Nowhere does it say that he’s actively imposing his high moral standards on OP or that she feels controlled, she just says he has high moral standards. If she was constantly being policed or preached at by him because of this, it would be another matter. Men quite rightly get a bashing for cheating on MN but when they adore their wife and have high moral standards about (I presume this was what OP was referring to) how they interact with other women, which is what we’d all hope about our partners, they’re accused using it as a way of being controlling. Sometimes men can’t win.
I do however understand that this can be true of some men, and does indeed come from their own insecurity, I agree with you there, but I’m taking OP’s reaction as just feeling bad that she has done something that she believes he wouldn’t.
If she felt controlled she’d be talking more about fear and anxiety around his reactions if he found out and she isn’t, she feels bad internally about herself rather than bad about how he might react. I’m not getting a controlling vibe here at all.
It probably comes from a belief that she sees her husband, who is obviously a very significant figure in her life, as pretty perfect too and therefore perceives her minor drunken comment as far, far worse than others would.
When we see someone as perfect, we are likely to view any, even the tiniest error of our own as huge and guilt is never far away.
A psychiatrist once told me (talking about parenting and its effects on children) that one of their first questions for people with excessive guilt was to ask them to rate their parents from 1-10, 1 being the worst and 10 the best. The vast majority of people with poor mental health issues around self esteem and anxiety that they saw in their consulting room, gave their parents either an expected very low rating or, surprisingly, an extremely high rating. So, do terrific parents damage your mental health? No, of course not, but our own perceptions and beliefs around that can.
Our perception of significant figures in our lives strongly affects our guilt and self-deprecation responses, as we can feel internally that we can somehow never ‘measure up’ to the lofty heights of the person we perceive them to be.
They don’t have to do a thing to us, they don’t have to demand a high opinion of them from us to try to control us or shame us, they might not even know how much we think they are perfect, our inner perceptions and the beliefs we have constructed about them do it all.
You’ll never find a person who feels more guilt than somebody who thinks their mother or father were ‘perfect’. Women who view their mothers as ‘perfect’ can suffer because they hold them up as a female role model that they will never live up to, even if their mother never criticised them. They struggle to feel that they are ‘enough’. Same thing for men and fathers.
The belief isn’t imposed from above by the significant other, it’s a perception constructed internally by the sufferer themselves and the significant other can’t help them doing this and have done nothing controlling or abusive for it to happen, they might not even know that that’s how they are perceived.
OP thinks her husband is her ‘dream’ partner, the adoring man who would never dream of even commenting to another woman, therefore in her mind anything she sees as a slip-up, absolutely anything, will feel absolutely huge.
He doesn’t necessarily have had to have done anything to OP for her to form this opinion and feel the resulting guilt.
Nobody is perfect and no matter how perfect we think they are, they are all human.
My psychiatrist friend said that the healthiest perception of our parents we can have is that they were ‘good enough’. Which recognises their bad poi ts as well as their marvellous ones.
OP you’ll feel way better when you acknowledge that nobody is perfect, everyone slips up, even your dream husband too. I think you have him on a bit of a pedestal too and feel like you haven’t measured up.
Pedestals are for statues who can’t slip up because they’re not human. Marriages are for humans who do slip up every now and again and building a life together means that’s definitely going to happen, so don’t beat yourself up and celebrate the love and admiration you have for each other not as perfect saints but as fallible, but very wonderful, human beings.