Really difficult living with spouse

LegacyUser

I'm married over 20yrs, father of two teens.
In a huge amount of that time I think I silently chose to ignore certain personality traits in my wife which have had a major effect on the quality of our relationship.
In short she is very haughty and nearly all of her interactions with me are informational stuff which just serve to boost her ego.

It's extraordinarily difficult to call her out on that - it's just not my style.
Perhaps I am enabling it - but it all set root early within the marriage and I feel that the marriage is very unequal as she surely realises she holds many of the cards.
Much like a number of other threads here we have little or no intimacy , hugging or sexual.

Looking back at things, she really only tended to share intimacy when it had some very clear benefit for her, such as trying for kids. Also occasional "make up" sex when I brought up the issues and she would just revert again and we would have no intimacy for a very long time again. Now, with 20+yrs marriage we are both just over 50 and to be fair she probably now has pre or menopausal issues so my expectations on intimacy and sex would and should be more moderated based on that. However, her haughtiness (a lot of which revolves around her status, her job - which is a highly regarded one in society) makes life difficult for me. It feels like she engages in battles of wits with me. I have some academic strengths and I feel maybe she is insecure about that.

She doesn't get this from the trees. Her father is very much the same and I feel that a lot of her actions in life are to please him or to get his tacit approval.
Over the years I am seeing her turn into a mirror of him.
Many put downs of others to inflate ego and if you are unlucky you will be in the firing line for one of those put downs.

She also has a highly perfectionistic streak and tragically she does things like attempt to bake impressive cakes (as a hobby for recreation) and she constantly becomes frustrated when undertaking tasks and becomes very snappy deflecting blame for the fact she is not achieving the task to her own level of perfection by calling me or the kids out randomly for small things like (where is this spoon, or that cooking implement). Usually she finds them because she has misfiled them but it's to me a narcissistic tendency to find fault with someone else because she cannot accept simple mishaps that her of her own making.

I am at the end of my tether.
She refused to go to counselling 2 yrs ago and I went to 7 sessions with a nice lady with Accord. She helped me work on myself which I have.
However, I am honestly tempted to look outside the marriage now because I feel I will be very unhappy in my 50s with this style of marriage. It's mostly a platonic co-existence and having to suffer her and her father's bouts of egotism and neglect of sustaining basic things in a marriage.

I am just looking for perspectives.
I know i need to raise this with her again and I honestly cannot call her out directly on her behaviour. I feel I have lost the battle and that her personality traits are highly ingrained and that really I have to either move on or just suffer this.

-husband of 2 teens

khaldrogo

My parents split when I was in my twenties. They should have split long before that. Your kids are more than aware of what's going on and it does no one any good pretending. You are still young and could have another 40 years left. Do you want to spend them in this marriage?

You have tried to fix things but, as seems to be the trend, the wife is not willing to help.

Get out now so you can live your life.

Just be very matter of fact about it. Don't get emotional. Just tell her what's happening and why and be done with it.

WIZWEB

You mention her narcissism and given examples of same. Usually a trait developed from dysfunctional parental attachments and you've outlined that too. She didn't lick these personality traits off a stone and it's interesting that her father shares them. You've identified several key components of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. These include her haughtiness, entitlement, inflated ego, gaslighting (battle of wits), controlling, the power imbalance, lovebombing (makeup sex) and lack of affection or even empathy.

Relationship counseling is generally doomed with these personality types. They see nothing wrong as "they have all the cards". Unfortunately Accord being a Catholic service works off a remit of keeping couples together. This is not always good advice especially when faced with spending the rest of your life with such a dysfunctional person. Your kids are nearly adults so you're right to seriously consider and plan your escape. I suggest that you see a counselor alone though definitely not one from Accord this time. A professional could help you with your personal boundaries and self-esteem while validating your experience and right to leave. As the FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt) clears you'll probably berate yourself for wasting so many years on this emotional vampire. Appropriate counseling tools will ultimately empower you in initiatiating a divorce/separation from what you already know to be a very toxic environment.

nikkibikki

This is also giving your kids a bit of a warped view of what a relationship should be like. You'll be doing them and their future partners a huge favour by not accepting this treatment any longer.

nikkibikki

husbandn1 wrote:

I am just looking for perspectives. I know i need to raise this with her again and I honestly cannot call her out directly on her behaviour. I feel I have lost the battle and that her personality traits are highly ingrained and that really I have to either move on or just suffer this.

She won't change. Too late for that IMO. It's too big of a thing to change, it'd probably take a decade to get there if she was prepared to do it, and you. And could you trust her word?

seenitall

Excellent post by WIZWEB - that poster knows a thing or two about narcissism.

You sound like a lovely and intelligent man, OP, it's time you started to value yourself a bit more now, and got the hell out of Dodge. Life is short and you owe it to yourself to try for some peace and happiness now.

Your kids will be ok. As teenagers, they are at the stage where they are much, much better off seeing at least one of their parents act in a healthy and constructive way, than none. Once they see you are doing the right thing by both yourself and them, they will understand!

The best of luck to you.

LegacyUser

Thanks so much for the replies - OP here.

The scene in the house is mostly that there are benign exchanges between myself and my wife. She can appear upbeat as if nothing is going on but there is a big elephant in the room all the time.
I feel in a way that even approaching going to counselling with her is just going through the final motions, sad to say.
I know that from the very occasional times we had to go in and see a teacher together back in national school days about minor issue, she would really grandstand and the teacher who was trying to mediate a discussion would hardly get a word in edgeways because she always knows better.
Sorry if it seems rantish.

Redondo50

husbandn1 wrote: »

Thanks so much for the replies - OP here.

The scene in the house is mostly that there are benign exchanges between myself and my wife. She can appear upbeat as if nothing is going on but there is a big elephant in the room all the time.
I feel in a way that even approaching going to counselling with her is just going through the final motions, sad to say.
I know that from the very occasional times we had to go in and see a teacher together back in national school days about minor issue, she would really grandstand and the teacher who was trying to mediate a discussion would hardly get a word in edgeways because she always knows better.
Sorry if it seems rantish.

Ask her a very simple question, is she sexually attracted to you.

LegacyUser

I have more or less been there done that regarding asking about sexual attraction. I know I asked something like this at one point and she deflected and talked about perhaps being asexual. I obviously don't want to make a connection between asexuality and narcissism as we would be getting into a distracting psychological debate and I am sure people who do classify themselves as asexual would be affronted by thinking it's a feature of narcissistic tendencies.
However, as I observe it she must be worn down with all the "keeping up pretences" stuff.

Just an aside - I think this really old movie (via googling for perfectionist wife) sums it up a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Craig
or think of the wife in American Beauty, to an extent in terms of the keeping up appearances but the marriage just falling apart.
I'm not dour about it and I try to keep a pleasant demeanour while I realise the marriage really is mostly a charade compared to the average.

I think there can be sexual chemistry and like I say things are at a stage and age now where she would be most likely menopausal/perimenopausal.

I've almost moved beyond the sexual question because it is more her nonchalant and so much stuff referring to seemingly continually inflate/reflate her ego that it seems like she is distracted from normal nourishment within a marriage whether sexual or not.

Another day

Op you only get one shot at life! I would suggest you return to counselling and work out what is best for you and prepare to move on. Sometimes we stay too long in a bad relationship and end up with nothing. Leave while you are young enough to make a new life for yourself but be prepared for the fallout. Counselling will help with that.

Daisy78

Was she always this way, even when you were going out together? Has she changed or have you come to a point where you can't deal with her behaviour? To be honest if a person was carrying on like that, putting others down for no good reason I'd be out of there in a hot shot. But you are where you are. It's unlikely that she will change, why would she, she has everything the way she likes it.

At the end of the day op it's your marriage. I have said it before on this forum, it's easy to advise a person to walk away from their marriage when it's not them that suffers the consequences. There are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself about how you would potentially see your future without her and not being around your children all of the time. From what you have said I don't think your wife will change now. There doesn't appear to be any warmth in your relationship from what you have written above.It's now a marriage of convenience for her than one based on love and intimacy. Is this something you are content to live with?