It wasn’t until I learned how to be respectful-and especially to relinquish the inappropriate control I thought I should have over his life-that there was a change in the climate. I would have missed the most valuable lesson of my whole life AND the amazing marriage I have now. I tried ultimatums, tears and threats of divorce. That still didn’t get him to respond any better. When I could no longer get the outcome I wanted by trying to persuade, cajole, beg or make demands of my husband, I felt heartbroken, betrayed and furious. I believed that if he would just do what I was telling him to do, everything would be great.īut now I know better. But at the time, I blamed him for all our problems. He wanted to be his own man, and have the autonomy that all men crave. What about what I wanted him to do?īut he’d been bending as far as he could for a long time, and one day he didn’t want to bend anymore. The heart message behind a midlife crisis is a man saying, “I want control over my own life and decisions.”įrom my point of view, that seemed hostile and uncaring. He just had a chronic case of critical, controlling wife-itis. My husband wasn’t having a midlife crisis at all. Turns out he was just tired of being nagged, nit-picked and micromanaged. He wasn’t willing to listen to reason, from my perspective. He was angry, contrary and uncooperative. He seemed like a different person than the guy I married. It made sense to me to try to teach him how to do things when I knew better, but as it turned out, there were a lot of things I thought I knew how to do better than him.Īt first it was irritating, but over time it became unbearable, and that’s when it seemed like he really flipped out. In other words, I was a controlling shrew, but I didn’t realize it. Or tell him not to order Coke at dinner because it’s such a rip-off at restaurants. Or ask him why he wanted to get his friend a Christmas present when his friend didn’t get him one last year. I’d explain why he should go to the store while he was already out instead of making a special trip because it’s more efficient. Of course, he’s a grown man, so I couldn’t stop him from doing what he wanted.īut I often tried to get him to do what I wanted instead. It had to do with feeling like he never got what he wanted because-and this is the embarrassing part-I rarely let him do what he wanted. The reason he quit both his job and the band we played in together on the same day (without breathing a word about it to me) was not because he had middle-age crazies. The reason he was depressed and grumpy, distant and selfish had nothing to do with being in midlife. The reason I ask is because my husband exhibited many of the symptoms of a midlife crisis years ago, and that wasn’t the problem.
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