“If he’s confident with himself and who he is, he’ll come to resent you. If he’s at all unsure about himself, he’ll start to believe you, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Neither one is a desirable, beneficial outcome to you, him or the marriage.”
What happens when wives become moms to their husbands and treat them like kids? This article/reposting is an interesting read if only because I have seen this happen in public, where women demeaned/talked down to their partners. The resigned acceptance of this behavior told me that the husband had become “accustomed” to this form of emotional/mental abuse.
I have never been in a romantic relationship, but in some ways close friendships can show these toxic trends as well: failure of a partner/friend, especially repeated failure, becomes untenable, leading to abuse of some shape or form. Over time, failure may result in unhealthy outbursts of emotion on the part of the long-suffering wife/friend. However, before continuing forward with the narrative that one is misunderstood, one should look carefully at oneself and ask some important questions, particularly since many women carry the expectation that their friends/mates should be able to intuit, mind-read, or “just know” what sub-text is going on.
The article gives us some example questions to ask ourselves.
Another thing to keep in mind is that competency and confidence in our partners/friends doesn’t come from belittling or berating them. It comes from loving and honest interchange. As Jordan Peterson asked in the Cathy Newman interview, “What sort of partner do you want? Do you want an overgrown child? Do you want someone to contend with that is going to help you?” He goes on to explicate: “It depends on what they [women] want, you know. It’s exactly how I laid it out: women want, deeply want, men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. Power is competence, and why in the world would you not want a competent partner? Well, I know why, actually. You can’t dominate a competent partner.”
In conclusion, I posit that it is obvious that mentally and emotionally unhealthy men and women use a variety of tools to exert control over their relationships. It doesn’t matter who is doing it to whom, the result is one partner with more control over the flow of the relationship as they leech competency and confidence from the other. Currently, we are being told that women are victims of male oppression, but I would argue that women themselves are capable of oppression.
Dappled-Things 