To tell my friend she's being an awful wife

[MommaTonda]

Long story sorry. A very good friend of mine has a 3 year old and for the last 2 years has been trying to get pregnant again. She's had all the tests done and no issues. IVF will cost them £12k and only 20% chance of success due to her age. She is understandably really struggling emotionally and I'm there for her all the time. I listen, help with childcare, help her research IVF options etc.

Her husband is the most lovely, supportive, patient man and he loves her and their 3 year old dearly. He is also a friend of my husbands and they talk a lot.

Every month when they realise there is no pregnancy they are devastated. My friend then turns quite nasty towards her husband (shouting, blaming him for everything, throwing her dinner on the floor, swearing at him etc). This is not her normal personality and I'm massively worried.

I'm worried she's so obsessed with getting pregnant she's treating her husband like sh*t. She's also very short tempered with her 3 year old. As her friend I want to help. Her husband is at the end of his tether and has asked my husband and me to help.

When she is so emotionally unstable, am i being unreasonable to tell her straight? You're going to lose all chances of another baby if you continue treating your husband this way? Or should I just carry on supporting her but not say anything about how she's treating her man?

I really don't know how to help. I also want to avoid an "It's ok for you" scenario as I have 2 kids and got pregnant straight away so I literally don't know what she's going through 1st hand. But I can see it's bl*ody hard and I need to help her!

It's still nowhere near acceptable to be throwing food on the floor. The atmosphere must be awful for the child. It's not normal behaviour.

@Chickenkeev couldn't have put it better. As a PP said, screaming and throwing things in anger is intimidation, pure and simple. But men shouldn't be cowed by such things apparently?

He's an adult and he can and should leave. Instead he asks his wife's friend to talk to her. No. I don't feel bad for him and I wouldn't if the gender roles were reversed. Adults needs to stand up for themselves and stop putting their children in these messes.

I do feel sorry for the child because they have no choice but to be trapped with these wackadoos.

I certainly don't feel bad for OP. I think she needs to go to co Dependents Anonymous and stop thinking she can save people or control people. This is not her circus, not her monkeys. I wouldn't be friends with someone if I thought she was abusing her husband and child! By staying friends with someone she honestly believes us so horrible, she is enabling this abusive environment for the child to have to grow up in, just as much as the husband is.

I'm so sick of adults letting children suffer in these situations when children have no power to save themselves. I'm so sick of people worrying more about adults than children's well-being.

It also hits men very hard too.
That doesn’t mean they have the right to be abusive.

I have no empathy for someone who is abusive.

You are making excuses and saying she has a reason to be abusive but thats what men say when they are abusive.
They will blame something that is happening in theirs lives or their wife for acting a certain way.

The majority of the time the abuser is triggered by something that has happened in their lives and takes it out on their partner but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

I remember a man who was raped on a night out and then became abusive towards his wife.
What he went through was awful and he definitely needed professional help, but that doesn’t make what he was doing to his wife ok.

It’s never ok to be abusive towards your partner, regardless of the reason.

She definitely needs help and she needs to remove herself from the situation before she damages her DH or child any further.
She should not be trying to another baby right now.

So who is going to stand up for the existing child in the middle of this? It's all adults supporting or not supporting adults. What about that little boy? Who helps him when he's suffering the brunt of this too?

am i being unreasonable to tell her straight? You're going to lose all chances of another baby if you continue treating your husband this way?

That would be an appalling thing to say, hideously intrusive and inappropriate.

Approaching menopause, some women experience huge hormonal mood swings at the end of their monthly cycle, like super- PMT. That may be a factor in addition to the wretched disappointment. Why not approach the period-start melt-downs from that angle;; instead of blaming her . " These awful moodswings sound like a nightmare for everyone, I wish I knew how to help you all ."

It’s not about good faith or not though… it’s about people projecting massively onto third hand and relatively incomplete/ vague information about troubles in someone else’s marriage and spitting vitriol at an unknown woman who’s worst crime is likely to be suffering poor mental health due to infertility. It’s mental.
annnyyyyeays.

Thank you! Think I'm going to leave the thread because I can't deal with seeing the uninformed opinions of people who have never been through anything similar. A lot of it misogynistic as you say. Glad there's someone talking sense!

Sorry but it’s not misogynistic to suggest that a woman who is abusive has no excuses.

I’m sorry for anyone who has struggled to conceive. I’ve been there. But abusing your partner and child because of it isn’t justified by those struggles.

Most people have factors behind why they turn out to be abusers. Even paedophiles have often been abused in their own childhoods but we don’t excuse that behaviour.

Yet a woman can pretty much do anything and is excused because “hormones/mh struggles/under the influence of an abusive man.”

Sorry but nope. people want equality? Abuse is abuse. If you’re feeling abusive you deal with it acknowledge it and walk away from the situation or get help. Nobody owes you an excuse (and by you I mean one in general).

Yes, some women struggle with the menopause. But the menopause is a natural part of life. Every woman will go through it. Some will struggle and may need some help, but the menopause isn’t an excuse for being abusive any more than being a man is a reason for cheating.

This. 100% this.

Dont be his messenger.

Be his friend by directing him to appropriate support - counselling.

Take her and her child out more around those difficult times. If YOU see anything concerning then you can make a decision about how to handle that.

And no. Two years isn’t very long to ttc in the scheme of things.

Dr’s won’t even do any testing until you’ve been ttc for a year, so actually she’d only been struggling to conceive for a year, a year to fall pregnant is entirely normal. In Aus and NZ they won’t start investigations until two years.

But apparently it’s necessary to competitively talk about how hard it was, how nobody can understand who hasn’t been there.

I ttc for a second child for six years and never managed to conceive one. But I decided to stop trying and to be grateful for the child I already had rather than spending my life upset at what I didn’t/couldn’t have. Sometimes it’s just not possible to have more children. But that apparently isn’t an acceptable thing to say because it doesn’t convey some kind of emotional struggle. Twelve years on I’m bloody glad I only have one. I split from my ex for other reasons, so I would have been a single parent to two children at this point. Ironically he had another child with someone else, and wasted no time in telling our existing DC that we had wanted more children but I wasn’t able to have them (even though it was unexplained), and now he regrets the second child for a multitude of reasons.

@Blossombathing

Is this what you'd say if it was a woman sharing that she was being abused by her husband?

Because that's what her husband is doing - he's telling his friend that he's being abused.

It's nothing to do with you. Back away slowly.

Wow. Obviously my friend's husband has had a conversation with his wife. He asked me to check if she's ok as well because that's what friends do. We've been friends for 25 years. I'm not now going to abandon her because of her recent mental health issues. Instead, I am going to encourage her to get help. Because that's what friends do. When you're friends with someone, you're not just there for the fun parts. You're also there to support them when they need it.

I don't think she's 'abusing' her son either. She is just very depressed and is therefore distracted and not playing with him as much as she used to. She still spends way more time with him than I'm sure a lot of parents do. None of the name calling etc as happened in front of him.

As I've said before, thank you for everybody's advice. I will be suggesting to her to speak to a fertility councillor and her husband, to make sure she keeps her emotions in check.

If I could close this thread now, I would!!

Meant kindly OP....your intervention is really not this central.

Well said, op. Good luck to you!

Tell her that her stress alone can stop a baby.
She needs to calm down,meditate,relax and look after herself.suggest homeopathic treatments,a trip to gp in case there is anything medically wrong,with her ,not conceiving wise,and get her to understand that pregnancy often occurs when the person is calm,stress free and relaxed and she should seek to achieve this.hopefully her dh and dc will then have a better home life too.

I’m amazed at the comments stating the OP doesn’t know the whole story etc . If a man posted saying his wife’s best friend was crying on the phone to her saying her husband was abusing her, absolutely no one would be saying that.

I have been been through primary infertility and never had a child. Of course I felt angry and sad. I carried those feelings around for years. But I never took them out on my husband or blamed him, he was my rock through it all.

let's all wait till she hits him then we've got real proof

So now you're a misogynist if you defend a man on the receiving end of abuse.

The woman's not even childless (not that it would make it an excuse).

As a PP said, this place IS batshit but not for the reasons mentioned. So many abusive men blame MH for their abuse and people climb all over it to say there is never excuse.

Woman with child has husband in tears due to her behaviour because she wants another, so current child isn't getting attention as they're not enough.

Men are human beings too and I'm assuming the posters with that mindset put their families through torture because of their own wants and are trying to make themselves feel better. Also assume they didn't end up having boys or else they'd realise males also have feelings.

OP she definitely needs help. If she refuses to take it then her H and child should leave for their OWN mental health.

As an aside, everything on here is 2nd/3rd hand information so why comment on anything at all when you don't know? Why even be on the website which is all strangers posting their own side then say people can't be believed?

Woman with child has husband in tears due to her behaviour because she wants another, so current child isn't getting attention as they're not enough

this. Is. Misogyny.

and I agree with a pp - pathological lack of empathy.

You misunderstand. It’s your assumption that she’s abusive based on totally vague , third hand info, (when the people who are involved haven’t alleged abuse) and the total lack of empathy for her fertility issues that is misogynistic. Comparing her to a paedophile. Really 🙄

Good advice, I like your comment!

While you are assuming that she is not based in exactly the same information.