Hi anita, sorry for seeing this so late! I hadn’t checked in a while.

I finished the Nonviolent Communication book by Rosenberg a few weeks ago, it was very illuminating. The chapter about judgements made me realise just how much my husband passes around judgements and how moralistic he is (which, ironically, is a judgement in itself).

To be honest, I don’t know how it’s really going. About half of all our days my husband gets unhappy or irritated about something with me. I’m really unhappy with how he expresses his needs and criticism and have urged him to read about Nonviolent Communication as well.

The other day there was a rare instance where I was the one being unhappy about something he had done (regarding finances) and when I brought this up respectfully, he was quite agitated and defensive. It’s actually very uncommon that I bring up something “against” him, but on the occasion it does happen I don’t feel that he’s truly receptive.

I’m quite anxious and worried about how this is going to progress. I have poured everything I can muster into this marriage to improve our dynamics and I don’t feel like it has had much effect… Maybe our temperaments just aren’t compatible. Our lives are very entangled and we are a multi-national family with kids, so even if we decided to end things at some point, it would get very complicated and long-winded to sort things out.

It’s strange because when we are both calm, my husband does say it would be very sad if we had to leave each other. He doesn’t actively want it. It would be kind of like someone ending their own life not because they want to die, but because they see no way out of a situation…

But he’s just such a different man when he is annoyed. I have asked him a few times to co-regulate when we were getting too agitated over something, to hold my hands and just breathe together, but he didn’t want to do that at all. And when I use the NC approach and try to observe and name his feelings/needs, he just gets annoyed by me. What can one do with such a partner? It makes me want to pull my hair out. There’s just no way to get through to him. Surely this isn’t “normal” in conflict…?