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[–] jackfraser ago 

Rough times dude.

The two things I try to remember to keep me sane in my own relationship, which has its problems, are:

  1. Your woman is not really an adult. She is merely an overgrown teenager. Even after becoming a mom, she is still not really an adult so much as a teenager “playing house”. Do not think of her as someone who can be held accountable to adult standards of behaviour. Emotionally acting out, gaslighting, being petty, revenge ploys and grudges, this is all par for the course for most people in modern long term hetero relationships. Our wives didn’t change, compared to generations prior, but they simply have no incentive to restrain behaviour that previously they know would have resulted in some form of pushback. This no longer being the case, women act the same way fatherless children do: pushing boundaries here and there, using drama and in-the-moment chaos to get what they want because the alternative is usually too time consuming and draining to get into.

Since your woman is just an overgrown teenager, you need to know that subconsciously she is always seeking the authority figure, and wants you to find a way to be that while also not falling into the poisoned well of demonized figures from the past. In other words, she wants you to be as authoritative in her life as the bad husbands of a hundred years ago were while being 100% convinced you’re nothing like that. Amused confidence and agree-and-amplify are the best techniques toward portraying this image.

OP, in your next long term relationship, you gotta set that tone from the start.

  1. Your wife is also a garden. If you’ve spent time gardening you know it takes a continual touch, it takes nurture, it takes not ignoring problems and letting them grow. You have to address things. Your reward is a pretty and enjoyable thing which improves your life, something your friends can admire when you have them over to the house, something that provides you with an emotionally centering experience when you need it. Neglected or ignored or punished, like a rose bush, she will get ugly and wither and be more thorn than flower.

Somewhere between these two views on women lies the way that will give you the sanity you need to step back and deal with them as they are, not as how they have been portrayed to you. You know deep down they’re not the same as men, that you cannot expect the same reasoning process or the same conclusions given the same fundamentals. Instead, you need to learn how they really approach things - with consensus, optics, etc as primary concerns - and take advantage of that.

This would all be easier, of course, if you started with a wife that shared your ideological precepts. Unfortunately, we have gone from being a society that literally had tremendous structures just to produce well-raised women like that (churches, etc) to a society that raises women to be the opposite of that on purpose.