My husband and I fought a lot. I always wanted to make sure that whatever I did that made him angry with me would never happen again. He, on the other hand, never bothered to fix anything. If he tells me I should never call him honey (and he has), I never did afterwards. If he says to put the toilet paper rolls a certain way in the bathroom (and he has done that too), I never put it any other way. If the table is turned, he never does anything I ask him to do, no matter how simple that task is.

I gave up on asking him to take the trash out a long time ago. At the beginning of our marriage, I tried; at first, I was ignored, and later I got yelled at several times so I gave up. Other things like, please can you make sure you turn off the hair dryer before you unplug it? or when I call from work and ask to please read the piece of paper that I left on the table? These requests would initiate a huge argument and result in a big fight, and the end result would be we would not speak to each other for a while. When we actually try to rehash what happened so we would avoid the problem from happening again. In his case, he’ll go back doing what he aggravated me before at the first chance he gets.

This behavior made me feel that I am discredited, he does not care about me at all, he wants to hurt me again especially now that he knows it hurts, and most of all; I believe he never intended to fix anything so we can stop having troubles and fights again. All he ever cared about was to band-aid the problem. I believe his thought were always of “Lets tell her what she wants to hear for now and have her talk with me, cook, and clean for me, and that’s that”.

Few years back, our fight was about him always putting me down, answering negatively and the first word out of his mouth for anything I ask was “No”. That fight escalated where we could not resolve it by ourselves, I reached out to friends to help us fix the problem. When we talked with them about our issue, they advised him to be encouraging, to be positive, to stop putting me down, etc. He agreed, I was happy and we went home. As soon as we went home, we were discussing a simple thing and he immediately came out swinging by saying no I cannot do what I was asking to do, and that I wasn’t good enough to do it. I thought to remind him of our agreement that we just made and he agreed to at our friend’s house. When I did, I was bombarded with loud screams and yelling, put downs, jumping with rage, etc. etc. etc.

He never wanted, intended, or even bothered to think for a moment that his words and actions effect the people around him. He never thought that just treating me like a human being could make his life better, he never for a split second that he needed to do anything to fix anything. Everything wrong in the world is someone else’s fault. In the case of our marriage, he thinks it is all my fault.