AIBU to ask what controlling behaviour once seemed normal?

[Jane143]

Abusive/ weird stuff we thought was almost normal at the time? I’ll start with something I mentioned on a previous thread so as not to derail that one.
my ex used to make me have another shower if I farted at anytime during the evening before we had sex. Also HAD to wear stockings etc. was this normal? Seemed so at the time and I did it all to make him be nice to me.

Mine said thanks for informing him, he’ll let me decide 😂

Yes that’s exactly what I meant . Abusive things during marriage which were unpleasant but sort of acceptable at the time as I was young and didn’t know anything better

Aw I actually liked that my husband travelled to speak to my dad. They had a nice memory of it. It wasn’t a control thing and obviously the decision was mine but I thought it was nice. It probably doesn’t serve any purpose really when I think about it but I like traditions.

Camera in living room 'for security'. From what?? Unplugged the fucker the second we were separated. Insisting on picking me up from rare nights out, under the guise of being nice. Right.

This sounds familiar, horrible way to live isn’t it

ocd is often in relation to germs . I once knew of someone with ocd who made their spouse shower the whole time

I think OPs example is a very unique example to say the least. More common examples would be man making all financial decisions, man ordering food for the wife, man demanding sex in his terms and schedule.

Well, I married my first husband in the 1970’s, when I was 18, and I’d never have seen the ‘shower after farting’ or ‘must wear stockings’ as anything normal. 🤷‍♀️

Nor the ‘conjugal rights’ thing. 😉

Within the last 12 months. Threads or Posts about car salesmen addressing all remarks to the man even though the woman said the car was for her and she would be paying.

My ex didn't allow me to have a quiet 10 minutes to myself in the bedroom. I often felt overwhelmed by lots of household noise when I was having cancer treatment and just needed some time by myself to decompress. Nope - not allowed. He'd come up and have a massive go at me for being selfish. Now, having my quiet time alone is absolutely golden.

DH used to use the silent treatment when he was annoyed with me. He’d also threaten to kill himself.
I didn’t realise it was abuse.
I was ready to leave but he had a very serious health emergency and his personality changed dramatically. He’s much much nicer now.

That was never normal, well unless you're old enough that tights weren't invented, and all women wore stockings.
What people agree on as a couple is fine, if they're both happy with it.

I have done some digging and in spite of all these liberating factors, equality and feminism, women in the UK today are generally less happy than our moms/grandmas in 1960s/1970s.
While modern UK women have vastly more economic freedom, legal rights, and professional opportunities, they report higher levels of anxiety, depression, and mental distress today than women did in the 1960s.
Modern UK women are roughly 75% more likely than men to report suffering from depression and 60% more likely to report an anxiety disorder.
The reasons for this paradox are apparently complex.
Sociologists and economists attribute this shift to inflated expectations. In the 1960s, a UK housewife evaluated her happiness primarily based on the stability of her home life. Today, a woman evaluates her success across a massive matrix: career progression, financial independence, physical appearance, social media representation, and romantic partnership. When reality struggles to match these complex, high expectations, recorded happiness drops.

So basically, we are miserable because the society tells us today that we have to be perfect in everything. In the past we primarily had to be mums/wives and although some of us felt unfulfilled, generally we were more happy because there was less pressure to do everything. Today we have to do everything and faster and there is just no more time left. Women in UK apparently commit suicide more often than women in e.g. Poland.
We gained independence but it didn't make us happy. We got into another type of corporate and consumerist slavery. And "the village" - which was natural 50 years ago - is now dead. We are the primary parents and have to also earn our keep. We are told we can do it all on our own. And it's just not sustainable to do everything on our own without the burnout. Crazily enough, men are generally happier than they were 50 years ago, cause their responsibilities have reduced. Ours have only increased.

I was talking to my DH about his mum and dad this morning (they have an unpleasant marriage when viewed from the outside and his mum has often said to me in private how she has contempt for his husband) and my DH said well they obviously love each other as they’ve been together nearly 50 years. I pointed out to him that they both come from a village and that she was only allowed her own bank account just before she got married. That it was the norm for women to stay with men who made them miserable, to put their dreams aside when they have children, to keep the house and put up with anger and sulking and verbal abuse and forced sex. My DH just looked shocked and nodded. This is not ancient history. She is a living example of what normal marriage creates. A bitter, unfulfilled woman who will never get her life back. Breaks my heart. My DH thinks of this as choice. Often even now there is not much choice. There’s a thread running now where a woman is asking for permission to go out. Permission. WTAF is going on in 2026?!

I do think though Ms should be standard as my marital status shouldn’t be visible simply by my title. No one can tell if a man is married by the title Mr. It all again came down to women being property, father’s and then husband’s.

Ms is still a gendered form of address because it applies only to women. It would be better to have a form of address similar to the old Soviet "Comrade" because it was non gendered and applied equally to men and women. (Obviously not actually comrade because of its Russian associations) For that reason I have always insisted upon my academic title of Dr because its non gendered and something I achieved rather than simply acquired.

The idea of a woman being GIVEN in marriage by some male relative.

FIL always filled up MIL's car. "Everyone" thought it was lovely that he looked after her like that, but it always seemed to me that not enabling her to do it controlled her.

I don’t know how you thought that was ever normal?!
I’ll add:
taking husbands surname for marriage
asking father to marry
unable to get mortgages etc. as a female

“Oh you’re bad with money, you’ll get into debt. I’ll keep control and I can just buy everything you/we need”

escalated of course to completely restricting access to money, and dictating what could or couldn’t be bought.

recruiting family and friends into the narrative so no one thought it odd, and in fact thought it was great he was “looking after” her Stopping her racking up massive debts.

spoiler- she had never been in debt, overspent, and worked for a financial company!!

Anyone remember the Ladies Menus.
Same as the main one which was handed to the man but the Ladies had no prices shown.
I think I can just about remember this in some posh London hotels.
But maybe I imagined it.
I mean it did exist.
Not sure how I know.

I don't think there is nothing at all to this. Absolutely, higher expectations of ourselves and our lives open the door to greater levels of disappointment and misery (rather like the oft-quoted chestnut that people in various poor communities around the world are on average happier than people in so-called developed countries). I also absolutely get your point about how the changes of the last few decades have been a triumph for capitalism whereby women are expected to do more work spread over more areas and get trapped in cycles of consumerist bullshit that equates our value to having expensive shit (not to mention meeting various ridiculous motherhood, work, beauty and lifestyle standards which all end up being more ways to squeeze work and money out of us).

But...

1. I doubt comparing rates of anxiety and depression in the 1960s with those of today is very meaningful. Commonplace understandings of those terms have changed so much (and also commonplace understandings of the sorts of questions that might get asked to elicit these things indirectly). Attitudes towards the threshold for distress and the social acceptability of admitting to challenges have changed. The social and practical consequences of struggling with your mental health have changed. I am deeply suspicious of the usefulness of the data.

2. Focusing on the 1960s is a bit strange really because actually the 1950s / early 60s represented an all-time peak in the proportion of mothers not working outside the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was not the historical norm for most women before or after this. It was only quite specific economic and social circumstances after WW2 that made it possible (particularly high levels of employment for men combined with high wages - in contrast to the incredibly high unemployment and desperate poverty seen in 1920s and 1930s Britain). So was it staying at home with their kids that made the women of this era less likely to be anxious and depressed, or was it more about financial stability? How did the fact that a world war was still recent memory for many factor in to happiness, given that people had that as a contrast to their current situations? How about the end of rationing in the 1950s, the takeoff of mass consumerism, the rise of television and the increasing affordability of household appliances that made cooking and laundry and housework easier? (it isn't like women in the 60s weren't also living in a capitalist and consumerist society, with all the good and bad that comes with that). It's really hard to work out what was causal when it came to women's happiness levels. Perhaps it wasn't anything inherent about the status of being a SAHM but more a set of unique broader historical circumstances.

3. I would be just fascinated to compare women's levels of anxiety and depression now with their levels at any other time in British history... living through the end of the Roman occupation; Saxon and Norse invasions; various civil wars; various famines; the Black Death and the Great Plague; the devastating changes to communities brought about by agricultural and industrial revolutions; those working in Victorian factories alongside their children or working among London's 50,000 Victorian era prostitutes or losing their loved ones in the First World War, or women across thousands of years who have been by modern standards raped and abused and voiceless, or women who have known there is an incredibly high chance that any child they have will die before adulthood.

I don't think that social and economic trends since the 1960s have been unequivocally good, but I do not think that, in historical perspective, they are the greatest evil women have ever faced either. And anyone who suggests that women were generally better off in the 1960s than now, let alone at any time in history before the 1960s, is living in a dream world.

Near here a middle aged couple. No kids.
She worked in town Hall 9 to 5.
He didn't go out to work. Possibly early retired.
He walked with her to work every day.
About a mile.
And went to fetch her home.
Waiting outside town hall at 5pm.
Also went every day to spend lunch hour with her.
She seemed quite happy.
We all thought it was sweet.
Like he was taking a child to school.
Making sure she was safe...
It was years ago.
We hadn't heard of these issues of controlling then.

Me having to take out a loan to fund my maternity leave because he wasn't spending anymore of his money.
All children's expenses were my expenses. He never bought a single pair of school shoes.
Seems crazy when I think about it now. He was crazy and I was so intimidated I just went along with it.

Being told I can’t get a career/return to a career with training after bringing up the children because it would cost too much money. Also getting a cheap runaround car to assist with said career/job.

I knew a man who in 1970s 80s proudly proclaimed that he had so little to do with the children that he didn't even know where the school was.
This sounds appalling to us now but there was a context.
He was outraged at his workmen saying they had to leave early to take their daughter to music lessons etc.
What do you have a wife for he exclaimed.
He thought it was just an excuse to slope off early from the site.
Speaking of his own wife he was proud that she could be left to deal with children school etc and do it efficiently.
As he said do i ask her to put up ladders and mend the roof?
I could see the rationale.

Because as she said in her OP, she was young and didn't know any better