Your advice is excellent and hope it reaches that woman. I was in an abusive relationship, and I’m now in the middle of a custody battle of my baby girl. I was having a hard moment today, but reading your response re-validates that I made the right choice and lifted me up. Thank you.
💯 Always prioritize your own peace & happiness, because no one else will. Especially not a man. Thank you (always) for your excellent advice, for calling a spade a spade, and for giving a voice to our collective experience.
“I wish to talk everything through, but my husband is a man who finds talking difficult and resorts to the silence of stone.”
I wish I had learned about this as a teenager. I’ve read no less than a thousand accounts of marriage exactly like this: wife wants to fix it, husband has checked out, refuses to speak to her, completely withdraws emotion, affection, attention from the relationship. I was taught that love and willingness to stay would be enough but the reality is that those traits are a slave mindset taught specifically to girls so we will self police our own imprisonment. We run around like headless chickens trying to save a relationship that we are essentially in with ourselves, while the man enjoys the social status of having bagged a female and does what he wants. It’s a scam.
I stayed for years in a marriage in which my husband, who qualifies in the world as a decent guy, felt it was fine not to resolve or repair arguments, defined to our marriage counsellor (that I insisted on seeing, of course, to no avail) that my request for emotional connection was some "vague thing that keeps saying she wants", etc. I ignored a host of red flags early in our relationship because my mother and her mother before her married men with difficult family backgrounds and then felt honour bound to "take care of them". I am now happily divorcing this man, as cooperatively as possible and wish I had done so years ago, not because I am angry with him (although sometimes I am) but because I wish I had known back then that I DESERVED BETTER.
My son and daughter are teens and I am the primary parent (they are 70% of the time or more each month and I am delighted with that). I LOVE my life now, even when it is challenging, because I am not experiencing the constant disappointment of a disconnected relationship. My mission is to ensure my children both understand that if they CHOOSE to be in relationship with a partner (and this is only ONE life choice of many), they must love and care for themselves and their partner equally, and treat their partner as they wish to be treated. And if they feel disconnection or discord in the relationship and their partner is not interested in addressing it or doesn't acknowledge it at all, that is more than enough to decide the relationship is over, not that they need to try harder or learn to live with less.
I believed for years that my leaving would hurt my children and stayed, feeling lonely and diminished. And now I see that was JUST ANOTHER STORY that I was told by my parents, my ex-husband and so many others to keep me in that powerless position. This all stops with me.
Your advice is excellent and hope it reaches that woman. I was in an abusive relationship, and I’m now in the middle of a custody battle of my baby girl. I was having a hard moment today, but reading your response re-validates that I made the right choice and lifted me up. Thank you.
💯 Always prioritize your own peace & happiness, because no one else will. Especially not a man. Thank you (always) for your excellent advice, for calling a spade a spade, and for giving a voice to our collective experience.
“I wish to talk everything through, but my husband is a man who finds talking difficult and resorts to the silence of stone.”
I wish I had learned about this as a teenager. I’ve read no less than a thousand accounts of marriage exactly like this: wife wants to fix it, husband has checked out, refuses to speak to her, completely withdraws emotion, affection, attention from the relationship. I was taught that love and willingness to stay would be enough but the reality is that those traits are a slave mindset taught specifically to girls so we will self police our own imprisonment. We run around like headless chickens trying to save a relationship that we are essentially in with ourselves, while the man enjoys the social status of having bagged a female and does what he wants. It’s a scam.
I stayed for years in a marriage in which my husband, who qualifies in the world as a decent guy, felt it was fine not to resolve or repair arguments, defined to our marriage counsellor (that I insisted on seeing, of course, to no avail) that my request for emotional connection was some "vague thing that keeps saying she wants", etc. I ignored a host of red flags early in our relationship because my mother and her mother before her married men with difficult family backgrounds and then felt honour bound to "take care of them". I am now happily divorcing this man, as cooperatively as possible and wish I had done so years ago, not because I am angry with him (although sometimes I am) but because I wish I had known back then that I DESERVED BETTER.
My son and daughter are teens and I am the primary parent (they are 70% of the time or more each month and I am delighted with that). I LOVE my life now, even when it is challenging, because I am not experiencing the constant disappointment of a disconnected relationship. My mission is to ensure my children both understand that if they CHOOSE to be in relationship with a partner (and this is only ONE life choice of many), they must love and care for themselves and their partner equally, and treat their partner as they wish to be treated. And if they feel disconnection or discord in the relationship and their partner is not interested in addressing it or doesn't acknowledge it at all, that is more than enough to decide the relationship is over, not that they need to try harder or learn to live with less.
I believed for years that my leaving would hurt my children and stayed, feeling lonely and diminished. And now I see that was JUST ANOTHER STORY that I was told by my parents, my ex-husband and so many others to keep me in that powerless position. This all stops with me.