I don't how to make a man happy, there is just something missing in me, says DH

[DreamyParentoid]

We are married. Have two beautiful girls, 2 yrs and 9 months. A lovely, if messy, home, and our relationship is tragically empty on the inside. He says he is in a living hell. That he looks back and sees how much happier he has been in other relationships that were filled with life. That I am just totally taken up with the kids and don't have time or energy for anything else. He doesn't get a look in. No cuddles, the kids get it all.

But I do everything, all the housework, kids meals, most of the childcare. H provides really well. He sleeps in a different bed because he doesn't want to be woken up by breastfeeding sounds and to get a good nights sleep.

It is not the first time he has said something like this. But he doesn't want to split up. He has just given up hope of it being any better. It has all just come up for him. But I'm not to worry. It'll be better soon because he will put his feelings back in a box.

Shit, shit, shit.

I have arranged to see a counsellor which has really helped. But I don't know what to do. Part of me wants to try and be all the things he has said he'd like. Then the other part knows that I am those things if he was nicer to me. He wants more physical contact but I find it hard to be nice to him when he is being so difficult. Then I think if I can just get strong and be myself and get through this bit then we can sort it out.

I just needed to say. I've got to take daughter to nursery now and make it look like I haven't been crying.

This all sounds melodramatic, but it does help to say it in this dramatic way!

xx

47 different nationalities Bonsoir! My goodness! I live among many dual culture relationships too and am always impressed when they work well together as I think it is harder work to maintain. There are so few shared experiences or expectations regarding the detail of life.

I married someone so culturally similar I expect we will one day find out we are related (hope not really) and I am frequently grateful for that because it saves me so much work and compromise.

A possible downside is that you might perhaps miss out on the excitement of sparks ignited by difference.

I might, not you...

Myself I am inclined to blame the cultural difference between an ivory-tower academic and a... normal human being! (Insofar as there is such a thing.)

Anyway, where he got it from is irrelevant. The question is whether he can learn to behave like a decent life partner. It's a bit much, though, having to train a grown, supposedly intelligent man like a toddler. The toddler seems to be getting the message a lot quicker.

I doubt there'll be a fairytale ending here, but still, I quite see that you have to try (just as long as you feel the need to, not as long as anyone else, including your H, thinks you should).

The irony of "the coming to the table situation" appears to be lost on the OP's husband.

The irony of "the coming to the table situation" appears to be lost on the OP's husband.

It just made me feel sad. She can't do right for doing wrong because it's always all about him.

I am a humanities-educated woman married to a science-educated man, and we have a partnership - we discuss parenting decisions, ways of coping, we back one another up, we step in when the other parent needs help, we talk, and we remain in a happy marriage 15 years on. There have been ups and downs - and we've needed to work on things at times - but we've worked on them together. And at no time has my DH dismissed my interests, conversations or hobbies as being 'dull'.

Dreamy, I don't know where you're going to go from here - but you can't do it all yourself. And your parenting ideas and boundaries are equally (or in my opinion, based on what you have said, more) valid than his.

That's 47 other nationalities in addition to the 3, you already mentioned, so you've been in at least 50 relationships. More if you ever dated more than one person from the same nationality.

Factor in a bit of time being single between some of them. Either many of them must have been shorter than a test match, or Bonsoir is extremely old, or talking bullshit.

It seems like there is potential for hope. Your post made me feel quite sad. You both must feel rather lonely and trapped in your own version of your marriage. There are things that you can both do to find a way to meet in the middle.
I don't think it helps you to be angry at him or for others to tell you what an idiot they think he is.
Do you want to make the marriage work?
What 3 things do you need to allow this to happen?
What 3 things does he need? (Try to ask him in a calm an objective way)
Can you both agree on these fundamentals?

Its a start..... x

Perhaps Bonsoir is not very good at relationships.

I don't know what your counsellor has said but I know what mine would say 'are you mad!! Leave the bastard, get out now'

My marriage was not as bad as this but enough to make me leave after years of no help or support, coercive sex, belittling, telling me how amazing other women are'

Fuck that, a real man does not behave this way. I've only just learnt this and you will too.
I'm now single mum to 3 dcs, with a full time job, but do you know what it's much easier without him, less stressful and much less of a struggle

I like practicing a lot . Practice makes perfect...

To be fair to Bonsoir I think there is a sector of the bourgoisie who an be very like the OP's husband;

Over forty, upper middle class, educated at a grande ecole (which he considers to be the most superior education in the world), extremely rigid about what a family life should look like. It produces men who have great conviction in their own superiority, a suspicion of all things not serious, a breathtaking lack of imagination and no sense of humour.

Whilst we're used to our intelligensia being individual, eccentric even, light hearted and self deprecating.

But what do you do, if you find yourself married to someone from that section of french society? France is very rigid as a society, change is greeted with huge unease. Can someone like that change to become more child centred, less sexist, more fun?

And even if the OP could change her ways to fit in with his cultural expectations, would she really want to? Will it make her happy?

I doubt it, sadly.

IME very few counsellors or psychologists or even psychiatrists have any grasp of cross-cultural issues. So they can be very poor judges of human beings who have been trained to behave in other ways.

Perhaps OP's DH was practising but he didn't learn much. If Dreamy was reverential and flattered he maybe imagined she'd remain that way. Not taken up with raising babies and developing her own tastes and preferences.

Bonsoir I agree that we are all trained by our backgrounds to some extent.

But how can you untrain someone and make them see that you are not dull or wrong just culturally different?

And if that person is convinced that his culture is superior?

Hold on, the Mr. Fishpie-TV-Dinner who threw a strop because you didn't mind read his desire to have his food served to him whilst he watched telly doesn't think you dealt effectively with your DD when she wanted to play with friends rather than sit at the table and eat dinner?

Maybe you should have served her dinner in the playroom? Or dragged him kicking and screaming to the table to have his. Nothing like a bit of consistency. If the house rule is that you all eat dinner at the table then it applies to everybody until the kids are in bed

Glad you had real-life support from your friends and his ex. He is being emotionally abusive to you. He has form for being emotionally abusive to a previous spouse. He is/wants you to be emotionally abusive to his children. You can't tame him and train him to behave. Men like this don't get better, they get worse, and he'll be like that with your daughters too. My EA F was vile to me, particuarly as a teenager, nothing was ever good enough, I wasn't good enough. He's a bully.

You don't have to live with a bully. Neither do your children.

(Do keep in touch with his ex though when you divorce, you could start a club/support group )

Given some of the contemptuous comments he has made I would think it's going to be a long road back to mutual respect, however hard he tries from here.

wordfactory - it is a very long process and, crucially, the person you are reprogramming needs to really want it and you need to be willing to be reprogrammed yourself

It's not really something you can explain on MN put in a bottle and trademark. But it is perfectly possible with two willing adults. In order to be willing the very first baby step is to realise what is going on...

Once you have been through the process your ability for free thought is something else entirely.

Forgot to refresh the page before I read and posted so missed all the 'but he is so French' stuff.

It really doesn't matter if he's an arse because of cultural conditioning or not. He's an emotionally abusive arse. The OP is not oblidged to stay in the relationship because he's a French emotionally abusive arse.

HTH

(and its pretty rude, and according to others here, inaccurate, to say that all French men are emotionally abusive arses).

World's full of cross bloody cultural relationships. Masses on our road, to start with. My parents have one. DP's parents did. School gate is crowded with parents from different countries and cultures and backgrounds. Some people are just arses.

And if anyone is going to pontificate about cross cultural families I can point them, helpfully, in the direction of some of the genuine academic work in this area plus a textbook I co-wrote on diversity-

Please could we take the discussion of cultural differences and how to be the "perfect" wife elsewhere? And actually talk about the OP's situation?

(Let me summarise for anyone coming late to this thread. There is a minority viewpoint on this thread which holds that: he is not an arse, he is merely from a different culture; and some women can find it fulfilling to do the surrendered wife bit, even though most of us beg to differ. That point has been made. Over and over again. Now can we move on?)

Personally, I'd recommend reading Perfect Storm's input (and that of her husband - who sounds lovely btw) - they more or less say all that needs to be said, coming from the perspective of people who are obviously in a very healthy, happy relationship, therefore have no "embittered singleton" (whatever that is) axe to grind in recommending LTB.

I agree, Lurcio.

Bonsoir maybe all those second wives behave like that because once you've been the mistress you need to keep behaving like one incase you create a vacancy?

OP I think you sound like a lovely, intelligent and caring woman. And you deserve much better than being treated as part of the domestic staff, much better.

Perfect storm, most helpful reflection re surrendered wife imagery. Feel my fires rage and ability to fight back surfacing gloriously. This thread I equipping my tongue for gloriously educational debates with dh.

I am still in it to win it. I.e. in there is a good man and the father of my ds and by winning i mean to stand up fully and instigate a truly equal partnership... which i suppose means him absorbing a couple o years of learning from and listenkng to me to balance things out and bring him into the 21st century... but another poster was right, it is going to be hard for me to respect him again for a while. And He may not be able to, want to, and I will still have to leave.

Camaleon x to you

Bonsoir, as ever, thanks for the posts an a bit more history. The science / humanities assessment is close, but I have a science teaching qualification and I retrained at 31. I think the split is more the classic that I'm interested in feelings, dreams, psychism and experience based stuff AS WELL and in this time of mothering very much puts me in that realm. And it's hard to hear your inner self if you don't have time to be quiet and listen. I think he thinks he can ignore that side of things. he says it just doesn't interest him, but I do think there is a big defence there because he doesn't want to go into what it brings up for him. Doesn't want to, can't, is terrified of being found out as normal...

Culturally he was educated in England. I think the French English thing I mildly helpful in understanding ( funny even) if you have a reference for it, but not really the big point.

The big point is about a culture globally that finds it acceptable to project shit onto women and expect them to dance to that tune to process the associated emotions repressed emotions of the projectees

Vs

one that really knows what it is to hold, nurture and positively influence empowered, chaotic, gloriously spot-on, tuned-in, passionate women. One that puts the golden egg of that magic at the centre of its cultural, emotional, scientific and family life and knowingly dances around it without stamping on it... Ever.