When I didn’t experience love in all the usual ways, my husband’s never-ending stream of passive tedium forced me into a daily life of controlling my own emotions so they wouldn’t get the better of me. Coping with his “stuff ” became the story of my home life with him. If I were graded, it wouldn’t be a black-and-white kind of thing like an A or an F. It would be more of a rainbowy illustration showing various levels of self-control, from calm blues and greens and removed whites to sorrowful blacks and fiery oranges. Yet in all those emotions, I kept so much below the surface. I dealt with most of my emotions internally. I worked them out the best I could. I awoke each morning with hope for a new reality because I’m an ever-hopeful idealist.
Nevertheless, the paradoxes we lived with were constant, and the irony that defined him was something I couldn’t wrap my head around. Here’s what I mean.
A Solo Married Man
I’ve asked my husband many times why he married me. He’s always gone quiet. I think he liked the idea of a wife and family, even though I don’t think he ever intended to do anything other than continue his own solo life, at least for as long as possible. It was impossible to pull him away from anything in his routine, especially in the morning. Nothing was more important to him than his daily triathlon. It was almost unheard of for him to give it up. Not for an event, not for a phone call with a dear relative, not to volunteer for something, and certainly not for me. Spontaneity and flexibility were so far from him that he didn’t even know what to do in the tiny instances that life demanded them of him. He would happily forego trips or seemingly fun activities in order to keep with his own schedule.
Comforted by Rigidity
Fear of making bad choices seemed almost entirely responsible for the routines my husband clinged to. He wanted to make good choices with every moment and every task at hand. He used to say things that inferred that he couldn’t understand why everyone wouldn’t make choices like his. Ironically, the choices he made in order to do everything right left out all the bigger, more important things in life that are much more meaningful. He loves to exercise out in nature; that is his passion. Being in the same, rigid routine every single day in which every moment was pre-decided long ago ensured for him that he wouldn’t ever get off-track in his exercising or eating. It also meant he wouldn’t be spending time with other human beings, developing lifelong relationships that fill the deep places of the soul.
His Boundaries Are Paramount, While Mine Don’t Exist
From the moment we married, he was hyper-aware of every tiny aspect of his spatial and temporal world, adamant that I prioritize all of his idiosyncrasies with immediacy. It was mind-numbingly frustrating for me to stomach the fact that at the same time, he was either completely oblivious to or entirely dismissive of the needs of anyone else. Especially mine. Ironically, if I were to have approached him with the same habits and vocal needs he demanded of me, he wouldn’t have tolerated them for a second.
In those first few years, my husband barely allowed a minute or two of his time to be spent with me. He had things he wanted to do. He had things he wanted to say. He wouldn’t allow love, enjoyment, or laughter to take up the precious time he needed to discuss the tiny scuff on the back of the driver’s seat of the car, or the rare time that I forgot to lock the front door when I left for a walk. Everything he wanted to do was a necessity, so he would do it. Everything he wanted to say was a necessity, so he would fill all the airspace we had with it. He never made time or space for joy or happiness—the real necessities.
Distantly Empathetic
My husband didn’t seem to notice the gaping maw of neglect he was causing, yet sometimes when I’d cry and heave about it, he’d burst into tears too. He’d comfort me like he never would in regular life. He seemed to have all the inner tools to listen and care, and show it. He deeply hurt for me. I didn’t cry and heave often, just when it built up over several months or a year. After these times, I realized that when it was over, everything returned to how it had been, except with ever-so-slight improvement in some area of care on his part. I didn’t want to slip into bad habits, crying more just to receive his attentiveness. I began to bring my woes to him less often. I didn’t want to enjoy his loving embraces and feel his empathetic tears falling on my shoulders only in times of deep sorrow.
My husband taps into empathy when others hurt. He always mentions when someone is getting teary-eyed in a movie (as obvious as it is to the rest of us) by saying, “Look, they’re getting emotional.” It happens every time. He will often get emotional too. He would cry while watching inspirational stories on SC Featured on ESPN, and he’d make sure to show me the stories too. He’d cry at the movies. He’d tell me the horrific stories of riders who crashed in the Tour de France, and tear up while watching feature stories about them. The guy had no problem feeling. No problem crying. No problem noticing when others were hurt. As long as he was removed as an observer, a bystander. He didn’t seem to notice when he was the cause of it every day unless I took him aside and poured out my grief. Then he’d let it go, sometimes deciding he couldn’t change, sometimes trying to change and forgetting over the weeks. But sometimes, very infrequently but remarkably, after I’d pointed something out, he’d come back from bike rides and bawl about how his treatment of me made him feel. There was even a time that he felt so sickened by it that he said some awful things about what he deserved out there on the road. Bright moments in his self-realization made me hold on, made me know his heart was in there.
Constant Talk About Nothing
Not only did my husband talk about every tiny thing that dismayed him, he simply talked. All the time. He’d start talking before he was even in the same room, he’d talk the entire time we were in each other’s presence, and he’d leave the room talking. Never (that’s not hyperbole) did he read his audience (me) or connect in some way so that we were actually interacting. I could be standing by the sloshing washer and the droning dryer and he’d be saying something to me from another room. I could be all wet and soapy washing a large casserole pan at the sink and he’d talk to me through the closed sliding glass door, motioning me to come open it right away. I could even be going to the bathroom and he’d walk right in saying his thoughts. He was the king of delayed gratification whenever it came to putting things off that were enjoyable, yet his verbal impatience was overwhelming.
Every moment we were near each other, he would talk about every last detail about what was going on in his day. Not any deep thoughts, not any fascinating interactions with other people. It was always the superficialities—the slight differences between shoe brands he was trying, the expiration dates on grocery items and how they should be ordered in the cabinet and the fridge, the temperature changes predicted for the coming week and what that meant for his outdoor excursions, etc. Usually what he was doing or looking at in the moment was of all importance. When he did bring up something from a past situation or interaction, it was usually regarding something peripheral to the meat of the situation.
Listening to my husband’s constant and predictable urgency to verbalize every detail surrounding him, you would think life was only happening to him. It was as though he didn’t realize that a whole life was happening in me too, or anyone else for that matter. The few moments I was able to get a word in edgewise, he either had no attention span or he immediately had to get back to his schedule. He’d start walking away, then he’d launch into another ten-minute monologue. It could be about his dilemma in choosing salt with iodine or salt without. Or a description of his exact technique of watering plants.
The few times I participated in conversation and he stayed in the room, he would routinely interrupt me, no matter what. When I asked why he would never wait for me to finish my thoughts, no matter how brief my comments may have been, he would say it was because he might forget what he wanted to say if he had to wait. That was maddening to me. Most of adult mankind knows how to be patient and polite, participating in the everyday give and take of conversation. He didn’t get a pass in order to be selfish. Every now and then, he would laugh and blame it on his Italian ancestry. That didn’t fly with me either. There isn’t an excuse for constantly being either rude or unaware.
When he would interrupt me, he’d start right in narrating his thoughts again or narrating what he was doing to clean or tidy something that was amiss. That was maddening too—to be interrupted so he could narrate pure tedium.
He never asked me anything. Never probed my mind or dug into my heart. He simply cultivated my frustration. He took a person who each day looked forward to sharing life together and wrung out every ounce of sparkle by mowing me down with depthless, voluminous words every time we were in the same room. Sure, I could have driven the conversations by being domineering, but I wasn’t interested in having his bad habits build habits in me that I equally disliked. I wasn’t going to force myself on him; I want to be heard by people who are interested in me.
My husband didn’t listen, didn’t pay attention to me, didn’t hear. Irony of ironies, he also couldn’t hear as well as others. He always attributed it to the concerts he went to when he was younger, though most people I know have been to many more than he ever has, and hearing isn’t an issue for them.
I could have become mute and he wouldn’t have even noticed. That’s not hyperbole either. I sometimes pondered trying a little psychological experiment to see how long being mute would go unnoticed.
In a life in which every inanimate object is discussed and attended to exponentially more than the human being in one’s midst, a wife can’t help but begin to feel she is of little importance and significance in her spouse’s life and heart. Thankfully I had a strong foundation; while it hurt, I didn’t allow it to degrade my sense of self-worth. On the other hand, pointing out this impolite behavior to him now and then made me feel more like a mother than a wife, and that wasn’t something I relished either.
A Disinterested Benefactor
Usually, someone supports a cause or a person they feel strongly about. To be so well-supported financially by a person who rarely seemed interested in being with me, having fun with me, enjoying me, or being enjoyed by me, always felt like the strangest contradiction. We had everything we needed or wanted. We had time we could devote to each other. We had a wonderful little home with walls begging for plaques like “Love Spoken Here” or “Home is Where the Heart Is,” but I didn’t feel they accurately described the feeling inside our four walls. Oh, how I wanted them to.
You Can Look but You Can’t Touch
You can imagine the triathlete physique I’ve looked at for years. He runs hot and I run cold, so when I have triple blankets on, he’s walking around shirtless. I watched his rippling physique with no lack of physical attraction. Our vows say we are one and our bodies are for each other, but that was ignored. He was one. His body was his. I never felt an open invitation to enjoy him, no matter what he promised on our wedding day.
Micro-Aware Yet Macro-Oblivious
My husband wanted to do everything right, down to the tiniest, most insignificant task. But there’s only so much time in the day. A person doesn’t have time for bigger, more important things when their energies are all channeled into details. My husband didn’t know how to not be self-focused or detail-focused. In his world of having to think about how we did every little thing in life, rationality was actually glaringly irrational. Yes, it made sense to do every little task in the way that he wanted because it would be cleaner in the end, less to maintain in the end, better for some reason or another. But by talking about all of those things relentlessly, his need to be obses- sively attuned with being sensible was sickeningly nonsensical. His need to reason his way through every little task in life—and narrate it to me—made for an unreasonable running dialogue and resulting relationship between us. Being obsessively practical was tiringly impractical. Logic to such a microscopic degree was exhaustingly illogical. His demand for such minute self-control was completely out of control. My husband was a walking contradiction.
Unreasonably Reasonable
Everything—and I mean e v e r y t h i n g—my husband did, he thought about. Nothing trivial got past him, which means nothing deep had time to enter our world together, at least verbally. Our whole life, piece by piece, revolved around the idea of ‘here’s how we should do this, and here’s how we shouldn’t.’ For example, when drawing or writing with a pencil, you don’t wipe eraser bits on the floor, you pile them up neatly and continually as you’re going until you’re done. Then you can put the trash can under the table and push them all into it. But that’s not exactly how the dialogue went. It was more like, “You’re wiping the eraser bits on the floor? But then they’ll just be all over the floor.” The problem with living this way is that it constantly bases life’s little actions on a fear of doing things wrong all the time, a fear of what might happen if you don’t do everything a certain way, a fear that every tiny morsel of life must be obsessed over. A constant attentiveness to doing everything a certain way is lifeless compared to turning one’s attention to the bigger things, the more important things, or simply enjoying life together without concern over the many details in one’s environment.
With these qualities as constants in our couplehood, I began to cringe when I’d hear him come home. My smile would go away. Frowning and preparing to defend myself—either in my thought life or in my words—started becoming a norm.
I was so lonely for so long; my mate was no companion at all. The potential to be loved daily by his wife and to love her had not fazed or softened his red-flag behaviors over time. He was a distant, predictable housemate and benefactor that only interacted with me to tell me when something in his environment wasn’t quite right or to narrate the menial tasks he was doing. He would monologue about the same rotating list of superficialities every single day without fail. I could predict the order of the whole line-up, and I’d ready myself for each point. I would ask endlessly why we couldn’t spend the little time we had here and there smiling and laughing with each other. Why we had to forsake joy for tedium. He never had an answer, and I suspected it was utterly impossible for him to let go of tedium’s importance in his sense of well-being.
When laughter, lightheartedness, sweet care, and genuine concern were avoided every single day without fail in order to make sure that all the minutiae like slightly bruised bananas and spoons left in the sink were discussed, I couldn’t understand why minuscule things mattered more than the person standing right in front of him. It was like our interactions weren’t even human. I started to think that if he got a deep cut in his arm, I’d see wires in there. The first recorded marriage of a robot to a human woman.
I was not a doormat, but I knew he needed a lot of time to morph into this new creature called a husband, so I worked mostly on self-restraint—keeping my expectations and frustrations at bay. Otherwise, I felt he would bail from the intensity of it all. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why not demand normalcy and let him bail if he couldn’t tolerate it? I didn’t allow myself to consider it. I didn’t want to create further fractures; I wanted mending. I had made a promise for life, and I wanted to be loyal.
Whenever he sensed fun or laughter coming on, he would say something linked to tedium to put out the joy right away. Whenever he entered a room, he would find something wrong to comment on. He didn’t even realize it, but I could predict it every time. I got to wondering if something about happiness scared him, and why. I spent way too much thought time trying to figure out who caused this in him. A person doesn’t come out of the womb edgy, fearful, anxious, and uncomfortable with ease, does he? Did someone kill his joy whenever they walked in a room? Did something bad always happen in his life when someone was happy? Was he scolded every time he had fun? Were mistakes unacceptable? Was fun thought to be lazy when he was growing up? Was a person only considered to be a productive human being if they were busy, busy, busy? Were there such hard times between his parents or siblings that he resorted to focusing on inanimate objects because they were incapable of causing him pain? I had so many questions that I had no answers to, and I had little to go on from his nice but private family. Dependency on discordant relations for emotional balance had to be a learned behavior, taught by a parent’s example. Or a reaction to familial discord. Or a repetition of family patterns from youth. Or something, I kept thinking. Whatever the case, I believe he learned for some reason that happiness was to be feared and superficial tedium was a safe refuge.
Aside from the fact that he’d never entertain the idea of taking off his shoes and wiggling his feet in the sand at the beach, my husband was a pretty enjoyable guy to be around out in the world, seemingly happy, lighthearted, carefree, and enthusiastic. It was the second he walked onto our property and entered our house that he’d click back into robo-maintainer. I braced every time I heard the knob. I knew that whatever joy I might be experiencing would be immediately overridden by some form of verbal discontent. Not many people out in life would suspect that he’d be a negative guy in his own space. I finally got to the point of putting a sign in an obvious place that said, “Don’t come in if you are irritated, anxious, naggy, (and more)!”
When you’re not noticed, not heard, not asked about, not inter- acted with, and your love isn’t needed, much less reciprocated, you hurt. Every day. (Pulling it all to the surface and writing about it is almost more than I can handle.)
I experienced the gamut of crummy emotions, day after day, with little reprieve at times. I had no interest in being a person controlled by negative feelings. I loved life and I loved love. Knowing his issues weren’t about me at their core, I kept my resolve to remain me in between my interactions with him and his ongoing siege of neglect. I also held on fiercely to any bright moments in his demeanor as signs that improvement was possible.
This went on for eight years into our marriage, when we decided to sell our house and move to a place we dreamed of living. Emboldened by the changes this already presented, I decided to draw the line. “It doesn’t matter whether this house sells or whether we move. We are not going to live your way anymore. We are not going to talk about things. We are going to have fun and laugh and be a normal family. Your way is cold and rigid and horrible. It’s death. My way is joyful and happy.”
But by now, “we” didn’t just mean the two of us. We were now four.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
