and coast for many reasons.  What I'm saying may not apply to you and your situation.  If you've done some honest soul searching and this stuff doesn't resonate, great.  It's a general conversation about common patterns, not an evaluation of why ever--or your--relationship failed. 

~~~
I think the article about the glass is interesting.  I think there's a lot of truth there, but to he fair to the men, I do think a partner also needs to flex, and look at the bigger picture (which the writer's wife may well have done).

DH does this thing:  we keep dish towels hung on the handle of the oven.  When I dry my hands on them, I reach over, rub my hands around on the towel, and that's it.  He feels the need to take the towel off the handle.  Okay, fine, though a bit mystifying.  But he dries his hands, then flings the towel into a heap on the counter.

It's annoying.  It means when I reach for the towel with dripping hands, it's not there.  And I'm frequently picking up a crumpled heap of towel and rehanging it.  And it doesn't even need to be removed from its hanging space in the first place.  But if he does pull it off the handle, he could rehang it 6 seconds later when his hands are dry.  But nope: counter pile. 

I have worked not to frame this as disrespect.  And I remind myself that I leave dishes soaking, which irritates him, and it's not disrespect.  My role in the relationship is to rehang soggy kitchen towels, and his is to dump pots and bowls full of murky soak-water.  Neither of us relish these roles, but in a strange way, they are at the heart of our partnership. 

Now, the reframing is pretty easy because he does so many other amazing things, and all of those make it clear he respects me.  So the water glass by the sink, or the unhung towel, doesn't become an avatar for his lack of respect.  It's just a damn wet-towel. 

When there are enough good and great things, the small things don't take on these additional hidden meanings.  It's only when you're already feeling disrespected that you can't look past moist towel-piles and sink glasses, or that those things take on more significance.

No healthy relationship is going to be destroyed by not putting the glass in the dishwasher. A relationship will be destroyed by 1000 cuts, and not putting the glass in the dishwasher is a cut. Your unhung towel is a cut. The dirty laundry on the floor in the vicinity of the laundry basket is a cut. The socks in the living room is a cut. The never closing the closet door is a cut. (I'm pulling examples from recent memory of social media posts I've seen.) And eventually, there are enough cuts that something is the last cut.

The article breaks it down to such a specific and silly example because for some people that's the best way to get them to understand and maybe change. If they don't want to, that's on them.

And yes, women can be just as guilty.

[GuitarStv]

Many years ago, maybe in the ‘90s, there was some good research on failed female-male relationships and divorce that showed sex, drugs/alcohol, and money problems to be at the heart of more than 90% of the breakups.

I wonder if this has changed.

You could add internet porn to that list now.

Those are also all common manifestations of more foundational problems.

Internet porn is so ubiquitous to men, and to boys at such a young age, that it has itself become a foundational problem.

Just like in the thread Lainey added on to: why are break ups something we want to avoid? Why is keeping people together a virtuous thing? Relationships form, and they dissolve... I don't see a problem. If someone wants to spend all their time watching porn instead of being with their partner, dump em.

There's a balance to be had.

Relationships don't dissolve.  They die of neglect, abuse, and lack of communication about important issues/emotions.  My concern with your comments is that they (maybe incorrectly) read to me as kind of supporting hyper-individualism where there's no value placed on a relationship, and it's discarded the moment that it becomes inconvenient.  It's often much easier to end a relationship than to do the (occasionally hard) work necessary to maintain one when things get tough.  But then you miss out on the myriad benefits that come from having a relationship that has stood the test of time and been strengthened by the trials it has come through.

That said, there's nothing wrong with ending a relationship.  Those benefits I was talking about only happen if both people are committed to the relationship.  If someone wants to spend all their time watching porn, dumping them might well be the right choice.  Keeping a relationship isn't a virtuous act - but ending a relationship as soon as things get difficult might lead you to miss out.

[Raenia]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

ETA: The author got so close, but seems to still think there was something else his wife could or should have done to get through to him, other than what she actually did (leaving) that finally did get through to him. Instead of taking responsibility for not listening, even if it didn't always make sense.

[Metalcat]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

And that there is a major problem that people aren't really grasping.

In many, many relationships, one person gets to dictate what feelings are valid and what aren't. I can't tell you how much of my work with couples is to deprogram that one partner doesn't actually get to dictate the other's reality.

[GuitarStv]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

[Sandi_k]

This is my experience too.  Although there are still some women in the Boomer generation who feel they're a failure if they're not coupled, most are happy or at least very content in being single in their senior years. I think that says something very powerful.

And to add to Metalcat's point, I wish our society would dial back on romanticizing marriage (and the wedding day, don't get me started!)  and normalize other forms of living together as humans.  Maybe that's too much to ask, especially when raising children takes 18+ years, but with so many unhappy couples something has to change.

The romanticization of the wedding day has always deeply disturbed me.  It's just a day where you have a party.  It's not the most important day of your life.  It feels like sometimes people focus on the importance of this day way more than they do on the whole rest of their marriage, which should go on for a half century or more.

Ha! When we were planning our wedding many years ago, my brother pushed us to interview a friend of his as our photographer, who did it as a moonlighting gig, but was still very expensive for our modest budget.

In our meet-and-greet, the photog gave the usual spiel about how "at the end of the most important day of your life, all you'll have left is your memories, and the photos; the food is gone, the flowers die, the wedding dress is in the closet. So the pictures are the thing you should spend the most money on - they should be special!"

I quipped that I certainly hoped it was NOT the most important day of our life, as it would all be downhill from there. And (now) DH noted that we believed that in many cases, the cost of the wedding was inversely proportional to the quality of the marriage.

The photographer exclaimed "EXACTLY!"

We left shortly thereafter, and did not hire him. :)

[Metalcat]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

So then what is your understanding of why and how people who claim to love someone deeply engage in this kind of behaviour all the time???

Could it be that humans are complex and a lot of folks are profoundly conditioned to not be very good at doing exactly what you just described???

Again, I come back to the very powerful bias that folks in healthy marriages tend to have in that they think that having a healthy marriage is pretty intuitive. Well, it really isn't for an enormous number of folks out there.

That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Couples counselling wouldn't exist if it was easy as just telling people how to be good partners.

So much of healthy relationships is intuitive to people who have been conditioned effectively to engage in relationships in healthy ways. Healthy dynamics are WILDLY uncomfortable and counterintuitive to folks who have been conditioned differently.

What's really important to grasp is that for A LOT of people, treating their spouse remarkably poorly actually feels like love. That IS them trying to engage in ways that make sense to them, that feel fair, and reasonable.

The average person who is violent towards their partner genuinely feels in the moment like something has been done to justify that. The anxious avoidants feel like their lashing out makes perfect sense. The dismissive avoidants feel like their cruel stonewalling makes perfect sense.

They all think they're doing their very best.

So just because FOR YOU and for a lot of us here, it seems so nakedly obvious to pay attention to a wife who is crying about a glass, there are COUNTLESS men who have been conditioned to react as though that unreasonable emotional warfare on her part. Because he cannot make sense of why she's being emotional, he cannot believe that her reactions are reasonable, and he feels manipulated.

Some people only have this reaction when confronted with intense emotions.

A super fun paradoxical reaction can be that one partner is incredibly loving and caring, but anxiously attached and whenever they are confronted with having done anything wrong, they are so overwhelmed with fear of being left that the first thing their mind does is find a way to deflect the blame. So their absolutely consuming desire to be loved ironically drives them to dismiss anything that feels even remotely like blame.

So if the reason she's upset doesn't make sense to him, his overwhelming self-preservation response, out of fear of losing her, is to discredit the validity of her feelings.

Y'know why???

Because people with unhealthy attachment styles don't so shit that makes any fucking sense to people with healthy attachment styles.

That's kind of how being unhealthy works...

[Ron Scott]

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

A lot of truth in your words…

Love is not something you feel, it’s something you do. In a relationship it’s important to know what your spouse needs and what the relationship needs. Relationships are these precious creations we’re always reinventing. Focus man!

[Just_Me]

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church and we spent several weeks going through marriage prep like this. It forced us to have a lot of conversations that we probably wouldn't have normally had about the things you mentioned like finances, kids, etc.

But the thing I remember mostly were the questions about conflict and how we answered differently. We both saw conflict sort of the same way, but we interpreted the questions completely differently, so we answered differently. After we talked through the differences we realized we were on the same page.

It has stayed with me because we've always committed to coming back to disagreements. Mostly in the sense of let's got back to that point because I want to understand where you're coming from. It taught us to talk rather than fight.

[GuitarStv]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

So then what is your understanding of why and how people who claim to love someone deeply engage in this kind of behaviour all the time???

Could it be that humans are complex and a lot of folks are profoundly conditioned to not be very good at doing exactly what you just described???

Again, I come back to the very powerful bias that folks in healthy marriages tend to have in that they think that having a healthy marriage is pretty intuitive. Well, it really isn't for an enormous number of folks out there.

I don't think that any of this is intuitive at all.  It wasn't for me.  There's a lot of stuff that I've had to slowly learn over time to get to the point where I'd consider my relationship to be a healthy one.  This included a particularly difficult time after the birth of my son where my marriage very nearly fell apart.

People claim all kinds of things without meaning it - love is certainly one of them.  Sure, humans are complex.  Sure, there's conditioning based on past life experiences.  But (while they maybe difficult) these are not insurmountable obstacles for people who really love their spouse.

That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Couples counselling wouldn't exist if it was easy as just telling people how to be good partners.

So much of healthy relationships is intuitive to people who have been conditioned effectively to engage in relationships in healthy ways. Healthy dynamics are WILDLY uncomfortable and counterintuitive to folks who have been conditioned differently.

What's really important to grasp is that for A LOT of people, treating their spouse remarkably poorly actually feels like love. That IS them trying to engage in ways that make sense to them, that feel fair, and reasonable.

Fundamentally, love is about caring for the well-being of another person.  The moment that you are shown that your 'feels like love' actions aren't helping the well-being of the person you purport to love, then you should feel compelled to change your actions.  If you're not, then I'd argue that there's no love at all but something else.

This also wasn't intuitive for me - it's something that I've had to reason out (and occasionally had to have someone take me aside and point out).

The average person who is violent towards their partner genuinely feels in the moment like something has been done to justify that. The anxious avoidants feel like their lashing out makes perfect sense. The dismissive avoidants feel like their cruel stonewalling makes perfect sense.

They all think they're doing their very best.

Yep, I get that nobody wants to be the villain in their own story.  People lie to themselves all the time.  It's a mark of good character to self-reflect, figure out that there's a problem, and work to correct it.  None of this is easy or intuitive - but all of which is necessary.  I don't know how you would handle an inability to do this (guessing this is what your field is all about).  A refusal to do this though is effectively an evil action - there's no other way I see to look at it.

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church and we spent several weeks going through marriage prep like this. It forced us to have a lot of conversations that we probably wouldn't have normally had about the things you mentioned like finances, kids, etc.

But the thing I remember mostly were the questions about conflict and how we answered differently. We both saw conflict sort of the same way, but we interpreted the questions completely differently, so we answered differently. After we talked through the differences we realized we were on the same page.

It has stayed with me because we've always committed to coming back to disagreements. Mostly in the sense of let's got back to that point because I want to understand where you're coming from. It taught us to talk rather than fight.

The talking rather than fighting thing is so important.  My wife and I have disagreements now and again, but we almost never really fight.  After talking things out, there's just no reason to.

[Just_Me]

Because people with unhealthy attachment styles don't so shit that makes any fucking sense to people with healthy attachment styles.

And unfortunately too many people maintain these unhealthy in the name of religious law, for fear of moral or social retribution.

It's especially unfortunate when there are kids involved that have to grow up seeing that thinking it's healthy.

[Villanelle]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

So then what is your understanding of why and how people who claim to love someone deeply engage in this kind of behaviour all the time???

Could it be that humans are complex and a lot of folks are profoundly conditioned to not be very good at doing exactly what you just described???

Again, I come back to the very powerful bias that folks in healthy marriages tend to have in that they think that having a healthy marriage is pretty intuitive. Well, it really isn't for an enormous number of folks out there.

I don't think that any of this is intuitive at all.  It wasn't for me.  There's a lot of stuff that I've had to slowly learn over time to get to the point where I'd consider my relationship to be a healthy one.  This included a particularly difficult time after the birth of my son where my marriage very nearly fell apart.

People claim all kinds of things without meaning it - love is certainly one of them.  Sure, humans are complex.  Sure, there's conditioning based on past life experiences.  But (while they maybe difficult) these are not insurmountable obstacles for people who really love their spouse.

That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Couples counselling wouldn't exist if it was easy as just telling people how to be good partners.

So much of healthy relationships is intuitive to people who have been conditioned effectively to engage in relationships in healthy ways. Healthy dynamics are WILDLY uncomfortable and counterintuitive to folks who have been conditioned differently.

What's really important to grasp is that for A LOT of people, treating their spouse remarkably poorly actually feels like love. That IS them trying to engage in ways that make sense to them, that feel fair, and reasonable.

Fundamentally, love is about caring for the well-being of another person.  The moment that you are shown that your 'feels like love' actions aren't helping the well-being of the person you purport to love, then you should feel compelled to change your actions.  If you're not, then I'd argue that there's no love at all but something else.

This also wasn't intuitive for me - it's something that I've had to reason out (and occasionally had to have someone take me aside and point out).

The average person who is violent towards their partner genuinely feels in the moment like something has been done to justify that. The anxious avoidants feel like their lashing out makes perfect sense. The dismissive avoidants feel like their cruel stonewalling makes perfect sense.

They all think they're doing their very best.

Yep, I get that nobody wants to be the villain in their own story.  People lie to themselves all the time.  It's a mark of good character to self-reflect, figure out that there's a problem, and work to correct it.  None of this is easy or intuitive - but all of which is necessary.  I don't know how you would handle an inability to do this (guessing this is what your field is all about).  A refusal to do this though is effectively an evil action - there's no other way I see to look at it.

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church and we spent several weeks going through marriage prep like this. It forced us to have a lot of conversations that we probably wouldn't have normally had about the things you mentioned like finances, kids, etc.

But the thing I remember mostly were the questions about conflict and how we answered differently. We both saw conflict sort of the same way, but we interpreted the questions completely differently, so we answered differently. After we talked through the differences we realized we were on the same page.

It has stayed with me because we've always committed to coming back to disagreements. Mostly in the sense of let's got back to that point because I want to understand where you're coming from. It taught us to talk rather than fight.

The talking rather than fighting thing is so important.  My wife and I have disagreements now and again, but we almost never really fight.  After talking things out, there's just no reason to.

But this is so subjective.  The guy from the water glass article probably thought he was caring for the well-being of his wife.  He saw her thoughts/feelings as irrational.  And it makes a certain kind of sense that helping someone be more rational--helping them see where and how they are wrong about their interpretation of an event--is caring for them and loving them and helping their well-being.
 

[Kris]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

So then what is your understanding of why and how people who claim to love someone deeply engage in this kind of behaviour all the time???

Could it be that humans are complex and a lot of folks are profoundly conditioned to not be very good at doing exactly what you just described???

Again, I come back to the very powerful bias that folks in healthy marriages tend to have in that they think that having a healthy marriage is pretty intuitive. Well, it really isn't for an enormous number of folks out there.

I don't think that any of this is intuitive at all.  It wasn't for me.  There's a lot of stuff that I've had to slowly learn over time to get to the point where I'd consider my relationship to be a healthy one.  This included a particularly difficult time after the birth of my son where my marriage very nearly fell apart.

People claim all kinds of things without meaning it - love is certainly one of them.  Sure, humans are complex.  Sure, there's conditioning based on past life experiences.  But (while they maybe difficult) these are not insurmountable obstacles for people who really love their spouse.

That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Couples counselling wouldn't exist if it was easy as just telling people how to be good partners.

So much of healthy relationships is intuitive to people who have been conditioned effectively to engage in relationships in healthy ways. Healthy dynamics are WILDLY uncomfortable and counterintuitive to folks who have been conditioned differently.

What's really important to grasp is that for A LOT of people, treating their spouse remarkably poorly actually feels like love. That IS them trying to engage in ways that make sense to them, that feel fair, and reasonable.

Fundamentally, love is about caring for the well-being of another person.  The moment that you are shown that your 'feels like love' actions aren't helping the well-being of the person you purport to love, then you should feel compelled to change your actions.  If you're not, then I'd argue that there's no love at all but something else.

This also wasn't intuitive for me - it's something that I've had to reason out (and occasionally had to have someone take me aside and point out).

The average person who is violent towards their partner genuinely feels in the moment like something has been done to justify that. The anxious avoidants feel like their lashing out makes perfect sense. The dismissive avoidants feel like their cruel stonewalling makes perfect sense.

They all think they're doing their very best.

Yep, I get that nobody wants to be the villain in their own story.  People lie to themselves all the time.  It's a mark of good character to self-reflect, figure out that there's a problem, and work to correct it.  None of this is easy or intuitive - but all of which is necessary.  I don't know how you would handle an inability to do this (guessing this is what your field is all about).  A refusal to do this though is effectively an evil action - there's no other way I see to look at it.

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church and we spent several weeks going through marriage prep like this. It forced us to have a lot of conversations that we probably wouldn't have normally had about the things you mentioned like finances, kids, etc.

But the thing I remember mostly were the questions about conflict and how we answered differently. We both saw conflict sort of the same way, but we interpreted the questions completely differently, so we answered differently. After we talked through the differences we realized we were on the same page.

It has stayed with me because we've always committed to coming back to disagreements. Mostly in the sense of let's got back to that point because I want to understand where you're coming from. It taught us to talk rather than fight.

The talking rather than fighting thing is so important.  My wife and I have disagreements now and again, but we almost never really fight.  After talking things out, there's just no reason to.

But this is so subjective.  The guy from the water glass article probably thought he was caring for the well-being of his wife.  He saw her thoughts/feelings as irrational.  And it makes a certain kind of sense that helping someone be more rational--helping them see where and how they are wrong about their interpretation of an event--is caring for them and loving them and helping their well-being.

Yep, he did. I just read his book a few weeks ago. He thought that he was being loving by trying to help her realize that she was letting herself get way too stressed about small things that really didn't matter. And that it would be way better for her well-being if she would learn to let the small stuff go.

[GuitarStv]

Man, that's fucked up.

[Kris]

Man, that's fucked up.

It is. But I gotta tell you, I think that is a very, very familiar scenario for a whole lot of heterosexual women. It sure is for me.

[Raenia]

Man, that's fucked up.

And yet, that's how many, many people are. Probably more than are healthy, I expect.

[Villanelle]

It's startling to me that someone would say this is "fucked up".  Not because it isn't, but because this is part of the everyday experience of most women in the US (and other places).  We are told to "relax", because being upset isn't "good for us or productive".  We are told to "smile" because being happy, or at least looking happy, is so much better for us.  We are told me are "too emotional" (and isn't that almost exactly what Mr. Water Glass was telling his wife?)   We are told we wouldn't make good executives or leaders because we aren't rational enough.

Like, this is everyday stuff.  And I use "every day" in the most literal sense.  This stuff happens pretty much every day and is part of our daily existence. 

[GuitarStv]

Yeah, I get that it happens to some.  It doesn't change that it's fucked up.  The women in my family have never / would never stand for that kind of treatment.  Like, there's a lot of stuff I've screwed up on in my life, but telling a woman to smile, or that she's being too emotional these aren't things I've ever done.  I've told my wife to relax on occasion (and she has told me the same) because we both have trouble sometimes when dealing with issues with our son, but I think that's quite a different scenario than what you're describing - it's kind of a code word we use to indicate that the non-pissed off person is going to tag in and handle the offensive behaviour before things really blow up.

[Kris]

Yeah, I get that it happens to some.  It doesn't change that it's fucked up.  The women in my family have never / would never stand for that kind of treatment. Like, there's a lot of stuff I've screwed up on in my life, but telling a woman to smile, or that she's being too emotional these aren't things I've ever done.  I've told my wife to relax on occasion (and she has told me the same) because we both have trouble sometimes when dealing with issues with our son, but I think that's quite a different scenario than what you're describing - it's kind of a code word we use to indicate that the non-pissed off person is going to tag in and handle the offensive behaviour before things really blow up.

You seem to be implying that the rest of us are somehow "standing for" this treatment. I'm not sure you have thought through how this may be perceived by those of us reading this comment. Could you define what you mean by "standing for" it?

And how you know that none of them have ever, in fact, "stood for" it?

[Villanelle]

Yeah, I get that it happens to some.  It doesn't change that it's fucked up.  The women in my family have never / would never stand for that kind of treatment.  Like, there's a lot of stuff I've screwed up on in my life, but telling a woman to smile, or that she's being too emotional these aren't things I've ever done.  I've told my wife to relax on occasion (and she has told me the same) because we both have trouble sometimes when dealing with issues with our son, but I think that's quite a different scenario than what you're describing - it's kind of a code word we use to indicate that the non-pissed off person is going to tag in and handle the offensive behaviour before things really blow up.

This made me bristle a bit.  Because "not standing for this kind of treatment" often has pretty undesirable (and sometimes dangerous) consequences.  I'd bet a lot of $ that nearly all women stand for this kind of treatment sometimes.  Maybe because it's easier to just ignore the guy who tells you to smile.  Maybe it's because it's not great for your career if you tell your influential boss that it's not okay for him to call you "emotional" just because you feel strongly about something.  Maybe it's because the guy who has you somewhat cornered in an unsafe environment is likely not to react well if you tell him to shove his suggestion you "relax".

So yeah, women "stand for this", and it's not because they are weak or pathetic or cowardly.  It's because they need their jobs, they don't want to get beaten or raped, they would lose hours of their weeks if they called out every instance.  Or, they are just fucking tired.

Something about "they'd never stand for that" sounds pretty blame-y and judgmental.  I know you didn't mean it that way, but... no. 

(And yes, there is a non-condescending, dismissive way and time when it's fine to tell someone to relax. Context, relationship, tone, and situation all matter, of course.)

[GuitarStv]

Yeah, I get that it happens to some.  It doesn't change that it's fucked up.  The women in my family have never / would never stand for that kind of treatment. Like, there's a lot of stuff I've screwed up on in my life, but telling a woman to smile, or that she's being too emotional these aren't things I've ever done.  I've told my wife to relax on occasion (and she has told me the same) because we both have trouble sometimes when dealing with issues with our son, but I think that's quite a different scenario than what you're describing - it's kind of a code word we use to indicate that the non-pissed off person is going to tag in and handle the offensive behaviour before things really blow up.

You seem to be implying that the rest of us are somehow "standing for" this treatment. I'm not sure you have thought through how this may be perceived by those of us reading this comment. Could you define what you mean by "standing for" it?

That came out wrong I think.  Men in our family didn't use violence or intimidation against women (as seems to be so common elsewhere) at any point that I have ever seen.  That meant that women didn't need to tolerate shit, and tended to put guys in their place sharply (verbally) if a dumbass comment came out.

EDIT - thinking back on things, I believe that this setup came from my grandmothers.  On my mom's side, my grandmother was a nurse who raised two daughters pretty much singlehandedly after my grandfather drank himself to death long before I was born.  She remarried to a really nice guy who was loving and supportive.  On my dad's side, my grandmother raised three kids while running a farmhouse with my grandfather (who although he's not talked about much sounds like he was a bit of an asshole).  Again, this  grandfather well died before I was born and my grandmother worked as a civil servant, putting all three kids through university and eventually remarrying to another pretty great guy.  Both grandmothers were both pretty incredible women in their own way and really demanded respect from those they dealt with.  There has never been any tolerance for men treating women badly in our family, and I think that it stems largely from actions that they took and the way they raised their kids (who became my parents).

[jeninco]

@GuitarStv , I 110% guarantee that even if the women in your family didn't have to deal with this BS in the context of family relationships, they absolutely have to deal with it out in the world. Because I'm an ex-rugby-playing cis rich-looking white woman (read "have all the privilege, and look a little intimidating too") and it's a regular part of my life. This crap happens ALL THE TIME, up to a certain age. Then it just happens sometime!

As @Villanelle and @Kris pointed out, it ranges from standard Bro-isms "you'd be pretty if you smiled more" to actual threatening behavior from men in bars or other places who require placating to try to avoid being assaulted, physically or sexually. And bosses saying sexist shit about being emotional, or irrational, or whatever because you care about something that doesn't even register for them.

So the explanation that that dude is trying to "help out" his partner by saying that her feelings of being disrespected and overlooked are "irrational" because "it's just a glass" is, in my opinion, overly sympathetic. If your goal is to act in a way that's loving and respectful to another person, you have to recognize and honor their autonomy, and what they care about may be different from what you think is "rational".

[SunnyDays]

It's startling to me that someone would say this is "fucked up".  Not because it isn't, but because this is part of the everyday experience of most women in the US (and other places).  We are told to "relax", because being upset isn't "good for us or productive".  We are told to "smile" because being happy, or at least looking happy, is so much better for us.  We are told me are "too emotional" (and isn't that almost exactly what Mr. Water Glass was telling his wife?)   We are told we wouldn't make good executives or leaders because we aren't rational enough.

Like, this is everyday stuff.  And I use "every day" in the most literal sense.  This stuff happens pretty much every day and is part of our daily existence. 

Men may say that they are telling women to smile, relax, etc for the good of the women, but I'd bet a lot of money that they are really saying it for themselves.  So they don't have to be uncomfortable or actually do something about the situation.  Easier to make the women change their behaviour so the men don't feel bad or annoyed than to change their own behaviour that led to the problem in the first place.

[simonsez]

The romanticization of the wedding day has always deeply disturbed me.  It's just a day where you have a party.  It's not the most important day of your life.  It feels like sometimes people focus on the importance of this day way more than they do on the whole rest of their marriage, which should go on for a half century or more.

Why does it disturb you deeply that others place importance on it?  How and why are you so confident that this importance is misplaced as you yourself come from a good marriage with many recognizable benefits?  Do you not understand the connection, symbolism, and nostalgia that can be associated with a wedding day as it pertains to the overarching marriage?  I suppose not based on your words.  It (the wedding day festivities) is not always a good proxy nor is it required for a good marriage but it is possible to have a wedding day coincide with general excellence and enjoyment.

Is it because of typical overconsumption and that many others grift off of wedding days?  Ok, we're Mustachians, we can mitigate a decent amount of that grift by thinking about what is important to us as individuals and then making plans based on that (rather than spending obscene amounts for shit that might not have a good payoff for a particular person and are doing it just because it's socially expected).  For me, it is one of the best days of my life.  Why wouldn't it be?  How else would I want to spend a day in my life other than making it official with my favorite human and partying with the largest collection of friends and family I could ever persuade into being in the same area simultaneously?

We lived in DC at the time but I was married in the Midwest (where my wife and I are both from).  So people came in from all directions.  Friends and family from both coasts, a few from across the pond came, it was fantastic!  Friends that were socially independent made connections that still persist to this day and are now friends independent of my wife and I.  E.g. Some friends from DC I knew indirectly through work met some of my undergrad friends who also happened to live on East Coast and are still great friends today.  It felt special to kick off the "official" part of my relationship and have it be condoned and celebrated by so many loved ones.  Heck, I think back to my wedding day every year when I do my taxes and select the MFJ box.  Boom, social dividend making that day and the journey since then (and also the journey leading up to the wedding day) even sweeter.

The whole week leading up to it and that weekend were very special (hanging out an inordinate amount of time with many out of town guests).  It was all festive and merry the entire week.  Rounds of golf, extended family feasts, playing games and having greats talks into the wee hours - damn, what an excellent week it was!  I'm an extrovert, though.  If I wasn't, maybe the plans would've been drawn up differently (I didn't care too much about the ceremony but my wife did, I would've been fine with signing a piece of paper at courthouse but I did care about the party and overall socializing). 

Also, my wife and I plus some friends and family put work into the event as a labor of love.  E.g. my dad provided his orchids for flowers at the ceremony and reception table arrangements, my FIL had the lighting taken care of from his construction worker days, one of my childhood best friends is a world class opera singer who performed Beatles songs at our ceremony (for free), etc.  There's something about the culmination of a project being executed close to flawlessly that provides satisfaction and relief in addition to enjoyment of the event itself. 

We made more money from wedding envelopes than the wedding and reception cost so it wasn't a financial outlay.  It was 12 years ago and the last time we visited with some of our KC friends at the lakehouse, another social dividend was paid as it came up in conversation about some funny anecdote that we had never heard before related to the reception.  The value keeps going up over time (largely due to representing the marriage as do various trips which also highlight either our marriage or our social bonds with friends and family) based on the way we frame it.  I mean, I don't think I would ever travel or do much for leisure if I couldn't remember it or even be involved with the logistics.  The short-term chemical affects of the day itself wear off immediately but long-term and what events can stand for can be really powerful (both positive and negative).  I can't help but feel good (as some non-zero amount of those same awesome chemicals from my wedding day get re-released in my body in the present day) when someone tells me that the day I married my wife was highly enjoyable for them in some fashion (and I love returning the favor and bestowing kudos to anyone else for a good time that is relevant to chat about be it a wedding day or something completely different).

I love celebrating my wife/our relationship, especially not taking for granted the good times and also enjoy providing a good time for friends and family and that day specifically was an all-timer.  Sure, I hope I'm lucky to have a good marriage for half a century and it takes a ton of active in-the-moment communication and work to stay on the rails but it all traces back to that day (currently taking a Business Analysis grad cert program and they keep stressing traceability!).  What is so disturbing to you about people like me fondly recalling my wedding day?  I don't understand the harm this achieves nor does reminiscing somehow remove responsibility and initiative from the present.  Never once have I used the excuse, "Yeah but we had a great wedding day" to resolve an argument or get out of doing a chore or to simply not be as present as I should be.  Nor will I say that if I'm ever divorced, at least not with any seriousness. 

What day was/is in that ultra top tier of importance for you?  I'm not a parent so I don't have anything child-related to potentially supplant my wedding day.  It certainly wouldn't be anything career or school-related even those journeys have been largely enjoyable overall.  My career and education just pale in comparison in importance to the place my wife has in my life and I can't help but tie it back to our wedding day.  I'm open to change for which day I think back on as the best/most important, though.  If a day gives me such a dose of the feel-good chemicals naturally coursing through my body to produce such euphoria that I am forced to recognize that as my new best/more important day and will pay very rich mental and social dividends for many years to follow - um, okay!  Sign me up!

[Metalcat]

From the article about the water glass:

If he KNEW that ― if he fully understood this secret she has never explained to him in a way that doesn’t make her sound crazy to him (causing him to dismiss it as an inconsequential passing moment of emo-ness), and that this drinking glass situation and all similar arguments will eventually end his marriage, I believe he WOULD rethink which battles he chose to fight, and would be more apt to take action doing things he understands to make his wife feel loved and safe.

I think a lot of times, wives don’t agree with me. They don’t think it’s possible that their husbands don’t know how their actions make her feel because she has told him, sometimes with tears in her eyes, over and over and over and over again how upset it makes her and how much it hurts.

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

So if telling him something, repeatedly, with tears, doesn't work to let him "know" that this is actually important, then what should she do? How does she "make sense" to someone who isn't listening?

I'm with the wives on this one, if the man cares about how his wife "should" feel more than how she actually does feel, isn't that already the end?

Yep.

If you've been told something over and over by your spouse, it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you, if you think it should hurt, or is something that would bug you.  You just change your behaviour because the person you love is telling you that it will make her feel better.

Every person has weird shit that they need that doesn't make sense to an outsider.  In a relationship, you're not an outsider though.  It's part of your job to figure out the weird shit your spouse needs.

So then what is your understanding of why and how people who claim to love someone deeply engage in this kind of behaviour all the time???

Could it be that humans are complex and a lot of folks are profoundly conditioned to not be very good at doing exactly what you just described???

Again, I come back to the very powerful bias that folks in healthy marriages tend to have in that they think that having a healthy marriage is pretty intuitive. Well, it really isn't for an enormous number of folks out there.

I don't think that any of this is intuitive at all.  It wasn't for me.  There's a lot of stuff that I've had to slowly learn over time to get to the point where I'd consider my relationship to be a healthy one.  This included a particularly difficult time after the birth of my son where my marriage very nearly fell apart.

People claim all kinds of things without meaning it - love is certainly one of them.  Sure, humans are complex.  Sure, there's conditioning based on past life experiences.  But (while they maybe difficult) these are not insurmountable obstacles for people who really love their spouse.

That's not an excuse, it's an explanation. Couples counselling wouldn't exist if it was easy as just telling people how to be good partners.

So much of healthy relationships is intuitive to people who have been conditioned effectively to engage in relationships in healthy ways. Healthy dynamics are WILDLY uncomfortable and counterintuitive to folks who have been conditioned differently.

What's really important to grasp is that for A LOT of people, treating their spouse remarkably poorly actually feels like love. That IS them trying to engage in ways that make sense to them, that feel fair, and reasonable.

Fundamentally, love is about caring for the well-being of another person.  The moment that you are shown that your 'feels like love' actions aren't helping the well-being of the person you purport to love, then you should feel compelled to change your actions.  If you're not, then I'd argue that there's no love at all but something else.

This also wasn't intuitive for me - it's something that I've had to reason out (and occasionally had to have someone take me aside and point out).

The average person who is violent towards their partner genuinely feels in the moment like something has been done to justify that. The anxious avoidants feel like their lashing out makes perfect sense. The dismissive avoidants feel like their cruel stonewalling makes perfect sense.

They all think they're doing their very best.

Yep, I get that nobody wants to be the villain in their own story.  People lie to themselves all the time.  It's a mark of good character to self-reflect, figure out that there's a problem, and work to correct it.  None of this is easy or intuitive - but all of which is necessary.  I don't know how you would handle an inability to do this (guessing this is what your field is all about).  A refusal to do this though is effectively an evil action - there's no other way I see to look at it.

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

My wife and I were married in the Catholic Church and we spent several weeks going through marriage prep like this. It forced us to have a lot of conversations that we probably wouldn't have normally had about the things you mentioned like finances, kids, etc.

But the thing I remember mostly were the questions about conflict and how we answered differently. We both saw conflict sort of the same way, but we interpreted the questions completely differently, so we answered differently. After we talked through the differences we realized we were on the same page.

It has stayed with me because we've always committed to coming back to disagreements. Mostly in the sense of let's got back to that point because I want to understand where you're coming from. It taught us to talk rather than fight.

The talking rather than fighting thing is so important.  My wife and I have disagreements now and again, but we almost never really fight.  After talking things out, there's just no reason to.

You're missing a lot of what I'm trying to explain, which is okay, it's not the most intuitive stuff to understand. There's a reason I can charge hundreds of dollars an hour to help people with this and why even then it often is incredibly difficult to actually help them. And these are people who.are highly motivated to improve their communication and connection.

You would probably be pretty horrified by the reality of a lot of marriages out there and just how convinced each person is that they are actually being loving to their partners.

I really cannot overstate how much you are missing about this. I know you tend to dig your heels in when challenged on something that seems obvious to you, but this is interesting, important stuff.

[rocketpj]

The romanticization of the wedding day has always deeply disturbed me.  It's just a day where you have a party.  It's not the most important day of your life.  It feels like sometimes people focus on the importance of this day way more than they do on the whole rest of their marriage, which should go on for a half century or more.

I'd say the same thing about childbirth.  People put a lot of energy into preparing for that moment, then all of a sudden there is a human who needs >20 years of care and feeding.   The day after is a kick in the pants.

[rocketpj]

@rocketpj - Could some of the resentment stem from home cleaning being a chore that neither of you enjoys? I categorize home maintenance jobs in the "it lasts / shows" while cleaning and laundry are just as necessary but in a household with more than one person evidence of the task being recently completed is barely noticeable. In four days there is a lot more laundry, beds are no longer fresh and the high traffic floors have bits along the edges. It is difficult to find any joy in "not clean but not a pigsty."

Of course, nobody enjoys cleaning.  25 years ago I just decided to do half and (importantly) not be measuring relative contributions all the time.  A few bickers (not really reaching the level of 'fight') later my wife was more or less on the same page, but it is a constant conscious effort on everyone's part.  And it doesn't always work.

But drywall is also not fun, in fact I hate it.  A hole in the wall is also ugly.  So we have to communicate.  And most of our cultural messaging around relationships seems to be rooted in 'just knowing' and absurdity.

[LaineyAZ]

The point about the emphasis on The Wedding Day is that too many people forget that after the wedding you now have to manage Married Life. 

A wedding should be a solemn occasion and a joyous celebration but I think, especially in the U.S., the Bridezilla with demands for an expensive gown, multiple pre-wedding celebrations, destination weddings, receptions staged for Instagram and invitations with suggested minimum cash donations have all increased expectations for The Day.  But sadly, that hasn't slowed the divorce rate because there's little to no thought or work put into day-to-day married life.

And I agree that, despite the many problems with the Catholic church, their pre-Cana marriage program is a good step in that direction.  That 8-hour program is now online, not sure if it's only available to Catholics, but would be worth looking at.

[wenchsenior]

The point about the emphasis on The Wedding Day is that too many people forget that after the wedding you now have to manage Married Life. 

A wedding should be a solemn occasion and a joyous celebration but I think, especially in the U.S., the Bridezilla with demands for an expensive gown, multiple pre-wedding celebrations, destination weddings, receptions staged for Instagram and invitations with suggested minimum cash donations have all increased expectations for The Day.  But sadly, that hasn't slowed the divorce rate because there's little to no thought or work put into day-to-day married life.

And I agree that, despite the many problems with the Catholic church, their pre-Cana marriage program is a good step in that direction.  That 8-hour program is now online, not sure if it's only available to Catholics, but would be worth looking at.

Agree.  I had an absolutely lovely wedding day that I look back on extremely fondly, and it certainly marked one of the most important decisions of my life.  But in my long marriage I've had many 'important' days and decisions and moments and conversations all shared with my spouse that I'd certainly put equal weight on, in terms of their value in my life. 

[waltworks]

Based on this thread I'm guessing we'll be seeing a decline in the Mustachian population in the future...

-W

[Villanelle]

Based on this thread I'm guessing we'll be seeing a decline in the Mustachian population in the future...

-W

Maybe yes, maybe no.  On one hand, I think mustachians (of both sexes) are more likely to be self-aware, thoughtful, and conscientious.  They are also used to bucking societal expectations and norms.  I think all of that means maybe they are more likely to be open to finding situations that feel good and equitable for both parties. So they might be more likely to be among those who can work through all this stuff and still find partners who want to be with them and maybe make babies with them.

On the other hand, mustachians are used to bucking societal expectations, so they may be more likely to skip the expectation of marriage and kids. And their self-awareness and thoughtfulness may mean they are more likely to look deeply at a partner and realize that even if they love that person, it won't be a happy partnership due to division of labor issues (or other issues), leading them to leave relationships and not have children. 

Of course, this also supposed that musachians have mustachian offspring, which isn't necessarily the case. 

[Metalcat]

Based on this thread I'm guessing we'll be seeing a decline in the Mustachian population in the future...

-W

Last I checked Mustachianism wasn't primarily propagated by repeoduction...

I've converted quite a hell more folks to this lifestyle than the average breeder has produced loin products.

[YttriumNitrate]

Based on this thread I'm guessing we'll be seeing a decline in the Mustachian population in the future...
-W

There definitely appear to be some similarities to the Shakers.

[GuitarStv]

What day was/is in that ultra top tier of importance for you?

Honestly?  I can't think of a single day that I'd put up on an ultra top tier of importance.  A day is just too short a period to rank up that high.  I've certainly had great seasons and years though.

FWIW, our wedding day was great!  We had family come from all over, everyone had a good time, memories were made.  But it was just a big party.  While I get the symbolism involved, I place reality far above symbolism.  The reality of just being married has many times brought me much more joy than the day we got married.

[Telecaster]

I mean seriously, how many of these movies would be resolved by a 5 minute, frank conversation?? Most of them.

That's why I hate of those movies.  I just keep thinking that all this trauma could be solved by these people simply pulling their heads out of their asses. 

[partgypsy]

Wedding day. Though me (and now ex) had been cohabitating for 5 years at that point and had dated a year before that, I remember being elated, touched and emotional on my wedding day. Making it official DID feel different. So yeah I cried and he got misty. My ex fully expected not to feel any different as he felt it was just a piece of paper and was really doing it for me, but also said it felt qualitatively different. So results may vary. 

[getsorted]

My flip side of the same question is what to tell my 17yo sister who seems, from my perspective, to be making poor relationship choices...

You have to grasp the dating reality for her before you can advise her. Things that seemed really obvious to me were NOT once I started realizing what I was actually dealing with with these young people.

My advice 6 months ago would have been pure trash for a young person. Now I do a ton of boundary work, metrics of mental health, stuff like that.

Late to the party, but-- I'm not Gen Z but I am app dating and it really is a very different paradigm than people realize. There is a great deal of pathologizing of things that earlier daters took for granted (like wanting to get to a point of commitment) or never thought about at all. The coercive therapy-speak is real and it's confusing even if you are a grown woman or man. I dated one guy who consistently insinuated that the only reason I didn't want to engage with his kinks-- which involved violence toward me-- was because I was "traumatized" (by what, I don't know -- he knew very little of my history!). This is a guy who read Dan Savage and went away from it thinking that anybody who didn't want to do the things he wanted to do was withholding something he had a right to. Or there was the friend who consistently painted my desire to get into a monogamous relationship as a product of my oppression and failure to free myself from antiquated ways of thinking, and seemed to believe I should be working on myself in some way that would lead to me being more amenable to doing mushrooms and having threesomes. There is a lot of pressure to move your boundaries around in such a way that you end up being somebody's fuck buddy.

I actually dated a guy with a master's degree in a therapy discipline. At one point I told him that I did feel like our conversations were a little one-sided, and I did wish he would be a little more open in his responses. He told me that I was probably just traumatized by my marriage and maybe I'd never experienced real listening before. (This is particularly funny to me because my immediate thought was, "Um, I talk to women all the time. I know how it feels to be listened to?!").

I am not done with men, but I have to say that even among my age peers who are similarly educated and in a similar earning bracket, I've seen an awful lot of marriages end where the woman has read at least a dozen books on how to have a good relationship, and the man will not read even one, even if the marriage counselor asks him to. What's the point of being in a relationship with someone who doesn't even want to be good at relating? 

[Just Joe]

And to add to Metalcat's point, I wish our society would dial back on romanticizing marriage (and the wedding day, don't get me started!)  and normalize other forms of living together as humans.  Maybe that's too much to ask, especially when raising children takes 18+ years, but with so many unhappy couples something has to change.

Listened to my Boomer parents lament that my nephew might be living with his fiancee in his apartment until they marry in a few months. Rent on two apartments is expensive.

Couldn't believe how old fashioned that sounded to me until I realized how complete their little cultural bubble is. DW and I more or less did the same thing back in the day. And our eldest is deeply involved with their SO and spending the night there. They spend the night here together too.

My boomer parents might just fall over if they knew the truth. 

[Just Joe]

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

We got the Southern Baptist version though we were not SB but we were married in that building where our relatives attended. I thought the counseling session was worthwhile too. Also entertaining later when the same pastor was nailed for various legal problems inside and outside the church.

[Metalcat]

My flip side of the same question is what to tell my 17yo sister who seems, from my perspective, to be making poor relationship choices...

You have to grasp the dating reality for her before you can advise her. Things that seemed really obvious to me were NOT once I started realizing what I was actually dealing with with these young people.

My advice 6 months ago would have been pure trash for a young person. Now I do a ton of boundary work, metrics of mental health, stuff like that.

Late to the party, but-- I'm not Gen Z but I am app dating and it really is a very different paradigm than people realize. There is a great deal of pathologizing of things that earlier daters took for granted (like wanting to get to a point of commitment) or never thought about at all. The coercive therapy-speak is real and it's confusing even if you are a grown woman or man. I dated one guy who consistently insinuated that the only reason I didn't want to engage with his kinks-- which involved violence toward me-- was because I was "traumatized" (by what, I don't know -- he knew very little of my history!). This is a guy who read Dan Savage and went away from it thinking that anybody who didn't want to do the things he wanted to do was withholding something he had a right to. Or there was the friend who consistently painted my desire to get into a monogamous relationship as a product of my oppression and failure to free myself from antiquated ways of thinking, and seemed to believe I should be working on myself in some way that would lead to me being more amenable to doing mushrooms and having threesomes. There is a lot of pressure to move your boundaries around in such a way that you end up being somebody's fuck buddy.

I actually dated a guy with a master's degree in a therapy discipline. At one point I told him that I did feel like our conversations were a little one-sided, and I did wish he would be a little more open in his responses. He told me that I was probably just traumatized by my marriage and maybe I'd never experienced real listening before. (This is particularly funny to me because my immediate thought was, "Um, I talk to women all the time. I know how it feels to be listened to?!").

I am not done with men, but I have to say that even among my age peers who are similarly educated and in a similar earning bracket, I've seen an awful lot of marriages end where the woman has read at least a dozen books on how to have a good relationship, and the man will not read even one, even if the marriage counselor asks him to. What's the point of being in a relationship with someone who doesn't even want to be good at relating?

Yes, this is so spot on. The use of therapy concepts to be coercive and challenge boundaries is rampant, and profoundly disturbing.

I've been reading for many weeks about exactly this in the world of ethical non monogamy, where it's not actually ethical if there's coercive manipulation being used to push other people's boundaries into accepting it.

[Ron Scott]

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

We got the Southern Baptist version though we were not SB but we were married in that building where our relatives attended. I thought the counseling session was worthwhile too. Also entertaining later when the same pastor was nailed for various legal problems inside and outside the church.

Strongly agree here!

Just exploring your own personal expectations, being honest with yourself, and sharing your expectations with your partner in an honest and open discussion, can be invaluable.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people criticize their spouse because they couldn’t be “trained” (there’s a WTF for you)  or for not meeting what are obviously just expectations. That baggage has to be laid on the table and left at the door.

[Metalcat]

Geez, the more we discuss this the more I think that a marriage license should only be issued after some mandatory counseling sessions.

My wife's family is Catholic, so we were married in a Catholic church.  To do that, we had to go to mandatory Catholic marriage counseling.  It was pretty comprehensive.  A chunk of it was useless twaddle (they advocate pull n'pray for birth control), but a fair amount of it was useful relationship discussion about kids, money, family, splitting house work, etc.  Overall, I thought it was worth the time and seemed like a pretty good idea.

We got the Southern Baptist version though we were not SB but we were married in that building where our relatives attended. I thought the counseling session was worthwhile too. Also entertaining later when the same pastor was nailed for various legal problems inside and outside the church.

Strongly agree here!

Just exploring your own personal expectations, being honest with yourself, and sharing your expectations with your partner in an honest and open discussion, can be invaluable.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people criticize their spouse because they couldn’t be “trained” (there’s a WTF for you)  or for not meeting what are obviously just expectations. That baggage has to be laid on the table and left at the door.

As someone who does couples counselling, I agree with this up to the bolded statement.

It's easy for people in good relationships to generalize their experience to others. From all accounts, you've had a long, healthy relationship, and that's great.

But a lot of folks bring emotional injuries to their marriages that can't be left at the door. My couples counselling area of expertise primarily involves couples where one or both have serious health issues, often a history of trauma.

Loving someone with that kind of history means accepting them with their baggage and working actively with them to adapt and heal.

Also, the "training" comment can be incredibly toxic, but can also be horrifically accurate. There overwhelming examples of women literally having to train their adult male partners how to adult.

Again, by all accounts, that's not you. From what you've said, you've had a really marvelous, healthy, respectful marriage for a long time. And based on how you talk about things, I assume you've been self-sufficient for a very long time. That's awesome.

Um...a lot of folks aren't. Particularly a hell of a lot of women feel like their husbands are an additional child to care for.

Now, should these women be agreeing to marry adults who behave like children with weaponized incompetence?? No, they shouldn't. But they've been so conditioned to accommodate and provide care without question that they don't question these dynamics and then end up miserable.

I 1000% agree with you that communication and clear expectations is crucial, but you're presupposing that people come to relationships with those skills.

I can tell you that they DO NOT.

I've spoken to couples who have been married for decades who it's like pulling teeth to even get them to be aware of their own needs, much less be able to express them clearly.

Again, it's easy for intelligent, mentally healthy folks to walk around and think that what needs to be done to thrive is just obvious, common sense. But unfortunately, we live in a world where being really well adjusted just isn't the norm.