Am I being too sensitive?

[akmom]

You have to stop confusing control for love.

It sounds like Tropical Wilds got it right. I mean, how long can it take to send a text? Presumably he spent the whole night with you guys, and any time afterward if you stayed awake, but at the stroke of midnight he texted his mom. You're getting hung up on that stroke of midnight. It's just a minute. It's not a symbolic moment in which you embrace what is most dear to you, nor is it a statement about priorities. If you feel like he is being a baby, or not spending any time with you, or not giving you any attention, then you should articulate why. Because that one account doesn't tell such a story.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

I would like to clear this up...I did not say it was the "crime of the century"...it just hurt me since he asked to celebrate with my family and then it felt like he did not want to be there with my family, me and our son.

Because you're having marital difficulties. Maybe he suggested it because he thought it would help. Maybe he suggested it because he wanted a buffer. Either way, wondering why he's acting like he doesn't want to be there is what one would expect when they're spending time with somebody who's considering leaving, has said so, and their family.

When I said cleave to his wife...I mean emotionally. We should be emotionally dependent on each other. Why would I compete with someone's mother? I am a mother as well. I have total respect for his mother because she is my elder and my husband's mom...but I am his wife. I did not go into full details about things that are a going on in this part of our life because I was only asking was I being too sensitive about New Year's...however I was raised that " a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife"
God instructs a married couple to leave their parents. The Hebrew words used in Genesis 2:24, which states that "a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife," mean "to forsake dependence upon," "leave behind," "release," and "let go."

Again, you slant this as if you're in competition with his mother for a finite amount of affection that he has. When you make who he shows his love to into a competition, do not be surprised or disappointed when you don't come out the winner.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you become "emotionally dependent" on each other to the point where you exclude the love displayed and exhibited by one's own family members. He has left his family for marriage, but he still has a relationship with his mother. I'm not seeing why you take that as such a threat.

Jesus addressed the issue when he said that no one was ever intended to come between a husband and a wife (Matthew 19:6). No one! No in-laws, no mother, no father was meant to divide a couple who had made a covenant with each other to leave, cleave, and become one flesh.

I'm sorry, but you're using the Bible to justify what you want based on what you think it says. The Bible does not say that when people get married, they get put in a little box and their love and attention is the exclusive property of their spouse. The Bible does not say that one excludes their parents from their lives in favor of their spouse. In fact, the Bible does speak of always honoring your parents... In several places actually.

If you're wanting to isolate him from everything and everyone until you feel secure in your marriage and everything is 100% perfect, not only will you drive him away, you're striving for something that will never happen.

A son who has a relationship with his mother and a mother who's maintaining a relationship with her son is hardly somebody coming in and "dividing a couple." Especially in this case where one spouse has announced they have one foot out the door and are considering separation. Dividing a couple is things like infidelity or people who would attempt to undo marriages that weren't advantageous socially or financially (something that isn't a concern now but was at the time the Bible was written). It isn't nurturing family relationships with one's own parents.

I get the feeling that you announced you're considering it because you were hoping he'd drop everything, come rushing to you, and beg you to stay and promise to do what you wanted to fix the marriage. That rarely, if ever, works. When you announce your detached enough that you're considering leaving, it's a wound that can't be taken back and he's going to seek support from the people in his life who won't leave... His family.

I think even if you think long and hard, you'll see that you're applying a standard to him that you aren't maintaining yourself. After all, you were at your family's place for the New Year. You didn't say to him when he suggested it "No, couples first, our marriage first. Nobody divides a couple and I shall cleave onto my husband." Something tells me if he'd suggested to celebrate at his family's home, you wouldn't have accepted that as readily as you accepted doing it at your family's home.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

A wife and mother's love are totally different. I love my husband with all my heart. The last thing I would want is to divorce him. I cannot make someone believe that our marriage is priority when he does not make our marriage priority. My question was "Am I being too sensitive"? I would like to feel important...and its not about who loves who more. There should be a balance and understanding. I am almost out the door...because he is almost out the door. You do not know my full story. He is my top priority after God!

Yes, a wife and mother's love is different, but I can still answer with confidence that I treat my husband better than his mother... Something you couldn't answer and still haven't answered. That is a big red flag and perhaps the thread you need to pull to understand why your marriage is where it is.

You demand respect and being made a priority, but you can't honestly answer if you are doing the same for him and give a lot of reasons why it's a comparison you can't make. That's a huge problem.

And I'd like to point out, you said "The last thing I would want is to divorce him" but then say three lines later "I am almost out the door...because he is almost out the door." This is a conflicting message and once you've established you'll use the threat of leaving but pin it on him, you've done an extensive amount of damage to the relationship that will be a monster to repair. Listing somebody's faults and then resorting to emotional blackmail for a solution to a troubled marriage is a bell that's hard to un-ring. He will now remember forever that behavior and it will taint any issue in your marriage forever.

It's hard to want to respect and prioritize a relationship where you're told you're failing at it, your partner is considering leaving and it's your fault because you're not making the marriage a priority, so fix it. It shows that it's his fault and responsibility things aren't great and it's his fault and responsibility you want to leave.

True reconciliation comes when both parties examine what they're doing to each other to undermine the sanctity of the marriage, not when one person submits a list of all the things they don't like and expects the other to fix it on penalty of taking the blame for something they're already being blamed for. There does come a point where they say "I can do nothing right, so who cares?"

Sounds like he's fast approaching there, if not there already.

 

[Tropical Wilds]

I love and respect my husband...and every mortal that I know wants the same in return.

God obviously comes first: Deuteronomy 6:5, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” All of one’s heart, soul, and strength is to be committed to loving God, making Him the first priority.

If you are married, your spouse comes next. A married man is to love his wife as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25). Christ’s first priority—after obeying and glorifying the Father—was the church. Here is an example a husband should follow: God first, then his wife. In the same way, wives are to submit to their husbands “as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22). The principle is that a woman’s husband is second only to God in her priorities.

If husbands and wives are second only to God in our priorities, and since a husband and wife are one flesh (Ephesians 5:31), it stands to reason that the result of the marriage relationship—children—should be the next priority. Parents are to raise godly children who will be the next generation of those who love the Lord with all their hearts (Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 6:4), showing once again that God comes first. All other family relationships should reflect that.

Deuteronomy 5:16 tells us to honor our parents so that we may live long and so things will go well with us. No age limit is specified, which leads us to believe that as long as our parents are alive, we should honor them. Of course, once a child reaches adulthood, he is no longer obligated to obey them (“Children, obey your parents...”), but there is no age limit to honoring them. We can conclude from this that parents are next in the list of priorities after God, our spouses, and our children. After parents comes the rest of one's family (1 Timothy 5:8).

I'm sorry, but when we get to the point in the argument where we don't listen to advice and instead take to the Bible to cultivate passages in such a way that justify our behavior, we've reached a point of no return.

I'm well aware of what the Bible says and I can see you're great at quoting it, but you've distorted a lot of it to match what you want it to say in the context of your problem.

I can and will tell you right now, there's nothing that puts a wife one small step below God in terms of respect, nor is there a passage that puts the family one large step below the wife. By your own admission, the Bible says you're to honor your parents and there's no cutoff date or age for that given, even though you choose to interpret it to mean you stop once you reach adulthood. And I could sit here and repost all those passages that show you that, but ultimately you very clearly want one answer and anything that is furnished to show you as much will be subjected to the same wide interpretation you gave the passages above so that you can then have more ammunition to whack your husband on the head with to prove you should be his sole focus.

As somebody who was married unhappily, divorced enthusiastically, and is now remarried euphorically, I can tell you one thing for certain... People get tired of being told what to do. People get tired of being told everything they do is wrong. When people feel like they can do no right, they'll give up trying, and when they're told they can do no right and unless they start doing right then they'll lose their partners and they can add that to the list of the things they're doing wrong, there will come a day where they say "fine" and hold the door open for you to walk out of. Emotional blackmail to resolve a situation is not the turning point to resolution, it's very often a very big nail in a coffin.

In all of these posts you've made, you've told us all he's done wrong while not examining what you're doing wrong to him. You've told us why everybody from God to the Bible must think he's wrong and agree with you. We've not heard how you can adapt your behavior and expectations from something many have told you are unrealistic, only how the world should contort to what you want and how you want it in order for you to be happy. If you are waiting for that day to come, it's not going to come and you may as well leave now.

From where I sit, you've got two choices. You can continue to attempt to isolate him and demand he changes (since you can't force him to change) while offering nothing in return, then sit back and wonder why your relationship is in shambles... Or you can initiate change by taking responsibility for the things you can control. Let him know what you're willing to change and what you'll try to change, then let him know what you'd like to see from him. Give him a clear path to be right for once and not totally wrong, then give him credit when it happens. Work together to fix it, not stand there tapping your toes waiting for the change, then pounding your fists on the floor while wailing wondering why it doesn't happen.

You've tried your way for awhile and a lot of people are giving you very similar advice on how to change it. Since you know your way doesn't work, maybe try it the other way for awhile?

 

[Susie~Q]

You are his wife, you should be first in all things, not his mother. It is good he respects her, but you should have been the first he wished Happy New Year to.

I don't like divorce, but, I would suggest you tell him he either puts you first or you are leaving (not divorce) and will return only when he matures, normally, this will snap them out of their childish ways.

 

[LinkH]

Where is the dislike button for that last post? That's dangerous advice to give based on the information given. People talking about marital problems are inclined to have a skewed perspective. The doesn't lead to introspection on the part of the poster, the one who is actually reading, maybe, who could be helped.

 

[LinkH]

In response to the opening post. If my wife had a disrespectful attitude toward me during a time of marital strife, and called me a 'mama's boy' (which causes me to wonder if you might have a bit of disrespect toward your husband), I might be tempted to spend less time with her, to avoid the arguing and the stress.

If a woman is displeased with a man, on his case for not spending time with her, negative toward him, etc., it's a fairly natural response for a man to want to avoid that kind of conversation. A lot of mothers are very warm toward their sons and think highly of them. Some think their sons can do no wrong. So a man in this situation might go to his mother for comfort. It's better for the marriage than going to a girlfriend.

A trick to get more positive attention from your husband is to have a loving, respectful attitude toward him, rather than a critical one. It's easy for him to enjoy spending time with you if that's the case. If you are critical, you push him away. If your critical for him moving away from you, that's a tough situation to win.

TW and I have disagreed a lot in the past. This time, I think she gave some really good advice.

Women like to talk. At least my wife does. If she's stressing about something and wants to talk late at night, sometimes it takes a lot out of me to listen to her. She doesn't always like the natural male response of offering solutions. I heard a couple of people on the radio talking about how researchers found a woman's pleasure center in her brain is wired to her verbal center by neurons in a way a man's aren't. That makes sense to me. If I'm stressed, I'm less likely to talk about it than she is.

Now if she's stressed and blaming me for something, and wants to talk to me about it at 10 at night or later, and especially if she wants to talk about it over and over again, repetitively, on and on, and talk and not have a dialogue, that's a rather intolerable situation. If she has some kind of issue with me and gets into doing that sort of thing, that needs to be resolved fast.

It sounds like your issue is not getting enough attention from him emotionally. Now, imagine this scenario. The issue is the wife doesn't think her husband gives her enough attention. So she constantly has unpleasant conversations, or monologues, about it, how is he going to react? He doesn't want to hear that. So if he avoids that kind of emotional torture...or discomfort, or whatever... she feels rejected. He's not listening. This is another case of her not getting what she feels she needs and what she feels he owes her. But it's not realistic for her to expect him to want to listen to her criticize him, on and on, never accepting an apology, always having a negative attitude toward him.

If you want to have a conversation where he pays you attention, think of a list of 10 great things about him, and have a conversation... or monologue, about that, with a nice, positive, loving cheerful attitude, when it isn't late at night and when he's not in the middle of something else.

My wife and I got married in the last millennium. There have been times we weren't getting along as well as we'd like. What we do is spend some time praying and asking God to help us resolve the situation. We ask God to expose sin and help us forgive each other. Then we talk it out. Somehow, this seems to work when we humble ourselves and pray first. We confess our sins and/or apologize to one another. It's not an issue that keeps resurfacing. She isn't constantly upset about it with no end. That usually seems to work on resentment issues and things get back to normal again and put things back on track.

You probably are stuck in a bad cycle where you are upset with him for not 'being there for you' emotionally, and he's avoiding you because you are upset with him and whatever other emotional stuff you've got going on toward him that's related to your being upset. You've got to forgive, get rid of resentment, repent, etc. to get out of a cycle like that. My guess is his mother is an issue for you because you don't feel like you are getting the proper emotional attention from him, and he's paying attention to his mother.