'Background negging', how weird or common is this?

[pentangles]

Really difficult to describe but will try my best.
Now Ex DH of 30 years, met when i was 21 and he was 32. We are from fairly different family backgrounds, but before I go further I will say that he has never shown prejudice to any social group. That kind of thing has never seemed to interest him at all.

I was born into a good deal of privilege, he wasn't. We both came from stable families and never suffered any early trauma. He did not grow up in poverty but had much less choice than I had, and left home at 16 due to arguing with is parents as he did not want to get a job. He joined a kind of arty counterculture and dropped contact with them.

I met him quite young and we seemed to have a lot of things in common, although looking back I am not so sure. My family liked him and were very open minded when I moved in with him but advised me to be careful of putting my education on hold. After a few years I applied for uni and received many offers, my chosen one happened to be at the other end of the country. He really didn't like this and told me the relationship would not survive the distance. He even went so far as to suggest having a child, which was crazy since we had both decided we didn't want any.

Unfortunately I turned the place down and relocated somewhere local to him instead. I felt as if he gritted his teeth through most of it, but never said anything. During most of these years my parents were incredibly generous and funded my education/home costs. And this brings me to the weird bit -

The 'negging' thing has only become apparent to me lately, in retrospect. During that 30 years he always described me (and 'us') as 'struggling', as never having had access to any kind of privilege, and that we didn't fit in to society. I thought this was unusual but never really questioned it. As the years went by I slowly took on his values and perspective. He chose low paid work and terrible housing, which my family advised me against, but I loved him so went along with it. For many years I did very little with my degree. He always favoured his friends to mine, so slowly people from my own background lost touch.

A few arguments over the years brought this up, and he would insist that we 'began from nothing' and 'didn't have the options' other people did. If I mentioned my background he would absolutely refuse it, saying my family were just like his, but with a car
Over the years I have come to accept that I was indeed extremely privileged and had many advantages at my feet, with an endless safety net and security even going into my 40's with some inheritance.. His denial of this seems so thoroughly weird to me, and I can't think of why he would do that, since he does not seem to have any kind of class prejudice at all. His sister and brother are more the other way - they both used to rib me constantly about my speech and behaviours.

Unfortunately the relationship left me confused and uncertain of myself, nothing new I know, but it has been difficult for me to re-establish my own memories and awareness. I now see myself as having lived a life of struggle even though I really really haven't. He even insisted my inheritance was 'small fry' and useless to me, which I am sure it is compared to many.
Why would someone do this?
I have heard of people having cultural clashes but this was like a whole scale denial, one that I stupidly went along with. In a way it is like my confidence was slowly stripped from me, but because there was no overt abuse I couldn't see it happening in real time. He always got on with my family and they supported him often, yet his family largely didn't approve of me due to a belief that I would hurt him (no idea why) and that I was' laa-dee-daa'.

WTF does any of that mean? is it at all common? Am sorry it is so long, I tried my best to condense it.
is it a kind of negging? It sure feels like that now.

Not it isn’t common. It sounds like he had a personality disorder, possibly covert narcissism? Either way, he has enmeshed you. Your identity has become one. It’s usual for a common set of values to become the shared focus on a relationship but this is very extreme. I think this was an abusive relationship op, maybe some therapy would be helpful to disentangle this mess.

Your life with your partner and your wish to analyse it sounds too complex for MN, unless you’re okay to get some quick responses. You really need some professional therapy I think to go deeper and get the type analysis that you seek.

Hi, thank you for responding.
I am not too bad really, my life has improved immeasurably since we parted and I am doing well. I am very curious about what happened though. I have done a lot of work on myself to rebalance, it has taken a while but I am moving forward.
I didn't imagine anyone thinking this would require therapy, but will definitely give that some thought.

He was diagnosed with depression many years ago, although I know that takes many forms.

That’s life hun. You made those choices to marry him. To relocate nearer to him. You loved him.

Now you don’t.

Simple as that.

A guy doesn’t have to be a bad guy for you to fall out of love with him. Sometimes you drift apart as you go through life stages and then you start seeing the incompatibilities that you ignored at the beginning.

From what you’ve written, he feels embarrassed/ashamed of his upbringing and doesn’t like it when you keep bringing the fact up that you had better life opportunities than him. It sounds like you’re covertly implying you could both have had a much better life if only he’d had the same upbringing as you. An upbringing he had no control over. He wasn’t “born into it” like you. No wonder he’s defensive and tries to justify himself and minimise the differences between you. It sounds like you look down on him.

That’s how it reads to me anyway.

He seems desperate to put you on an even footing with him. A sort of levelling, I think. He had no drive or ambition, so when he felt threatened by your chances he made sure to thwart your ambitions, lest your eyes be opened to what a nothing he was.
I agree with the poster who hinted at abuse. He dragged you down, and gaslighted you into thinking this was normal, and you could not have done better.
I do feel sad for you, but glad you can leave him behind. Onwards and upwards - put some of that inheritance to good use and find a good therapist. You can find yourself again.

21 and 32 does stand out for the wrong reasons unfortunately.

I don't think at 21 you could "see the bigger picture" about things, and I think he exploited that.

When I encounter many male 21 year olds, I can see they are incredibly vulnerable and not really able to mindfully make good decisions.

So even if they thought an older woman was attractive and sophisticated (and lust and admiration is what "young love" is like) and their dream woman to commit to, they can't really "place" her and see other opportunities ahead of them.

Or they're impressed by her "social confidence" or that she has a job and a flat and can afford nice clothes.

Also decision making is hard when younger. Someone mature who "takes the lead" can be very attractive - but for whose benefit? Would the older person wants what's best for the younger person, or for them?

Someone predatory can exploit that dynamic.

I kind of scrub up ok as an older woman, and I could see how I could take advantage of someone younger... but it would be creepy and unethical.

There's an episode of that (guilty pleasure) First Dates Hotel programme where they set up a beautiful Cambridge student who SAYS she likes "alternative streetwise" older men with an older guy.

Whilst they are clearly "taking what she says at face value", and the programme is a set-up, it is a bit creepy seeing how he tries to "immediately socially dominate/neg her" as he can see that she could potentially "do much better".

She's obviously incredibly intelligent but also fairly "childish and uncertain" of herself (as early twenties people are) and he's picking up on it.

I agree this might need counselling to unpick as obviously "your whole life" has been this. And also try to be happy now as that's most important.

I don’t think he necessarily has a ‘personality disorder’ (how can anyone diagnose this from a few lines in a post?) - he just sounds like a flawed human being, with a chip on his shoulder.

It reads like a sub-par older man, taking advantage of a younger, naive woman.

A tale as old as time.

I agree with pp that talking it over with a professional would probably be helpful.

Thank you everyone, it is helpful to see all responses to this since I have rarely discussed it out loud.

The comment about the age gap was like a slap in the face, because it is quite close to the bone, and makes a LOT of sense to me. Oh how we can see things so much clearer in retrospect.

I may consider some counselling, maybe something domestic? I don't have any real issues in my life at present so don't think CBT would be all that useful, but maybe something to allow me to at least unpack the memories and process them further.

Sounds to me like he needed reasons aka excuses for underachieving in life and rewrote a history that fitted this brief.

It's all a bit:"I could have been someone." "Well so could anyone."

It's not negging so much as gaslighting. He was emotionally abusive through that and isolating you from friends and family.

He was trying to destroy your sense of sense to keep you irrecoverably bound to him. Together, you could survive as outsiders but without him, you were vulnerable.

Total bollocks obviously. I'm glad you're out.

I also agree that therapy would be helpful to you. Not CBT but proper psychotherapy.

Is it just a kind of inverted snobbery eg he didn’t do as well as he could have and didn’t go to university but it was his choice and he looks down on people who ‘conform?’

I have had a few relationships like this with men who were clever and from a very ordinary background but were anti-education and career. They benefited from mine though.

Maybe it’s not the same at all but it reminded me of several men I have known who claim they are hard done by but it was their life choice not to study or work hard.

Sounds abusive to me. The pressure not to go further away to uni and wanting to trap you with a child. Sounds like he knew he was punching but because of the age gap was able to pull the wool over your eyes when you were young and vulnerable so you didn't realise that you could do so much better than him. It seemed he didn't really want to achieve anything in his life and he wanted to drag you down to that level with him.

I'm glad you're away from him. I think talking to a good psychotherapist you help you unpick this and why you settled for this man who didn't seem to have your best interests at heart.

Well he went off the child idea pretty quickly, but he deeply resented me going for interviews across the country.
I think a lot of the resistance to me branching out was a fear of me meeting men my own age. This became even more evident as time went on. I am ashamed to say that I put up with a lot of punishment for his sexual insecurity in those early years.

He blamed his mother for most of his issues, and in fits of anger would occasionally yell at me that I reminded him of her (I do not). He is almost 60 now and his mother has been dead for many years, but he remains furious with her. As far as I am aware, she belittled his interest in books and schooling. Not good, but he did have options to carve his own path after 18. His life has been all about anger, really.

He never seemed conscious of money or interested in achieving it. I am just surprised that he wanted me to believe I had no privileges in my life. For example, after my A-levels I wanted to work for a few years with my sister who ran an animal sanctuary before going to uni. He was pleased with this but always treated my sister as if she was ditsy, or in his words 'bonkers' when she was extremely capable and intelligent.

His own sister wouldn't give me the time of day thanks to inverse snobbery (as someone put it above), but if you say that out loud people think YOU are the snob, so you can't win :(

My opinion now? I wonder if he felt a certain amount of contempt for my family because they might (just might!) have led me in a different direction.

This is abuse. I recommend therapy if you wish to unpick understand this. It's almost like grooming. He groomed you into thinking you didn't "deserve more" or could just go back to your family. He kept you believing you were unfortunate. He kept his foot on your neck.
All this reads like an attempt to control you, rewriting history to make himself feel better, reduce your confidence and reduce the likelihood you would leave him

You sound like you now feel that you have under achieved and missed some opportunities in life. Looking back you seem to have a lot of regrets and wonder if you should have gone down different paths?

You are linking your regrets to the influence of your partner and it does appear that he had a big influence in some of your key decisions in life. Whether he always had you best interests at heart or he was just showing controlling and selfish behaviour at these times is difficult for us outsiders to say, but it does seem that he didn’t encourage you to achieve many of your ambitions in life.

Your now going through some introspection and analysis of your relationship can be positive. But you may need professional therapy to get the answers that you’re seeking.

I think @GoodNightsSleep has nailed it. He sounds like a bit of a nob. Having had his carefree 20s, he went for someone with very little life experience because women closer to him in age would have had him pegged as bit of a nob.

It’s a shame you allowed him to influence your uni choices. He did stop you making the most of your opportunities during those years. BUT you’ve still got plenty of time to make the life you want to make. There’ll be useful stuff you learned from your experience with him. And whilst I would never have allowed a BF to influence my uni choices, I have got some other stuff seriously wrong over the years and have some quite big regrets - whereas you may well have got that stuff right. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t do some stuff differently if they had their time over but life is for learning and it sounds like you’re entering a very exciting period! Therapy for what’s troubling you and then onward and upward, OP.

Thank you.
Yes I am horrified at what I allowed to happen, but it is true that we can only focus on the future, and this is what I have been doing. I would do many things differently if I were to do my time again, and I know that I am not alone in that.
I think gaining awareness is the most important thing.

Another embarrassing factor is that I dumbed myself down a lot, without being terribly conscious of doing so. So I altered my accent a bit, took on a different world view (bear in mind i was quite young), and completely supported a lifestyle that I didn't feel at home with. I can't answer why
Of course I am more than aware of it now!

Opening up to who I really am has been a slow yet deliberate process, and when he first realised that I was doing that, the tension was palpable. He began to treat with me utter contempt, although thinly veiled, and just lost interest in me altogether. It became really obvious to me that my happiness and growing confidence upset him.

Yes, the prospect of you not needing him must have really upset him. Because he knew deep down he was not your equal and you would leave him behind. Which is what’s happened.

But you seem primed to make the most of what’s ahead of you and that’s terrific!

He brought you down to his level (struggle) Infact he gaslit you down to his level. Some men deliberately and insidiously chip away at a woman to knock her down a peg or 2. Although you had a certain amount of privilege, he wanted you firmly in the trenches with him as I'm guessing he thought he could never get himself out of the figurative trenches, with his self fulfilling struggle mentally!? Maybe I'm over shooting the mark but that's just my 2 cents 😀

The story of your ex reminds me of a quote I always liked, ‘a bleak man tells why he likes bleakness, it seems a strength but proves a weakness.’

As a few posters have suggested, he sounds like a man who’s been simultaneously attracted by and threatened by your opportunities and potential. He’s done his best to make sure that you stay where he wants you to be, for fear you’d move on without him, and to cement your joint future he’s created a joint narrative. ‘Us against the world’ is pretty popular, it’s an easy sell as well.

I’ve got a bit of sympathy with a life that’s never come to much, I also have a bit of sympathy with your description of his parents. Where I lose sympathy is the way he manipulated a younger partner and how dedicated he’s been, over the decades, to this vision of you both, to both your expense. Some men would have gladly accepted that by meeting a woman of some greater means, life threw them a line. Perhaps he’s afraid of failure. Hard to fail if you never try.

Speaking as a working class person who grew up with both great potential and crippling fear of failure, I think it’s a sad shame that not everyone has the same chances in life, but that shouldn’t have been your burden to bear. Ultimately, by the time he met you he had plenty of agency and was, as my granny said, all the man he’d ever be. It’s easier said than done for someone to shake off a damaging upbringing but that doesn’t mean anyone should throw themselves away to assuage someone else’s insecurities. All the chat about how ‘we’re’ xy or z is all a matter of mindset isn’t it? He might have used your connections and opportunities as a way to access choices of his own (not in a manipulative or exploitative way, more just by seeing that we don’t all have to stay angry young women/men forever) and realise his own potential. He didn’t want to, that’s also fine, but it’s a long life for you bound to a man hell-bent on destroying what he couldn’t create.

Regarding the title, it’s not really negging, per se, it’s more troubling and insidious than that. Personally (I’m 42, so neither old nor young) now you’re out of it, I wouldn’t spend lots of time trying to understand the why of him, a lot of what’s been said here is fairly astute and sounds entirely plausible. Unless, of course, you think that analysis would benefit you. But that would be more about you than him.

Now you’re live to the ‘what’ of him, you know his playbook inside out, and you’re making the most of the life you have. Sounds like a good
result.

21 is barely an adult and the age gap was huge to be honest.
I think he feels insecure about your familial differences and it's a defence mechanism to lump you and his family's socio-economics in one bag because really your relationship from the offset had too many imbalances.
I don't believe he had no trauma, what sort of family pushes a 16 year old out? What sort of a well adjusted 32 year old go for a 21 year old 'kid' really who was yet to finish her education you weren't a worldly graduate at that point your life was still starting out. What sort of a healthy man throws the idea of a baby to keep a young woman? I think he is trying to control the narrative to make himself look better, he seems to enjoy the struggling victim mentality. Any suggestion that he got with a wealthier woman, that he was predatory but mostly it's jealousy and insecurity about you being financially better off than his family. He is trying to rewrite history and gaslight you because he is worried about seeming like he used you or that he was the male equivalent of a gold digger. Maybe he is insecure that you grew up wealthier than he could provide you and feels guilt and shame about downgrading with him. I don't think it's a personality disorder though and not everything is 'narcissism' this and that.

You don't have to live with him for the rest of your life.

When you met him he was 32, and he'd left home at 16, so he'd spent 16 years thinking of himself as a down to earth person who "stood on their own two feet" and didn't need handouts from anyone. He made you fit into the same mould instead of allowing you to find your own identity (a hugely important part of our teens and early 20s).

I think there's sexism involved here as well as the class / money aspect. He didn't like having a much younger girlfriend who was better educated than him and probably on course to earn more than him.

OP, now you are free from this man I truly wish you a happy time in finding out who you are and enjoying it.

I agree with this and also the pp about covert narcissism although we can’t of course diagnose this. Not acknowledging your achievements or any good fortune you’ve had (eg. Inheiritance) sounds very deliberate. This usually goes hand in hand with jealousy IMO so the best way for them to manage their jealousy is to downplay or even deny the things you have that they don’t.

I just glossed over the age gap now, well this explains a lot. Younger women are usually attractive to older men not only for their looks or figure, but also because these men feel they have the upper hand with women who are less experienced in life and may not be as established as them. In your exes case his problem was you had quite a privileged background so he probably felt as if you had the ‘upper hand’ so to speak and wouldn’t be as dependent on him as some other young girls.

i think it’s definitely complex and worth exploring. Ignore my previous comment about him being possibly narcissistic, because actually it’s not something you can get to the bottom of easily and perhaps you don’t need to and should just focus on your own healing and reflection.

It’s a shame no one from your family had an issue with the age difference but I do get it was more common back then, assuming you met him a few decades ago.

He is your EX so I would normally say give him no thought but 30 years of that weirdness and keeping you down deserves some un picking in therapy

He did not support your education that was your first red flag suggesting a baby to keep you second red flag
All other negative comments red flags

So glad he is your ex