314pe wrote:
The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
Wife yelling/snarky commenting at husband, and showing a kind of revulsion/annoyance at husbands, is a very common and typical thing, and there's no social boundary for it because it's not considered verbal abuse when it's coming from a woman against man.
Because it's ok for a woman to be emotional, but a man has to be stoic. I noticed this in my relationship as well. My wife said that she can yell at me because she is a girl and I am not allowed to yell because I am a boy.
I look at this two different ways.
On the one hand, it’s trendy for men to be henpecked because the pattern has always been that men were dominant and could abuse women without any thought to consequences. The more liberal society becomes and favors women, the more pressure men have to deal with a double-standard.
It’s a consequence of feminism being so widely adopted that husbands have become so neutered. I’ve dated women who were like that, who seemed to claim ownership of me without like reciprocation, i.e. I have no right to “be a man.”
While I fundamentally disagree with the OP reasoning for avoiding relationships, I firmly believe that if that’s what relationships are all about, there are better and more important things in life. My objection is just that not all relationships are like that, nor do they have to be like that.
The other side of the coin just deals with what roles you choose for yourselves in a lifelong relationship such as marriage. My wife sees me more as an executive. A decision-maker, someone who establishes a shared vision and provides a big-picture direction for the family. She sees herself as a details person, a doer, an “operations director” of sorts. At home, she would say the best thing I can do is stay out of her way and let her work. If I want to step in and help, it has to be done HER way. Because she works hard in and out of the home, she’s really not up for dealing with my needs or urges, so intimacy is strictly on HER terms.
If that’s the dynamic we’re talking about, then fine. I don’t mind her being the boss. And she doesn’t feel so much pressure because our ultimate success or failure is on me. She gets praised for the good stuff, I take blame for the bad stuff.
I don’t feel neutered because she allows me to do what I need to do and what others need me to do. We share one vehicle for the whole family, so the one night a week I have to get to my other job before she gets off work I change clothes and run 5-6 miles across town where she joins me later on with the kids. I work that into my exercise routine, and I work out a few times per week besides.
If I played in a band and had gigs, she wouldn’t give me a hard time about it. If I actually had friends to hang out with, she’d be ok with it. When I need to buy a new musical instrument, she doesn’t give me a hard time over it. Actually, I did buy a new piano for gigs and made the money back in about 3 months and was able to bring in a lot more for a year after that. Took some online classes to get my teaching license reinstated, bought a new high end laptop with music software and sample libraries and it’s like I never spent a dime for it. She’s just that cool because she knows those things end up benefitting us both.
A lot of women would be, like, ok, you didn’t spend money on ME??? How come YOU get nice things and I don’t?
If letting a woman run the house means that I can do what I need to do, I’m all for that and don’t mind getting bossed around a little.
There is a line between that and abuse. There is absolutely NO REASON WHATSOEVER for any woman to yell at a man or for a man to yell at a woman. My wife and I treat each other like reasonable adults. We talk business when we have to. We debate important things. We disagree sometimes. We get frustrated. The frustration is usually about things we find we can’t both get our way on. We’ll reach a point where we agree that there’s just no way to get what we want, so we let it go and move on to something else. We both have those “line in the sand” moments sometimes that we have to work through. But for the most part, we avoid zero-sum games in our life together.
We don’t yell our insult each other. We don’t trash each other around other people, neither around each other or even in private. People think I dominate her because I have the final say, but they really don’t understand what it’s like being us.
What disturbs me about it all is our society has pushed female dominance so much that people sometimes make fun of us BECAUSE I don’t necessarily back down and obey my wife, like being “the man of the house” is something to be ashamed of. Like she SHOULD yell at me, or we should come to blows on things. Or if we don’t agree on something she should blab our private business to her friends. Instead, she’s publicly supportive of me and brings relational and personal issues directly to me.
And we fix things, and hold hands in public, and don’t avoid each other like there’s something to be ashamed of. We work as a team.
The idea that a man should dominate a woman or a woman should dominate a man is absolute trash. I’m married, not neutered. We’re allowed to work together as equals, sharing everything and not complaining about it. I think it’s the best way to go.
26 Feb 2018, 2:34 pm
