Wife has poor relationship with her father - impact on me

[Ward]

After 21 years of marriage, I heard something recently on the radio, the guy said "never marry a girl/women who has a poor relationship with their father - if you do you are in for a hell of a ride." That got me thinking about the problems in our marriage and how my wife's very poor relationship with her father may be impacting us. Technically, she has always had a poor relationship with both her mother and father, who divorced when she was about 12. She spent some adolescent years living with her grandparents who she had great relations with and her grandfather died just days before we met and her grandmother in recent years. In reading about this subject matter, the experts say that women in this situation (poor relationship with father) will likely choose a mate that is a reflection of their father. Even when they despise their father no less. I find this disheartening since her father is a low life and to think she may have subconsciously seen the same in me has me wondering just what is - and what was going on in her mind. Other things about our marriage. She thrives on confrontation whether its with me, our kids, the mailman, co-workers, you name it. She even agrees that she does not play well with others. She has one friend and from time to time she swears off that friendship. She is never satisfied. She is negative about virtually all aspects of daily life. She has low self esteem. When we have arguments, in those cases where it is decided I was on the rights side I quickly put an end to the thing - meaning I don't take advantage of the situation. In those cases where I was wrong in the argument, she uses that situation to punish me with verbal assaults, even after I quickly apologize to try and save some of my own backside - to no avail - she just keeps on dumping on me. And she says that I'm verbally abusive to her. I've thought about marriage counceling but what scares me is that I would feel obligated in such a setting to be open and be honest. And if I am, she will go ballistic. I believe she would look at counceling as a way for me to learn something but I think in the end it would be just the opposite and she would be emotionally hurt by the experience and just might go off the deep end. With all that said, I'm not perfect either. She's a very emotional person and I'm not - she wants me to be emotional - I'm just not wired that way and never have. Also, I'm 9 years older than her. She was 19 when we met. I'm a college grad and she is not. In some ways, you might say I helped raise her, helped educate her. Sometimes I feel like she holds that against me in some way. Like she's rebelling against me as her father. I don't know. I can't seem to find much on the web about this particular situation. There is a lot about women who end up with husbands who have the same character flaws of the girls father - but like I said above, I sure hope that is not the case here. I'm a good man and a good father very much unlike my father-in-law.

[ThunderHorse]

Search Suzette Elgin, YOU CAN'T SAY THAT TO ME 8 steps to ending verbal abuse. Elgin is discussed on other threads in this forum. Basically, instead oa arguing with your wife, you can just use nice, pleasant platitudes like, "You may be right that I am wrong about ...., but maybe some furhte discussion would alllow us to come to some compromise.......

My personal rules for therapy with my wife are to never criticize my wife in therapy, and when the Therapist says something with which I disagree, I will argue with the therapist. "Why don't you give YOUR checkbook to my wife for a week, and see how that works out."

Have you tried 15 minutes of daily unconditional listing? I have started a list of feeling based responses to women, under Communication, to give them the acknolwedgment of the validity of their feelings.



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