We were 13 years in, I'd done so much work trying to support him and work with him. To improve my communication and boundaries.
And how did he ultimately respond? "You aren't the person I married." He as proud of not changing at all, and mad at me for being different. Over a decade of living together and multiple children, and the ONE thing he was proud of was acting exactly the same as he had while single!
The only useful part was that it confirmed we were NOT compatible.
Men actually DO want their wives to change. They want her to do more for him, for his family, for their children and pets. My husband was upset that I couldn't be in 2 places at once.
And I bet most women would love it if their husbands actually kept up his pre-marriage level of effort in the relationship. He never made fun of me before we got married, or blamed me for all his problems.
It's not actually about if people change. It's about *how*.
And, there are bare minimum changes that should be expected for parenthood, regardless of gender.
I view that phrase as another way we gaslight women.
I would have been quite happy to continue to be married to the man I married. He did half the cooking, treated me with respect, picked up after himself, was funny, didn’t call me names, didn’t hit me or strangle me, wasn’t a drink, and liked to have conversations rather than just lecture me on his version of truth.
I was very much not ok with the abusive man he became after locked me down.
That has not been my lived experience. No sooner had the ink on our marriage certificate dried and my spouse was a red flag porcupine. I believed in marriage for life and commitment to working together on solutions. He has done nothing but create chaos and avoid and manipulate. I have done everything I can think of to shift the situation, finally realizing that I should not be the only responsible adult and he has to be committed too.
Marriage as a covenant sets women up for abuse. If it’s just a contract, it’s not much better as it still allows for abuse until one gets fed up and leaves. I am certainly interested in learning more about true partnerships and marriages like Dawn’s.
NEVER join your finances. Do NOT give up your career. The shame of being reduced to child-like status is crushing. It makes leaving and divorcing very hard.
Yup totally agree with all the comments here that disagree with that quote I shared from Terry Real. Was just trying to affirm what Meadow originally posted (a bit tongue in cheek) but definitely agree that men do change (for the worse) after getting married. Ultimately women are trying to get change from men for the better and it sadly rarely ever happens. 😔
I think a LOT of us have gotten to a point where we've "graduated" out of the relationships men offer. Sorry, I am actually too Good At Communication to spend my off-work time trying to decipher some dude who is apparently allergic to nouns (or whatever).
An example from my professional (I am a family law attorney) life:
A couple weeks ago, I went with my man client to a hearing on Temporary Custody and child support. The mom's attorney came into our little conference room, and made an offer about custody and visitation. My dude wanted to discuss it with me, do the other attorney left. What followed was 30 minutes of nonsense. The first thing my client said was "ok but if I do the thing she says, I won't be able to do that other thing? Or like are they equal? How am I supposed to do both things?" Friends, I had NO IDEA what he was asking. I told him so, and he just kept repeating vague hypothetical questions without ever letting me know what "the thing" means to him in the several contexts where he said that phrase. Eventually, I actually said to him, "dude I am BEGGING you to Use Nouns. I cannot help you if you won't tell me in words WHAT The Thing is."
And he was... So confused. Like dude is 38 years old and nobody ever told him that you have to use nouns to identify subjects and objects. And it is absolutely no wonder his ex cannot talk to him. Because he just says the same absolute nothingburger sentences over and over, as if the problem was that I "missed" what he said. No, bruh, you are NOT SAYING ANYTHING.
I was there with him for 2+ hours, and I am certain I could've learned and accomplished a splenectomy more easily than figuring out what he wanted.
This isn't even uncommon. Dudes apparently do not know that they are bad at Communicating because they think that "just saying any old words" is the same thing as "carefully explaining/naming an idea." And I absolutely cannot deal with that unless I am also charging hundreds of dollars an hour.
Omg. Thank you for identifying this issue! I have experienced this with two separate particularly problematic partners. Both of them were upset about something in the relationship, exhibiting protest behaviour and I was asking what they were upset about. And all I got was word salad. I think I was a tactic to put me in the position of trying to please and appease them, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen they could not use words to communicate. It’s like they had developed these really powerful manipulation defences that probably worked in every relationship to get them what they wanted but at the core of it was a profound inability to recognize their feelings and communicate it. I was not willing to do the emotional labour of figuring it out for them, so putting the accountability back on them really highlighted their skills gap. There wasn’t a noun or subject that I could even pinpoint in the word salad, it was crazy making.
Yep. Dudes get exactly ONE "I hate when you do That." If they are unable to define "That" (or it is something fucking dumb like "sigh" or "look other places" of "have X expression"), I am not engaging about it. They'll just have to die hating it. I'm not playing a whole years-long game of Catchphrase trying to guess what (probably imaginary) "Thing" Some Dude wants from me.
We were talking about something (not worth remembering what), and he made some Entirely Unrelated and nonsense claim. And the next thing he said was "I hate when you do that. It's rude."
So I asked him what "That" is.
And his answer was "you make a face like I just said the dumbest shit you've ever heard. You need to stop."
And friends, I was Not Having It that day. I had a LIST, y'all.
I was all like "Ok. No. And let me tell you why--
1. You're trying to change the subject from (whatever) to Why My Face Is Disrespectful. I'm not willing to entertain a side-argument at the moment.
2. You're projecting. You don't write or decide MY thoughts. I'm not a character in the Story of Dan. Knock that the fuck off. I won't have it and I'm not gonna sit here and defend shit you decided I feel.
3. If you're so worried that I might think you said a dumb thing, I advise you to Think Before Reacting Like a Third Grader. If you think something you said is fucking dumb, it probably is. Stop saying dumb shit, and you won't have to worry about me "thinking it's dumb."
4. I can watch either my mouth or my face. I've chosen, out of respect for regular social norms, to not say out loud that what you said is fucking dumb. If you'd rather I interrupt you to tell you in words that you are being stupid as hell, I would actually be glad to.
5. This is MY FUCKIN HOME. I shouldn't have to tell a man in his 40s that you aren't in charge of anything in my home, including my alleged face, but here we are. You're leaving."
That did NOT go how he thought it would and the mantrum of stompy feet and Big Feelings about getting his stuff and exiting my home was honestly gorgeous.
Which is why I don’t tolerate this bullshit anymore. If the men I date are capable of putting executive level presentations together, why can they not express their themselves?
Especially when they have an empathetic and attuned listener trying to understand why they are saying. If they can’t take it away and come back with at least a general “I’m feeling something, I don’t know what it is but I need to do some thinking about it to get more clear” or “ I’m not sure what is going on but can we talk it through together to identify it?”. I am not engaging, I swear it’s an exhaustion tactic.
Yeah I used heaps of different “coaching” resources when I was dating, trying to figure it all out. Looked at myself from different angles, trying to improve on all fronts to be the “best version of myself”. And after a while (quite a while) I realised:
(a) I was fucking tired/ borderline burnt out; and
(b) I could be literally the most perfect woman in the world, and it would not matter, would not change the number of male peers who were interested in, available for, *and capable of* creating a loving, fair, supportive, equitable, relationship.
So I stopped focusing on (or even thinking much about) dating and relationships, and my mental health improved markedly. I’ll never go back.
The combination of ignorance and entitlement will destroy a women’s self esteem and peace of mind in a relationship. Misogyny is about not seeing your partner as a human being who has limits to what they can achieve. It is about a set list of requirements that the man wants before he will even do the bare minimum of reciprocal care. I think he views women in terms of what they can do for him practically, financially and emotionally and to bolster his ego. Any women is an option to him so if the current one is not performing he will start to weaponise her desire for communication and care against her. He gets all the justification he needs from our culture.
His ignorance means that he has no idea about child development or the challenges that women face daily. Instead he will weaponise her failures against her. Child not sleeping? This must be because his partner is a bad mother. Women not making him feel good? This must be because she is selfish and incapable. And so on.
I guess I’d be dead wrong if I said men, men are the problem in and with most heterosexual relationships. We just keep glossing over the evidence based reality of that fact since like 3000 B.C.
Recently, I read a post that said, ‘Men will abuse women who will do anything for them.’
The problem with this is, it is always women yelling from the mountain tops they will do anything for said, man. They will do anything to keep their man, make their man happy, spoil their man…blah, blah blah.. like,
Fuck that, no!
I never and I mean never read men saying. I will do absolutely anything for a woman unless it’s a sexual innuendo or sexually exploiting and explicit.
Yes, this!
We were 13 years in, I'd done so much work trying to support him and work with him. To improve my communication and boundaries.
And how did he ultimately respond? "You aren't the person I married." He as proud of not changing at all, and mad at me for being different. Over a decade of living together and multiple children, and the ONE thing he was proud of was acting exactly the same as he had while single!
The only useful part was that it confirmed we were NOT compatible.
“Men marry their wives hoping they’ll never change. They do. Women marry hoping their husbands will change. They don’t.”
Men actually DO want their wives to change. They want her to do more for him, for his family, for their children and pets. My husband was upset that I couldn't be in 2 places at once.
And I bet most women would love it if their husbands actually kept up his pre-marriage level of effort in the relationship. He never made fun of me before we got married, or blamed me for all his problems.
It's not actually about if people change. It's about *how*.
And, there are bare minimum changes that should be expected for parenthood, regardless of gender.
I disagree.
I view that phrase as another way we gaslight women.
I would have been quite happy to continue to be married to the man I married. He did half the cooking, treated me with respect, picked up after himself, was funny, didn’t call me names, didn’t hit me or strangle me, wasn’t a drink, and liked to have conversations rather than just lecture me on his version of truth.
I was very much not ok with the abusive man he became after locked me down.
That has not been my lived experience. No sooner had the ink on our marriage certificate dried and my spouse was a red flag porcupine. I believed in marriage for life and commitment to working together on solutions. He has done nothing but create chaos and avoid and manipulate. I have done everything I can think of to shift the situation, finally realizing that I should not be the only responsible adult and he has to be committed too.
Marriage as a covenant sets women up for abuse. If it’s just a contract, it’s not much better as it still allows for abuse until one gets fed up and leaves. I am certainly interested in learning more about true partnerships and marriages like Dawn’s.
NEVER join your finances. Do NOT give up your career. The shame of being reduced to child-like status is crushing. It makes leaving and divorcing very hard.
Yup totally agree with all the comments here that disagree with that quote I shared from Terry Real. Was just trying to affirm what Meadow originally posted (a bit tongue in cheek) but definitely agree that men do change (for the worse) after getting married. Ultimately women are trying to get change from men for the better and it sadly rarely ever happens. 😔
I think a LOT of us have gotten to a point where we've "graduated" out of the relationships men offer. Sorry, I am actually too Good At Communication to spend my off-work time trying to decipher some dude who is apparently allergic to nouns (or whatever).
An example from my professional (I am a family law attorney) life:
A couple weeks ago, I went with my man client to a hearing on Temporary Custody and child support. The mom's attorney came into our little conference room, and made an offer about custody and visitation. My dude wanted to discuss it with me, do the other attorney left. What followed was 30 minutes of nonsense. The first thing my client said was "ok but if I do the thing she says, I won't be able to do that other thing? Or like are they equal? How am I supposed to do both things?" Friends, I had NO IDEA what he was asking. I told him so, and he just kept repeating vague hypothetical questions without ever letting me know what "the thing" means to him in the several contexts where he said that phrase. Eventually, I actually said to him, "dude I am BEGGING you to Use Nouns. I cannot help you if you won't tell me in words WHAT The Thing is."
And he was... So confused. Like dude is 38 years old and nobody ever told him that you have to use nouns to identify subjects and objects. And it is absolutely no wonder his ex cannot talk to him. Because he just says the same absolute nothingburger sentences over and over, as if the problem was that I "missed" what he said. No, bruh, you are NOT SAYING ANYTHING.
I was there with him for 2+ hours, and I am certain I could've learned and accomplished a splenectomy more easily than figuring out what he wanted.
This isn't even uncommon. Dudes apparently do not know that they are bad at Communicating because they think that "just saying any old words" is the same thing as "carefully explaining/naming an idea." And I absolutely cannot deal with that unless I am also charging hundreds of dollars an hour.
Omg. Thank you for identifying this issue! I have experienced this with two separate particularly problematic partners. Both of them were upset about something in the relationship, exhibiting protest behaviour and I was asking what they were upset about. And all I got was word salad. I think I was a tactic to put me in the position of trying to please and appease them, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen they could not use words to communicate. It’s like they had developed these really powerful manipulation defences that probably worked in every relationship to get them what they wanted but at the core of it was a profound inability to recognize their feelings and communicate it. I was not willing to do the emotional labour of figuring it out for them, so putting the accountability back on them really highlighted their skills gap. There wasn’t a noun or subject that I could even pinpoint in the word salad, it was crazy making.
Yep. Dudes get exactly ONE "I hate when you do That." If they are unable to define "That" (or it is something fucking dumb like "sigh" or "look other places" of "have X expression"), I am not engaging about it. They'll just have to die hating it. I'm not playing a whole years-long game of Catchphrase trying to guess what (probably imaginary) "Thing" Some Dude wants from me.
Like my last ex.
We were talking about something (not worth remembering what), and he made some Entirely Unrelated and nonsense claim. And the next thing he said was "I hate when you do that. It's rude."
So I asked him what "That" is.
And his answer was "you make a face like I just said the dumbest shit you've ever heard. You need to stop."
And friends, I was Not Having It that day. I had a LIST, y'all.
I was all like "Ok. No. And let me tell you why--
1. You're trying to change the subject from (whatever) to Why My Face Is Disrespectful. I'm not willing to entertain a side-argument at the moment.
2. You're projecting. You don't write or decide MY thoughts. I'm not a character in the Story of Dan. Knock that the fuck off. I won't have it and I'm not gonna sit here and defend shit you decided I feel.
3. If you're so worried that I might think you said a dumb thing, I advise you to Think Before Reacting Like a Third Grader. If you think something you said is fucking dumb, it probably is. Stop saying dumb shit, and you won't have to worry about me "thinking it's dumb."
4. I can watch either my mouth or my face. I've chosen, out of respect for regular social norms, to not say out loud that what you said is fucking dumb. If you'd rather I interrupt you to tell you in words that you are being stupid as hell, I would actually be glad to.
5. This is MY FUCKIN HOME. I shouldn't have to tell a man in his 40s that you aren't in charge of anything in my home, including my alleged face, but here we are. You're leaving."
That did NOT go how he thought it would and the mantrum of stompy feet and Big Feelings about getting his stuff and exiting my home was honestly gorgeous.
Man played stupid games with an attorney and won stupid prizes 😂😂😂
I love this! So logical and laid out so well.
I see the PowerPoint in my mind!
Which is why I don’t tolerate this bullshit anymore. If the men I date are capable of putting executive level presentations together, why can they not express their themselves?
Especially when they have an empathetic and attuned listener trying to understand why they are saying. If they can’t take it away and come back with at least a general “I’m feeling something, I don’t know what it is but I need to do some thinking about it to get more clear” or “ I’m not sure what is going on but can we talk it through together to identify it?”. I am not engaging, I swear it’s an exhaustion tactic.
Years long game of catch phrase 🤣🤣🤣
I suspect that they know what they want and they also know they are being unreasonable. Clarity is not in their best interests.
Yes, team Graduate here!
Yeah I used heaps of different “coaching” resources when I was dating, trying to figure it all out. Looked at myself from different angles, trying to improve on all fronts to be the “best version of myself”. And after a while (quite a while) I realised:
(a) I was fucking tired/ borderline burnt out; and
(b) I could be literally the most perfect woman in the world, and it would not matter, would not change the number of male peers who were interested in, available for, *and capable of* creating a loving, fair, supportive, equitable, relationship.
So I stopped focusing on (or even thinking much about) dating and relationships, and my mental health improved markedly. I’ll never go back.
Thanks for educating us Zawn!
The combination of ignorance and entitlement will destroy a women’s self esteem and peace of mind in a relationship. Misogyny is about not seeing your partner as a human being who has limits to what they can achieve. It is about a set list of requirements that the man wants before he will even do the bare minimum of reciprocal care. I think he views women in terms of what they can do for him practically, financially and emotionally and to bolster his ego. Any women is an option to him so if the current one is not performing he will start to weaponise her desire for communication and care against her. He gets all the justification he needs from our culture.
His ignorance means that he has no idea about child development or the challenges that women face daily. Instead he will weaponise her failures against her. Child not sleeping? This must be because his partner is a bad mother. Women not making him feel good? This must be because she is selfish and incapable. And so on.
THIS ☝🏻- so well articulated
I guess I’d be dead wrong if I said men, men are the problem in and with most heterosexual relationships. We just keep glossing over the evidence based reality of that fact since like 3000 B.C.
Recently, I read a post that said, ‘Men will abuse women who will do anything for them.’
The problem with this is, it is always women yelling from the mountain tops they will do anything for said, man. They will do anything to keep their man, make their man happy, spoil their man…blah, blah blah.. like,
Fuck that, no!
I never and I mean never read men saying. I will do absolutely anything for a woman unless it’s a sexual innuendo or sexually exploiting and explicit.