He hates conflict so he just fobs me off and it's destroying our relationship

[thelongday]

Basically, if I have any sort of issue, I bring it up and explain that whatever it is isn't working for me and can we look at compromising and finding a solution we are both happy with?

I'm always prepared to compromise and listen to him. I repeat things back to him so he knows I have understood.

He sometimes agrees within minutes with me, sometimes he argues, tells me I'm being ridiculous / petty / silly and then agrees the compromise I suggest. I had started to ask him to come up with the compromise so that he doesn't feel like I'm making the decision, as I thought this might be the problem.

The end result is ALWAYS the same. He agrees, but carries on just the same. I point out that he must have "forgotten" our agreement in a kind way and we have another argument where he tells me I'm being petty/ silly / ridiculous / making a fuss over nothing and then he agrees to the original compromise but carries on the same.

Nothing is ever resolved and I suspect, the only reason we are still together is because I just end up "letting it go" or accepting something far less than we agreed.

I seem to be constantly stressed because I never know what is happening in my home life.

Examples are expecting the kids to walk to school and then he picks them up every day or him suggesting he loses weight (I simply pointed out I was worried about his health as he is now clinically obese and on statins) and then he mocks me in front of his friends for eating healthily or inviting his family round when I'd said it didn't suit me..... Loads more, pretty much a daily or weekly issue.

I just want to find a way to get him to be straight with me. I don't believe any promises he makes or even am convinced by any plans he says he's made etc.

When I worded the "helps round the house", I should have said. We pay for a cleaner, I insisted on it before moving in. However, he also cooks dinner with me and will run the Hoover round if asked, do washing etc. I am happy, generally with my practical role.

We are a family unit and I want all the kids treated the same with consistency. Believe me it doesn't create for a happy family when one set of kids are chauffeured and the others waved to as they drive by!

The reason I'm in counselling is to try and change my behaviour because what I've been doing before hasn't worked. I'm trying a different approach and part of that is understanding why he does things.

So he doesn't listen to you but you're the one having counselling to change your behaviour?

"The reason I'm in counselling is to try and change my behaviour because what I've been doing before hasn't worked. I'm trying a different approach and part of that is understanding why he does things".

No, no and no.

Well you could be counselled for some considerable time re why he does things and you will still be no further forward. I could give you an answer as to why he does the things he does; its because he can and it works for him. This is all about power and control. You allow him (and he is a saboteur) to do this to you all. His own parents were likely the same; we after all learn abut relationships first and foremost from our parents.

What do you get out of this relationship now?.

What do you think these children are learning from the two of you about relationships here?.

Changing even one aspect of your behaviour is nigh on impossible to do and why do you feel you need to change your behaviour anyway?. To try to fit in with him?. Its not you, its him.

What you have tried before has indeed not worked so a different tack is certainly needed. Like leaving him.

The reason I'm in counselling is to try and change my behaviour because what I've been doing before hasn't worked

But the reason it hasn't 'worked' is because he has chosen to do whatever he wants. Because there is no actual partnership in your relationship. I have no idea how you having counselling will change his behaviour. Nor do I think you investing time and effort into trying to understand his behaviour is worthwhile. This is who he is. He is selfish and disrespectful and you've let him get away with it by backing down and further down for eight years. Why would he change? In order to get you to marry him? That doesn't sound like a great bargain on either side.

Why are you so desperate for this relationship to work? You mentioned you trust him 100% with other women, do you think it's worth putting up with all of this in return for that?

You want to believe he can't help it because then you have the power to 'fix' it if you can just get through to him and help him work on strategies to change his behaviour. All the while he's just doing whatever the fuck he wants with absolutely no concern about how that affects you. You want to believe you have power in the relationship when you have none, because you are choosing to have none. I hope you can use that counselling to look at how to assert yourself and to feel more confident in your opinions and feelings. Stand up for yourself and what you want.

I just don't trust him with day to day life!

That's a sad and poor way to live, thelongday

You're pouring everything into this to make it work. Is he?

Why should he change? He is getting everything he wants. If he wanted to consider you he would have done so earlier in the five years.

I think you need to accept that this is your life.

He's just hoping I'll put up and shut up isn't he? :(

It's like he's walking his own path and I'm trying to get him to take just a little detour sometimes but he just carried on walking, knowing that I'll just scurry along behind.

I've got a lot of thinking to do because I sure as hell don't want to spend the rest of my life like this.

And what about your children? Do you really want them to continue to be treated unfairly just so you can say you are in a relationship with a man who thinks you win if he compromises???

He's just hoping I'll put up and shut up isn't he?

Yup.

If you've tried talking and compromise, then the next step in changing is action. You've done that. He hasn't.

This is the way it's going to be in the future thelongway unless an earthquake happens in his world and he is willing to take action

Passive Aggressive Personality. There is a brilliant website called baggagereclaim which sums this up nicely. Sounds like you've got a bad case of a PA man with a victim complex because you dare to question him - he sounds as if rather than taking your questioning and talking as a HEALTHY part of a NORMAL relationship, he hides behind the "I hate conflict so I'll retreat into my man cave" to wait for the 'woman' to stop nagging.

The irony is - they'd hate to be with someone submissive - they get bored, frustrated and unfulfilled. So they go for someone with, lest I say, more passion and motivation for life, and they're offended by that too.

Long story short - they're pretty much offended by everything.

The sentence of yours that stands out for me is I really want to believe he can't help it.

The certainly are some behaviours that we really can't help (or at least we have to work very very hard to act against).

But I can't really see how the examples you give fall into this category. If you've agreed not to pick up the kids from school... then just don't pick them up!

OK, I guess it could be that he feels really strongly that the kids should be picked up, and is unable to express this to you (perhaps through fear of conflict as you suggest in your thread title). But if that's the case, you have to ask why would anyone feel so strongly about this issue? The most plausible explanation in my opinion is the one you give, that he sees any compromise as me "winning". The way you are communicating with him about the compromise won't make any difference to this.

I agree with other posters - you're making a big effort to change your communication style when it could in fact all be solved by him just not picking the kids up when he's agreed not to!

I don't think it matters whether he's doing it deliberately or whether it's something he can't help. He has no respect for you - illustrated by his deliberately public mockery of your healthy diet. (Who mocks their loved one in front of their friends?) He agrees to a compromise merely to shut you up, however temporarily, with absolutely no intention of meeting you half way on anything.

The only thing he hates about confrontation is having to listen to you making reasonable suggestons and compromises, as it's just wasting his time. He has no intention of doing anything but what he wants to do, so any time he spends discussing it is wasted.

So, can you continue like this for the rest of your life? Is this the example of a releationship you want your children to learn from? You don't trust him and he doesn't have any respect for you.

I think you need to cut your losses...

I agree that saying an adult man has no free will when it comes to his decisions and has some sort of condition that means he can't cope with not always having his own way is just kidding yourself.
He is actively choosing to ignore you and to just do what he wants to do.
He could choose to take your views seriously and stick to agreements or tell you he doesn't agree with you and won't do what you want and you have to just live with it. He chooses to say "yes dear" and then ignore you.

He doesn't seem to want a relationship in any meaningful way. He seems to want a companion, and someone to toy with, so that he 'wins' every so often.

It is demoralising to be with someone who does this, when you need support you will find yourself alone. His role is to score points off you.

It's no way to live. You'll get heartily fed up of being treated like this

Ask him why should he always 'win'? If winning is the game then surely you have to win sometimes too.

Or else he drops the idea of winning and grows the fuck up.

It's a partnership not a battle.

The only way to 'win' with a partner who insists on everything being a battle is to leave the bastard field of war.

He really should be given the choice of winning the battle of wills, and to stand alone in the battle field, or win the relationship game, where both cooperate to make each other happy.

He'd say cooperate of course(!), but would just carry on as before, metaphorically putting two fingers up to the OP and her hope of having a reasonable relationship.

"I just want to find a way to get him to be straight with me."

This is just one if many statements in your posts which is very worrying IMO. You can't make him be straight with you.

This relationship is no good for you, but actually the most dangerous person to you in this relationship is you. Your DP is not treating you with the respect you deserve. You should have left him ages ago IMO. But instead you are trying to look within yourself for answers, reading self help, going to counselling, bending yourself over backwards trying to change things.

"I really want to believe he can't help it." That's obvious. You've been doing an amazing job of denying what's going on so you don't have to face two facts:

1 He knows he's doing it
2 He's not going to change

He's not nice, but you are bring even worse to yourself, as you have the power to make this stop.

You can make it stop by accepting you will never change things and showing him the door.

Stop giving him chances. Stop letting him undermine you. Take back control of your own life. Stop judging him by your decent standards or treating him with the kind of respect you deserve. The time for that is long gone.

Sorry if I sound harsh, but I wasted too many years learning the hard way that there are some arseholes out there, and they won't necessarily admit what they are doing.

You can't do anything to change him, but you can change your life so you don't have to live like this.

I really want to believe he can't help it. But he's used to getting his own way and sees any compromise as me "winning". He's said this directly. I've tried telling him what I actually want and then what my compromise suggestion is to try and counter this, but he just refuses to listen. It's just me "getting my own way" over things.

And it really can be anything. Where we go out for dinner, the kids (mine and his and treating all fairly), his weight, the dog, the car.

I don't want to be negative but... what you are describing is a situation where everything is fine unless you express a different opinion or suggest doing anything differently. He does not consider a normal to-and-fro between partners to be normal. He doesn't see the conversation being between two equal parties who thrash something out and come to an amicable agreement about where you fancy going out for dinner, for example -as anything other than a power battle. This should be the simplest and most enjoyable conversational push-and-pull. If he turns this into a battle, where either you can't 'win' or if you do get what you want, then you are accused of selfishness, then... you got problems.

The thing is, I'm guessing that you don't see every conversation as a power-play, over who gets to 'win'. You just want to get through the day and come out with happy family at the end of it. He sees things as you 'getting your own way' - as if that was a bad thing. I used to get accused of the same thing - it is very hard to defend yourself. XH used to say 'You always want what YOU want!' He never acknowledged that he felt exactly the same way about his needs or desires. I would say 'Of course I want what I want, everyone wants what they want or they wouldn't be human. You want what you want don't you? It's not a crime is it? Doesn't mean to say I always get what I want but it's just a truism!' He never liked logic as it meant that he was in danger of looking fucking unreasonable. Which of course he was. He quickly resorted to just plain bullying tactics, as he would never get me to say black was white.

This man does not want you to have power in the relationship. It doesn't matter if you don't subscribe to the whole power schtick, the point is, he DOES and he is using nasty weapons against you. He doesn't care that he upsets you, what he cares about is CONTROL.

He may deny that he is doing this, but that won't change the fact that he will continue to do it. He may say he loves you, while all the time showing you no respect and no love. Do not believe what comes out of his mouth, just hear what his behaviour is telling you.

Sorry for the capitals, but this looks very clear to me. He is not trying to make you happy, he is trying to shut you up. There are very limited number of ways that you can change this whilst staying in the relationship.

p.s. next time you are trying to agree something, why not try it and do say 'You're just lying to me aren't you?'. Call his bluff and get him to prove that he isn't.

Thank you all for your replies. Something I've been pondering is that he rarely seems to question my decisions so it feels a bit one sided. I'd like to think that's because I understand him and what he's happy with so I just do something without thinking. But actually I'm now wondering if I'm actually feeling controlled and living my life to his terms?

When he has "got the hump" over something I've done, he can be quite angry. Not in a shouting way, but again, in a way where he just refuses to listen.

LTB
Too much hard work.
And when the children leave home you will be on your own putting up with is crap.
Life is too short to fix someone else.

Well he doesn't need to question your decisions does he because he's going to carry on doing his own sweet thing anyway! Why question anything, it's not going to affect him at all. He may as well just smile & nod!
Sorry OP but he sounds awful, he laughs at your diet, becomes angry when challenged. This doesn't sound like a respectful, loving relationship.

Look OP, your coming at this from the wrong angle it's not 'why does he do this?' but 'why the fck do I put with it?'. You're distracting yourself with his* possible motives, to avoid confronting your own for staying in a relationship where your opinions don't count.

I'm glad you're in counselling and hope you realise that this isn't about him, it's about you. What is it about you, that makes you expose yourself to such staggering disrespectful and selfish behaviour?

N.B. Isetan - I'm not saying you are wrong, but it takes time to get past the 'Why does he do this?' question. Hell, Lundy Bancroft's book of nearly the same title is this board's favourite book. OP's only just starting to believe (maybe) that her DP is abusive. OK, so the rest of us on MN who have been through it can spot it a mile off - but you cannot just fast forward the process as much as you would like. I am sure everyone commenting on this thread would like to spare OP as much pain as possible, maybe getting her to rip the LTB plaster off, rather than lifting the edge of it and getting it off painfully and slowly. But I think this process has a different shape and timescale for everybody.

However, I do though think this: What is it about you, that makes you expose yourself to such staggering disrespectful and selfish behaviour? is a bit much at this early stage. Good grief, she only started this thread yesterday! I went a long way down the track before I started beating myself up about 'collusion' and what made me vulnerable. First things first please.

p.s. The answer to 'why the fuck to I put up with it?' in my case, was 'Because I chose the wrong man. Because I was groomed and conditioned through no fault of my own.' Sad but true. This stuff was way down the track for me.

through no fault of my own

This. Very much this Hillfarmer. It is the thing so often forgotten in the quest for answers.

You have realised I think OP that you cannot change him only yourself. In a normal rs you would change a bit he would change a bit, a balance would be reached

In a rs with a fucked up dynamic, you give a bit. He does not budge, you give a bit more, he stays put and so on. You cannot keep giving op. Eventually you will break.