picking on DH. How to stop? in an unhappy pattern of behaviour/resentment

[horribleCow]

I am not proud of this. I have recently got into a pattern of being irritated with DH, and picking on him in a patronizing way for quite silly things, or complaining about things that probably don't really matter.

It's stuff like "have you changed your shirt, please do it, it smells" and "why can't you share my interests, I don't want to be married to someone who does nothing but work" and "can't you take the initiative on cooking occasionally, why do I have to do it all the time" and "can't you just notice the draughts of air and put the thought aside rather than worrying obsessively about wall insulation that you can't afford to fix?" and when he comes home talking about a new project at work I ask how much more time it's going to require for him working in the evenings, rather than being pleased about it.

He is quiet and withdrawing into work. It's not really surprising. i'm being a cow. Where the stuff matters I could say it more nicely and effectively. Mostly it doesn't matter.

But it's an overall pattern that is really beginning to drive me mad.

I am irritated because he makes statements like "I'd like to spend more time on X" in front of other people, where X is something he thinks is deeply inferior to work - and then does absolutely nothing about ever learning any more about X (things like reading anything at all, ever, not related to work; cooking; doing anything at all round the house or garden that isn't just something he can pay a tradesman to do). He clearly has little respect for people who have had opportunities but haven't turned them into good careers, but doesn't think about the fact that people like him are usually propped up by people like me, who become trivial-minded and boring because we're constantly dealing with day to day trivia simply because he absolutely never does any of it.

He used to say he liked me because I was multi-dimensional, and did things like reading, cooking and gardening. I guess I should have looked harder at his parents and realised that he was trying to convince himself that reading, cooking and gardening weren't a waste of time.

In his parents' old house they paid people to do the garden for them - they now have a house that covers the entire block and has no garden. His mother has always been censorious and rude about people who do anything other than work and buying pre-made food or eating out; she is frequently rude about my parents' habit of giving her potted plants, making sure she keeps them all, dead, until I visit so she can ostentatiously throw them all in the bin and say her life is too busy for trivia like tending to plants, or cooking. She is always very rude and patronizing to caterers when they have visitors (she would never cook for visitors herself), and tends to ask them what their career plans are. His father does nothing other than work, and generally eats out. He's one step beyond in that it would never even occur to him to talk to a gardener or caterer in his own home.

Dh seems to want to turn into his parents. I get angry. I pick on him. He retreats into work and gets more and more like his parents.

Don't be too hard on yourself, you are reacting to him basically no reacting to you! It must be hard, I would find that very frustrating, you have to be quite alike I think to be able to share your lives together, he seems devoid of anything to say other than talk about his work, that's pretty boring even for the most even tempered soul.

I also think you are possibly flogging a dead horse, it might just be that you are on the road to splitting up because you have years and years of this in front of you, it shouldn't be an endurance test to stay together, I also think that your OH should be your idol in a way, your romantic partner, your soul mate..........you get the picture, I don't see that here.

His mother ... is frequently rude about my parents' habit of giving her potted plants, making sure she keeps them all, dead, until I visit so she can ostentatiously throw them all in the bin and say her life is too busy for trivia like tending to plants, or cooking.

She sounds utterly VILE. Full marks to you if you've managed not to call her a massive cunt to her face, cos I wouldn't be able to hold back.

What are you currently getting out of this marriage? Is it compatible with your life goals? Where would you ideally like to be in 2 years time?

Thankyou to BifsWif, Meerka, Penfold007, MrBuster and TendonQueen, Jan45 and PocketSaviour for your analysis.

Feijoa - no, we dont have kids.

TokenGinger - your causality is round the wrong way, though this isn't your fault - I have been deliberately vague about details. I agree with your point that it is better to have a DH who is excited about work than one who isn't. However, that isn't really the issue here.

I think in the short term, I need to learn to count to three and think before i speak; I need counselling; and we need joint counselling.

In the short term, logistically, I need to stay where I am, as I've ploughed all my savings into a house with DH, my job doesn't pay well enough for me to live on my own (and getting a better job will take time), and I'm not entitled to benefits.

In the long term, I don't know what I want out of life any more. I've kind of lost my way. I don't know what I can do career-wise, and I don't really have anyone to talk to (I've tried careers counsellors - they're not much use). Without retraining I haven't really any job prospects beyond admin work, here, as there's not much happening here.

The things that I actually find fascinating (e.g. political and ecclesiastical history in the 1400s and 1500s; musicology - useful topics, eh) aren't going to give me any sort of job except potentially in academia back in the UK, and I've already done the academic slog before giving it all up when I couldn't get a job here - I am too old to move back and do it again, apart from the fact academia is no longer really somewhere I'd want to work.

Sending you , you sound utterly pissed off and fed up. Do you have any hobbies? Anything you could do just for the enjoyment of it rather than worrying about making it a career?

Horrible you have some tough choices ahead and I wish you well

Wishing you the best horrible. I didn't mean to make you defensive when I posted last night it just struck me that you really didn't seem happy with him.

I too moved countries for dh's job, couldn't practice my profession where we moved and had to make a sideways move into a different area. Our marriage stayed strong but god did we have some hard moments for years- it is hard not to feel you are in the wrong place/living someone else's life and I needed a lot of appreciation for what I had done. I actually went for counselling for this alone and it helped a lot.

You've done a good job of listing your H 'faults' and what he should do to make you feel appreciated/ loved but what are you doing? Your sneering of your H's contentment at work and activities 'organised by others ' screams projection. Has your H really changed that much, or is it you? You no longer have the career path that you once had and I'm guessing you don't have the same social circle who share your interests. You sound frustrated about how you can change (career, hobbies etc) and have shifted the responsibility, by expecting your H to fill the void.

I think the previous posters' suggestions of hobbies are sensible. Do you have things that you can do to make yourself feel better?

I'm in a very similar situation to yours - I think there are probably a lot of us in this boat of mid30s ex academics who have got together with other academics, moved when one gets a permanent job, and then discovered that the two-body conundrum (i.e. there's only ever one suitable job per continent available, per academic couple) is unavoidable.

What has saved our marriage is hobbies that we can do together, and both of us having learnt a style of communication where - even if we're feeling negative about something - we try to frame it as a positive. So i might say "I think it'd be really fun if we weeded the front garden together for a couple of hours on Saturday. I can show you what needs doing, which bits are plants and which are weeds. Would you be up for that? It won't take long" instead of "ARGGGGH why can't you take the initiative on this, you never do anything in the garden!" which is actually what i feel like saying sometimes!

I understand the academic obsession with work. My DH can be like that, I used to be. But he's gradually admitted the need for other parts of life. Perhaps try the positive-reframing trick with yours and see if it works, just on little things? If it does, you could talk to him about having made a decision to change how you address things.

With the nubile young students who can gushingly, breathlessly talk about the delights of whatever his field is... is it that they're young and female, or that they're discussing his subject with apparent fascination? My DH can do that a bit, but I've come to realise that for him it's the discussion of the topic, and it's the female students being slightly stalky and over-keen - and the fact I never actually meet the male students. Dh's field is one where the very few females tend to be self-directed go-getters about everything, and the (many, many) males tend to lack social skills, motivation and direction. We also live in a very small town, so if a female student is persistent enough to want to appear bloody everywhere, she can do it pretty easily. My solution is to gently make him aware that the occasional female student looks like she might be a bit over the top (and that this could damage his reputation even if he does nothing*, as it's a very short step from lacking perspective about appropriate student-prof social connection, to the student lacking perspective when social connections are apparently rejected), and then ask for an educated layperson's explanation of what they were talking about.

*Don't get me wrong on that. I give DH the benefit of the doubt as he is pretty clearly just a geek delighted with his research, who is a bit socially blind. There have been a few female students who were a bit annoyed to find out he had a girlfriend. The wedding ring helps these days...
However, I do also know plenty of sleazy male academics for whom the interest is the young, female bit, not so much the research, who lead young female students on and then claim that they're psychos when they get aggrieved. It's not clear which category your DH fits into.