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Dear patelh,
your situation reminds me of my cousin. Her in-laws never accepted her, were telling she’s not good enough for their son, because she’s a few years older, hasn’t graduated from college, and that she’s messy and doesn’t keep order at home. Well, that may be true, but she’s a good person otherwise and was a good match for her husband. They did well and had 2 beautiful daughters together. The husband was loving in the beginning, but then started to criticize her more and more, falling under the influence of his parents. Eventually he filed for divorce, and they did get a divorce. She was devastated but she’s survived, and probably she’s better off now without the constant criticism and put-downs by her husband and in-laws.
The problem is that he was a weak man, insecure in himself, and didn’t have the guts to confront his parents and defend her. She had low self-esteem issues, and so she tolerated his criticism, and partly thought she deserved it. He was the superior one, she was inferior. She believed it.
I see a lot of similarities with your situation, because as you say, your husband doesn’t respect you and agrees with his parents and family that you’re inferior. It could be that he’s specially rude and impatient with you nowadays because you’re not working and decided not to look for a job at the moment. My cousin’s husband was similar – he didn’t like that she stayed more than one year at home after the birth of their 2nd daughter. He thought she was lazy.
My advice is to separate from your husband because it probably won’t get better. It could in theory, if you move somewhere else, where he’s further away from his family. But it’s not a guarantee because they can still influence him – and he seems very susceptible to their opinion. If he doesn’t respect you, that’s a huge and No1 problem. Another problem is if you don’t respect yourself…. You’d need to work on your self-esteem and decide that you’re good enough, there’s nothing wrong with you, and that you don’t want to tolerate this kind of attitude.
I guess if you’d like to separate, you would need to find a job, so it’s not the best timing for you now. But this situation with your husband isn’t really sustainable and will only make you miserable.
Dear Neverdyed,
By vague language, did you mean that I hadn’t admitted my real feelings towards him?
No, I meant you sometimes use vague language here on the forum. For example, you asked ““Can there be a friendship which I keep in touch with somebody without leading to a formal romantic relationship?” – you asked in general terms, when actually you wanted to ask if you can be friends with this particular man.
Other parts I had trouble understanding are probably due to your language style, and not because you wanted to sound vague on purpose. But anyway, I could understand everything once you’ve clarified it.
As for those questions, I can answer them for sure, but maybe it’s more important for me to feel/experience good again, right?
Yes, but if you know what made you feel good back then (let’s say you felt appreciated and important – just as an example), you then know what it is that you’re missing in your personality. If you miss feeling appreciated and important, you’d need to develop a sense of self-worth. If you miss feeling loved, you’d need to develop love for yourself. And so on… The way you felt in the “good old times” is an indicator of what you want to create for yourself in the present, but not by waiting for another man to give it to you, but by developing it within your own being.
Wishing you a nice weekend too!
Dear Ryan,
although this relationship hasn’t worked out the way you hoped for, I think it’s actually not a bad thing that it happened, because as you say yourself, you could be open and vulnerable, without slipping into the old defense mechanisms. This shows you’ve grown and aren’t the same man who has 2 failed marriages behind him. I say this in response to these words of yours: “there remain the issues that have led me to be twice-divorced, where I have yet to have an intimate, long-term relationship, in my 45-years of life. I certainly have a lot of work to continue to do.”
You don’t necessarily have so much work to do any more, neither you’re the same man you were before. Yes, there are still things to work on but you’re much more aware now and have the help needed. You’ll get there, for sure.
“I also need to work on my self-worth after working much of the past 10-years on my self-esteem.”
Actually, I think self-worth and self-esteem are one and the same, whereas self-confidence is a slightly more superficial thing, in that people may have self-confidence (due to their skills and accomplishments), but deep down, they may still feel unworthy. A typical example is an athlete who’s built his self-confidence around performance and winning. When they have an injury and cannot perform any more, they may become depressed because they based their worth on some outer thing – excellence in sports – and without it, they feel worthless.
The sense of worth is at the core of our being, it’s something that should be there simply because we exist. In childhood, if the message we’ve received from our parents was that they don’t appreciate us that much, they’re not happy to have us, that we aren’t that important to them – that’s how our self-worth gets damaged.
Based on my own experience, I believe that my mother criticizing me damaged my self-confidence, but her expressing that she didn’t want to have me (because she was afraid to have children, she felt incapable of being a mother) was what actually caused my lack of self-worth. When the child feels unwanted, this is how the wound happens. Interestingly, I wasn’t aware of my lack of self-worth until much later in life, I was only aware of my lack of self-confidence.
Anyway, now that you know what to work on, it doesn’t necessarily need to take a long time to heal it. You may start valuing and appreciating yourself already now, not because your outer achievements, but just because you’re valuable and worthy. We all are. This is how the sense of inferiority/superiority gets resolved too. You lose the need to compare yourself with others, you focus on your own life and growth, without looking what others are doing.
I wish you a happy new chapter in life, and keep us posted how you’re doing…
Dear Ryan,
good to read from you again. Also, I am glad about your job prospects – are you planning to accept the offer?
Did you have the chance to talk about the savior complex during your therapy session? Because I believe this is an issue. In a previous post, you wrote:
“I wanted to be someone different for her here in the small town in the middle of nowhere. Someone other than the country boys that abound. Someone who does more than drink, hunt, and fish. Wanted her to know that it’s okay to lean on others. That those she lets close aren’t going to let her down. That men see more in her than just a sexual being.”
It seems to me you wanted to be special for her, but also better than the average “country boys” in “the small town in the middle of nowhere.” There’s a sense of superiority there, like you’re better than the men there, you’re sensitive, you talk about your feelings, you’re not seeing women just as sexual objects. You come from a big city to this God forsaken place in the middle of nowhere, and you feel so much better than the local guys. Does that ring true?
You also said:
“I suppose my torment comes from a sense of rejection by her. Not in the romantic sense but it of the almost consistent rebuff by her.”
It appears that the greatest pain is that she rejected you, not necessarily as a romantic partner, but as this special person in her life, who could be a stable rock for her, who could give her what other men cannot, and eventually, who could save her from her demons. It’s almost as if she refused your uniqueness, she didn’t recognize how special you are, and this seems to hurt you the most.
If this is true, you’ve got issues with self-worth, which often goes hand in hand with the savior complex. Because you’ve grown a lot as a person and are much more self-aware than before, much more able to show vulnerability etc. So you made a definite progress, and this makes you feel better about yourself (and it should). But if there’s a deeper issue of lack of self-worth, we’ll start taking pride in being more “mature” than some other people whom we’ll then try to “save”, all in an attempt to prove how special and valuable we are.
This all happens subconsciously, but the result is that we’re attracted to “damaged” people, whom we then try to save, unsuccessfully…
Dear Neverdyed,
no worries, take your time 🙂
I must admit I had trouble understanding parts of your post, for example this:
“And I tried to see if I’d avoid interacting with my married male colleague, the result seemed to be no, probably because I’m aware that nothing can develop between.”
Have you interacted with you married male colleague, or you’ve avoided interacting? What was the nature of this interaction – romantic or just friendship?
“Can there be a friendship which I keep in touch with somebody without leading to a formal romantic relationship?”
Are you asking if there can be a friendship between a man and a woman without it turning into a romantic relationship?
“These days I’ve been so over the “connection” or the idea of reconciliation (even though I’m sure that I will neither initiate nor respond to him further), it still upset me a little when reading something suggesting a third party.”
Are you saying it upsets you that he was seeing other women as well, and not just you?
It seems you’re having a hard time letting him go, and it means you still need something from him. In my previous post, I asked you what is it that you need from him, and I speculated that if might not even be love, but respect. That’s because you seemed quite disturbed about him not replying to your chats, suggesting that it means he doesn’t value you as much as you do him (“in the last contacts, I noticed that he’d respond in rather long hours (please note again that in the first year, he replied quickly and almost daily), which is opposite to what I often did, and that shows an imbalance of how I and he values the connection. Maybe I simply expect to be valued equally.“).
By him not replying, he showed he values you less, and this seems to be the most painful part for you.
“Can you please give me an example of “start valuing yourself”?”
Valuing yourself may manifest in e.g. not accepting an open relationship but looking for men who are capable of a committed relationship. Valuing yourself can also mean expressing your needs in a relationship and not keeping quiet, fearing that your needs might be selfish.
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