I had lost the only other adult I shared daily life with. While things had improved at home in so many ways over the years, the list of emotional comforts I still longed for in a husband remained absent.
Allowing himself to get close to someone wasn’t a way of life that my husband entertained. He avoided communication. He’d go immediately quiet when things needed to be discussed and resolved. And he would ignore when I was upset, as if any problem would go away or resolve itself eventually without his input.
When I think about our years together, at best, my husband and I were like two co-sleepers in the night and two superficially pleasant acquaintances in the day. We loved our children deeply together, took care of them well together, educated them together, and pitched in with all the family and household duties together. At worst, we would bicker about those superficialities when he would comment on minutiae and I would get frustrated. Sometimes I held it in, sometimes I voiced it. But when someone comments on minutiae all the time, it doesn’t matter how many times you hold it in if the other times you voice your frustration. It can get overwhelming for the responder and come to seem normal for the little observers learning how conversation works. The latter was one of the most worrisome aspects of all for me to ponder.
What do you do when huge aspects of marital life like chemistry, connection, desire, and communication are missing? I could either endure the best I could, give in to my frustrations and argue all the time, go numb and avoid him, or dissolve our family structure and divorce.
I had determined from the start that I wouldn’t do the latter. I was still hopeful that things would continue to shift over time. We had experienced some quick, monumental changes, and I wasn’t even naively banking on more of those. I had seen how my husband had gradually become more emotionally concerned about making intentional efforts to make things better. Often on the nights I’d bring something up, he wouldn’t know what to say. He would turn over silently in bed, fall asleep, and I would go to sleep crying. The next day he would do something that showed me he was trying, either by adding more touch in daily life, or asking me about me, or figuring out a way we could spend time together. I’m not a high maintenance girl. Especially after years of neglect. Do one little loving thing and it fills my emotional tank for a week. Over time I finally had to consider accepting the idea that it is near-impossible for him to be loving in ways that are easy for other people. Somehow he could feel empathy while watching an emotional movie about strangers, but it took massive effort for him to go below the surface in his own life.
But could I be okay living out the rest of our lives that way?
For over a decade, I didn’t allow myself to consider the idea of divorce. It was not an option. I would not give in to despair; I instead clung to the hope that time, no matter how slow, would gradually repair what needed fixing and he would eventually develop into the outwardly loving person I imagined him capable of being. That doesn’t mean I glossed over the ugly stuff. For someone like me who needs daily conflict resolution in order to move on, I brought up my woes quite often in the beginning. Actually, I’d hold onto them all day and do my best to be the most cheerful mom I could be until I saw my husband again late in the evening. But by then, he needed some down time from working and I would be emotionally and physically exhausted from parenting all day (a good kind of exhausted). I know he always put his all into what he did, and I always did my best to be the most present, loving, teaching, adventurous, supportive mom that I could be. I had learned from many tries that bringing up my sadness at night would rarely result in any kind of resolution. I had always hoped that he would curtail his continuous clinical comments on superficialities, or open up his day to spend a little time with me, or at least throw in a few kisses or love pats as we passed each other in the kitchen. But he just didn’t, so as much as I needed to talk about it almost every night, I’d let it go and go to sleep, often with tears flowing down on my pillow.
We’d wake up and the whole cycle would repeat itself. I didn’t want to deal with things during the day in front of our little boys, and I kept learning that things rarely got resolved at night. I remember one afternoon early on when our first child was about two years old. The three of us ended up at the front doorway and my husband was commenting on how we needed to watch out, we might leave a mark on the wall while we were taking off our shoes. I lost it. I was so dang sick of being monitored for any potential minute threat of uncleanliness. And by this time, I was as careful as someone could be. You mean after a few years he still didn’t trust that I’d follow all the rules well, even though my actions from the start proved my competence? I finally aired my frustrations. In the presence of our little, unsuspecting sweetie. I slapped my hands all over the wall and raised my voice, threatening to paint it all kinds of colors while he was at work, perhaps even with nail polish. He was quietly furious and I suspect he worried I might be serious. A few days later, when I wouldn’t allow our toddler to do something he wanted to do, he went over to the wall and slapped it with his hands in defiance, copying his momma’s example. Great.
After that, I was unsure how to resolve our stuff. I knew I couldn’t hold it in for long periods of time, and resolutions weren’t reached at night. I finally decided I would take a path most people would probably advise against, but it was the only solution I could see: I would have to resolve things as they came up during the day, in the presence of our children, because we had a small house and didn’t have anywhere else to go to talk. If I didn’t, I’d explode. And if I avoided doing it, our children would still grow up feeling the silent elephant in the room. This would be their life too, and even though I didn’t want them to watch and be affected by continual discussions, they would have to eventually deal with their father’s ways as well. And—this is a big and—I felt I was going to end up being a doormat if I continued to allow extreme behavior to persist. I had no intention of becoming something I had never in my life been before as a result of someone’s negative issues dominating our home. If our kids had to grow up hearing me resist negativity, then that would just have to be.
Resisting negativity unfortunately leads to more negativity, and I didn’t want our kids getting a different message, that their parents just bicker all the time. There have been times I’ve picked my battles well and times we’ve just plain sounded like bickerers, I’m sure. It’s always easier to talk about someone else’s issues. But at this point, I must make myself vulnerable too because being with someone who doesn’t want to communicate about anything deeper than superficialities—someone who would rather spend a lifetime passively nagging me day in and day out, every single day, year after year, rather than actively loving me—has caused things in me that didn’t used to be there. When frustration builds, even in a flexible, easy-going person, it boils over eventually. Over the years, though I’ve kept it at bay most of the time, I’ve unleashed my anger and I’ve yelled at my husband. Sometimes in front of the kids. Because of this, our kids have watched anger in action. They’ve watched me scream. They’ve watched me cry, sometimes convulsively. They’ve watched emotions I never saw when I was growing up. They’ve watched emotions I never had my whole life until marrying this person.
Lacking self-control in life’s ordinary trials wasn’t an issue for me before marriage. My fear was that our children would grow up seeing me fail sometimes, not realizing that the trials I was reacting to were not ordinary. They didn’t know of the endurance I was maintaining over the years. They were unaware of how much patience I had to have, sometimes for days or weeks or months, before losing it here and there. They saw the handful of times I just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stuff it all down. This is the ultimate irony: that I, a person who never in my life had anger, sadness, or frustration issues, have at times unsuccessfully coped with those emotions that have messed with me every day. One of my biggest prayers is that my kids never pass those qualities down to their progeny (along with the prayer that my children both find wonderful lifetime spouses who mutually love and support each other). The idea that generations of people who come after me may carry on a few traits not because of my husband, but because of how I couldn’t hold in the way he treated me at times is a sadness to me. I wouldn’t want my kids to learn how to bicker, or yell, or cry convulsively from anyone, but especially not me. It’s just one of those “life’s-not-fair” things.
On a ludicrous note, would staying with my husband present another irony—enduring his anxieties for decades until he finally changed and enjoyed being together, only to soon have to take care of his every need in old age, even changing his didies? That could cause some hefty resentment.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
