I find the term coercive a little extreme!
I also find today’s obsession with being “your authentic self” and never compromising for the sake of your other half to be a little sad.
Good marriages are built on compromise. Agreeing to eat fish on Fridays when you really want to eat pizza. Agreeing to watch a period drama when you would prefer to watch a thriller. Saying yes to going hiking when you wanted to stay at home for a picnic. And yes, making the effort to dress up on three or four occasions a year to take your wife out, allowing her the opportunity to dress up too, very much falls in to that category,
As long as both parties are compromising equally, then I don’t see why this is such a bad thing to do, and I say that as someone who has been married for over thirty years.
it’s not something that is going to do the husband bodily harm fhs; it just means he has to make a bit of effort! And unless he is a member of Hari Krishna or something, I doubt wearing decent trousers and a carefully chosen shirt occasionally is going to compromise any long held principle of his.
It’´s about forgetting what you want occasionally to make the other person feel happy, which in turn should make you feel happy! It’s about flexibility and selflessness in other words.
Unfortunately the message being continually broadcast today, on social media and elsewhere, and it starts very young in school, is that we should all be self-fulfilled, self-confident, self-aware, self-loving, with healthy boundaries, and of course all of those things are important, unfortunately it completely bypasses the fact that we are social animals who need to rub along with others in the playground and in the workplace, romantically, and when parenting children.
Also, there is such a thing as becoming too comfortable in a marriage or long-term relationship and falling in to a rut,
Honestly I know so many divorced couples who have lost weight, started going to the gym, started paying more attention to what they wear etc. And I meet both of them separately in the pub or the supermarket or wherever and compliment them and tell them they look great! And of course you never know what goes on between two people, but sometimes I wonder why they couldn’t have made that effort for each other when they were together.