DH not speaking to me for longer and longer each time

[Gettingsickofthis88]

My husband and I have been together for over 20 years yet we have a problem that's getting worse and worse and I am so sick of it.
If we have an argument or a disagreement, afterwards he will not speak to me and sometimes the children too and he will also stop looking after himself. He will go to bed, not eat, not wash for days.
Yesterday he was going to let our 10 year old daughter watch squid games which i didn't agree with and had already told her no. Had a heated discussion about it, he stormed off and went to bed at 7pm! This happens regularly.
I already know that we won't speak for the rest of this week . I'll make a guess at 5 days. He won't even stay in the same room as me. Won't make my meals for me (he cooks in our house) , won't wash my clothes (he washes too, he's a SAHD) . It makes me not want to go home from work and creates an uncomfortable atmosphere in the house which the kids see aswell.
We have spoken about it alot but it's something that just doesn't improve and is infact getting worse.he says he has no control over it , he has this overwhelming urge to withdraw which is fine if it wasn't affecting everyone else.
It used to be maybe one or two days. He used to do it before we lived together and he wouldn't answer the phone to me and I wouldn't be able to contact him.
Sometimes he will storm out and be gone for hours in the car and won't answer his phone.
Other times he will go to bed.
The worst was we didn't speak for the entire 6 weeks summer holidays last year. I can't even remember what that was about. But nothing major. Its horrible to live with.
After 20 odd years I've had enough. There are other issues aswell but this bothers me the most.
My mum said her first husband was the same and would sulk for days. It's just horrible to be around!!
Does anyone have any advice apart from the obvious LTB?

Apart from the 10 year old , how old are the children? How essential is a stay at home parent?

he says he has no control over it

That's a load of BS. He can control it, he just does not want to.

I'm just on my lunch break, will read all the comments when I get home but to answer a few....

1. I didnt know my mums 1st husband , I'm from her second marriage. She left him
2. He's a SAHD but our kids are older, he's more a house husband. He still does everything for them but stops doing it for me
3. He will speak to them , just not me
4. He only goes off to bed when I'm there
5. He's had therapy before and wouldn't engage

There are many other reasons why I want to separate but wanted to know if others experience this level of sulking?
Granted once it starts i wont talk to him either as I just can't be bothered now. So we essentially ignore each other and then will eventually just start speaking again. I refuse to beg and plead now

Yes, plenty of us on this thread were exposed to this abuse as children, and have been damaged for the rest of our lives by our parents choices.
I don't bother with my mother now, or her current bloke.

My ex husband used to be the same and sulk for days. I came to the decision to leave in the middle of his very last sulk.
The silent treatment wore me down so much over the years.

He attempted to maintain that last sulk and ignore me, until the penny dropped that I was done.

My advice OP? Take your time, don't give him the information you are splitting, speak to a solicitor first so that you know what you are dealing with financially.

Then present it as a done deal.

This is no way to live,

Sadly op I think the writing is on the wall here.
You need to 'match his energy' and then some, i.e withdraw from him so much that you never see him ever again!

For six weeks, whilst refusing to neglect our own kids in the process?

Nah, autism isn't an excuse for this. Autism, he'd shut down to everyone and reset within the hour. This is a pure grudge.

(Edited to reflect new information from OP.)

And you know what?
Even if it’s coming from ND and autism, it’s still just as hurtful,as if it was deliberate. To the OP and to her dcs.

Being ND doesn’t allow you to be an arsehole and stop talking fir 6!!! Weeks.
Actually even with rejection sensitivity etc… I dint know any autistic people who would go silent for that long. Because they calm down and move on. Not keep punishing the other person.

I had this in my marriage (together 24 years, married 14) He would give me the silent treatment any time I tried to raise an issue or do something that he didn't like or if I didn't meet the monthly sex quota

My own father does the same to my mum and I remember what it's like to grow up in that kind of malevolent silence. Because of my experience I would be the one to apologise to him even if I wasn't at fault just so my kids wouldn't have to live in a toxic atmosphere.

Early last year, I sat crying in my car in a car park dreading going home as I was facing a full weekend of the silent treatment because I committed the grievous crime of not wanting to go to the cinema to see a particular film with him. I remember sitting trying to come up with strategies on how I was going to cope and I just thought, fuck this!!

I told him I was done - he packed his shit quite happily, I think he thought I'd come crawling but nope.
When he realised that I was serious, the begging and threats from him started soon after but I was just done.

With a bit of space, I realised that maybe I stayed for so long because that's what I'd seen as normal growing up. I couldn't let my daughter grow up and do the same and thank god she's young enough to see me doing it on my own because I deserve better than a manipulative man baby.

I'm now going through the divorce process and it's hard but not as hard as my marriage was.

It's emotional abuse, and he knows what he's doing, believe me.

After 25 years of silent treatment after any disagreement i told my dh if he did it again would leave (spurred on by a MN thread). We're two months in and he hasn't.

Up to then he's given every excuse in thr fucking book about him needing to withdraw and not being able to cope and then doing icy pleasantries only which basically amounts to the same egg shells routine.

Even our marriage counselor excused it and told me that by predicting that he'd ignore me he did. Mind you she was happy to do all the counselling while he was in therapy for depression without acknowledging that the depression might be a factor.

While feeling relief I'm actually feeling pretty fucking angry that he can actually do life without silent treatment. Wtf was he doing it for?

What did your ex do? Continue to sulk? Was he shocked? Try to reform?

He's a SAHD but our kids are older, he's more a house husband. He still does everything for them but stops doing it for me

Not much of a house husband then, is he?

Also, I think now youre calmer, you're minimising. You said in your OP he doesn't talk to the kids. Now you say he does. I dont think you're lying or backtracking, I think that you've calmed down and are trying to convince yourself it's not quite as bad as you thought it was.....

I have zero issue with people who continue to remain at home after children don't need them as much so this is NOT one of those posts, but I do think if you DO stay home, then you have to be contributing equally and if there's less needed foro the kids, then frankly, yes, you do need to be doing the cooking and cleaning and laundry. Sounds like he has a pretty good life - he gets to opt out whenever he wants, doesn't have to work, has limited responsibilities for the DC (and I'm interested in whether he really is a SAHD or whether he's just a sort of childcare/driving service and you're still doing all the mental load), and if he's cross with you, he has the option to tell himself his life is so hard..... and not engage with you.

I'm not usually the "I bet he's having an affair" type but I do wonder a bit here.

This isn't going to make you feel better necessarily but honestly, I don't think they can stop after all this time, not without actually acknowledging that he is the problem and, from what you've written here, I don't think he has. So he will do it again... it might just take a bit longer.

Sorry, I haven't had time to read the answers, just the OP''s two posts.

I could cry for you, living like this must be hell. I had a cousin who's husband acted the same. His mother told my cousin after they had married, he was a terrible sulker, and that manifested itself in him withdrawing and not speaking (to whoever he had the disagreement with) for days.

He did get worse as the marriage progressed, would go weeks, communicated through their daughter, sleeping in a separate room, leaving the room the wife entered, and so on.

If your husband won't get help, and it seems he tried and refused to cooperate, I cant see an answer.

After the sulker boyfriend I had it was such a revelation when I met my late dh and we could have a disagreement but he'd just talk to me normally afterwards instead of sulking for ages. The woman the sulker moved on to and had a ds with actually phoned me to ask about our relationship and said he hadn't spoken to her for two days. She ended up leaving him.

@SugarPlumpFairyCakes he continued the silent treatment until he had his lightbulb moment and realised I was done. Then he became the chattiest man on the planet. He even lit one of my new candles in an attempt at a heart to heart conversation. I was annoyed about the candle, I wanted that for my first night without him.
It was too late though, to be able to regularly treat me like that, not good enough anymore.
He knew how it wore me down, how embarrassing it was in front of family, how I had to be breezy as fuck to try to make it better for the kids.
Then he went from chatty to angry and he's been like that for the past 20 years.
I think he genuinely thought I'd never leave.

@Gettingsickofthis88 and all the others with these dreadful sulky bastards - even if you told him to shape up or ship out and he miraculously stopped being emotionally abusive, could you forgive him the previous 20 years of appalling behaviour knowing he’d been able to stop BUT HAD CARRIED ON??
Stuff that, ignoring you for 6 whole weeks???
Dont waste any more of your time, or your dc’s lives. There is only one solution - set yourself and your children free. Divorce the horror. You don’t have to tell him, just see a lawyer and get that that ball rolling.

Well yes, quite. That's where i am. How could you live with yourself knowing you'd done something so hurtful you could so easily stop.

You have been very passive to allow your children to be subjected to his behaviour. He is being nasty, immature and cruel to you and the children.
It sounds like you have to separate.
Maybe consider councelling for yourself. It might help you get your thoughts in order. If one of your friends had a husband behaving like this then I bet you would tell them to split up.

Yes, I married a sucker, first a day or so then a couple of days, a week, two weeks, longer and longer each time as I would no longer apologise and left him to it. The last time I decided to record how many days on an app on my phone and when it got to 40 days of the silent treatment I sent him a message on Wattsapp telling him I want a divorce. Oh he wanted to talk to me after he got that message but I no longer wanted to talk to him, I told him he’d had all these years to fix it and now it was too late.

My partner actually used to do something very similar.

after a lot of therapy and discussion we established that it was due to childhood trauma.

feeling criticised or like I was saying they had done something wrong sent them in to an absolute shame spiral that they just couldn’t cope with so emotionally withdrew.

partner often described not being able to control it in the moment.

HOWEVER, it would last a few hours at most and my partner was able to acknowledge the huge impact it had on me /our relationship.

partner went to therapy and actually ENGAGED in it - and once they had understanding of what was happening (and I did too!) it became easier for them to communicate with me.

your partner may/may not be having the same kind of experience but what they are doing is actually very abusive insofar that they aren’t willing to do anything about it (!!!) and are not acknowledging the impact it has on you/your kids.

six weeks not speaking to you is actually utterly insane.

it will not change unless your partner wants it to and is willing to put in the work.

the reason underlying the behaviour is not your partner’s fault as it probably is related to trauma/ND HOWEVER, them not addressing the issue is absolutely their fault.

Also, you don’t have to keep putting it with it if you don’t want to. You can leave and would be well within your rights to do so after years of this behaviour.

When I was a child my mum would do a much milder version of this. She’d not speak to me /be off with me, so (wanting to ‘fix’ whatever was wrong) I’d ask her what was wrong / had I done something wrong etc etc. She would just reply “nothing” or ignore me and this performance would go on all day (or more than one day sometimes). Eventually she would reveal what was upsetting her and it would be something so inconsequential as to be bizarre. It was just attention-seeking / manipulation on her part. It marked my childhood - not hugely, but wasn’t at all pleasant or reasonable to do that to a child. Now consider what your fool of a partner is doing. He deserves to be alone

The problem is you have enabled his behaviour for years, so it’s completely entrenched. I would not tolerate it more than once. It’s completely abusive.

I grew up with two parents that did this to each other. They’d have a row and then neither of them would engage with the other for days on end. Believe me, you do not want to raise children in a house like this. What is it teaching them about how adults behave and move on from arguments?

If you don’t divorce him for your sake, do it for the sake of your family. Sulkers only get away with it because there is a weaker person letting them. Six weeks of not speaking to you? And you came back for more? He’s really doing a number on you and has done for 20 years? What the heck? I can’t tell you how furious it makes me feel. I’m probably not screwed up by my parents’ marriage only because I spent so much time at friends’ homes where they had normal parents. My husband had parents that had a nice, respectful marriage and I don’t think he can appreciate what life at home was like for me. The grand sulks might only have been a few times a year, but it is my pervading memory of my childhood. I would hate to even think of subjecting my children to this sort of thing.

Freaking out for a few hours is one thing - not ideal, but hardly marriage ending.

It’s quite nice of you to say the root cause is from childhood - OP’s husband could just be a sulky arse though…..

You've reached the end of the road
There's nothing else but divorce... and then freedom and a happy peaceful life for you and DC
Children soak up atmospheres like a sponge so you must do it now