Labeling Married Women as Emotionally Manipulative, Nagging Assholes

Is that who you married, guys? An asshole who hid it from you all of this time?

Image/Neuroscience News

Because I’m not interested in having an internet fight with anyone at the moment, I’m going to refrain from identifying the person who recently wrote the following.

They wrote that the framework of nearly all modern marriages is “feminist,” which I conclude means they consider feminism-influenced relationships to be bad, or harmful, or ineffective on some level.

Then they said:

“Here’s how it works:

1. Happy wife = happy life.

2. The wife then sets a provider frame for the husband, regularly setting him tasks to complete and blaming and shaming him when he fails to do so to her standard.

3. Over the long term, she uses nagging to set the priorities of what's important.

4. In the short term, she uses tantrums and emotional drama to make her demands urgent, i.e., to show what's a priority right NOW.

5. The man accepts her role as the judge who rewards or punishes his compliance.

6. Having internalized this framework, the husband is subject to the wife and regards it as his duty to obey and respect her.

“It's a masterly inversion of what the Bible says marriage should be.”

…

This is important to talk about because there’s so much relationship conflict and resistance within marriages and long-term partnerships to accept influence from your relationship partner. I don’t think it’s a secret that men often demonstrate resistance to their wives or opposite-sex partners in this regard. I certainly did in my twenties.

Because I didn’t need another mom. Because I don’t like being told what to do. Because I don’t want to be “whipped,” and not just in a reputation-with-my-friends sort of way. I don’t like feeling controlled or managed or as if I have to seek permission to do something that I don’t believe should require permission.

I can’t put my finger quite on where the sexism begins, but it ranges from a little to a lot in many of these situations.

“Nice to know who wears the pants in the family.”

“Are you kidding me? Be a man.”

“Why don’t you grow a pair?”

“Stop acting like a girl.”

…

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. Happy wife = happy life

I’ve always despised this phrase because it always struck me as advice that says: Do whatever your wife says will make her happy and feel good, and then you’ll have a great life because she’ll never hassle you about anything.

“Happy” is kind of a bullshit word. I’ve never liked it. The word “contentment” is much better. Great relationships are not built on making people feel comfort and pleasure 24/7. Great relationships are built on trust.

I trust my spouse or partner to speak and act in a manner that communicates that I can trust them to care about everything that’s important to me just as much as they care about everything that’s important to them. They do not choose their thoughts and feelings over mine. They include me, and think about me, and factor me into their decisions. Because of that, I know that I’m loved and respected. And because of that, there’s safety and trust in our relationship.

2. The wife then sets a provider frame for the husband, regularly setting him tasks to complete and blaming and shaming him when he fails to do so to her standard.

Sometimes, this dynamic shows up. You will do it my way, or I’ll make your life miserable! And if you’re married to someone who demands that you subjugate yourself to them, and that everything they think, feel, and want matters more than you, I encourage you to consider ending the relationship.

The vast majority of women I meet in my work are simply asking for help in order to not feel pain in the relationship. Let’s use a toilet seat as an example.

Women don’t ask men to put the toilet seat down because they’re too weak or too stupid to execute the task themselves. They don’t need a big, strong man to do that work for them. Women who ask men to put the toilet seat down tend to do so because NOT doing so communicates I’m leaving this toilet seat up because it’s the way I want it, and I don’t give a shit how you feel about it. When your preferences come into conflict with my preferences, I will always choose me over you.

Or.

I left the toilet seat up because I didn’t think about it at all. I essentially forgot. You’re not important enough to remember and consider and adjust my behavior for. Whether I do this on purpose or by accident, the thing you can count on is the idea that I’m always going to act in my own interest regardless of how it affects you.

Blaming and shaming are horrible to do to your spouse unfairly. But I reject the idea that women are universally weaponizing blame and shame to get their husbands to serve them.

3. Over the long term, she uses nagging to set the priorities of what's important.

Nagging isn’t a very nice thing to do to people.

I submit that most women in most relationships aren’t “nagging,” and if they are, they HATE that they’re in the position to do so.

Almost always, they’ve expressed their needs and wants many times, and nothing has been done about it. Everything from fixing something around the house, to getting something on the calendar, or more often to STOP doing something (like leaving a dish by the sink, or walking through the house in shoes, or leaving an empty beer or soda bottle in the living room).

But her husband won’t stop doing things his way. I choose my wants and needs over yours! his actions say.

“Nagging” is almost always a sad and angry and scared person asking to have their needs and wants honored, but not receiving it. I think it’s understandably hard when the person you promised the rest of your life to communicates that they will always choose themselves over you. Therefore, after many years, one’s words and tone of voice might sound remarkably similar to nagging.

4. In the short term, she uses tantrums and emotional drama to make her demands urgent, i.e., to show what's a priority right NOW.

Imagine a husband and wife preparing dinner together side by side in the kitchen. And imagine the husband, while chopping carrots and celery juts his elbow out and it runs into his wife’s forearm. Now, imagine she yelps out in pain and raises her voice.

The man is surprised. It seems like emotional drama to him. After all, it was just his elbow slightly running into her arm. What’s the big deal?

The woman rolls up her sleeve to reveal a burn wound hiding beneath her clothing. “This really hurts. I know it was an accident and you didn’t know, but when your elbow hit me, it was super painful. Please be more careful moving forward.”

Now imagine over the course of the next three nights, the husband, a well-intentioned, smart, successful guy who loves his wife accidentally runs into the wound four or five more times, while they’re hurriedly moving about the kitchen and working closely together.

Thought exercise that has no definitive answer: How many times is he allowed to run his elbow into or otherwise brush up again his wife’s painful wound before she’s allowed to adjust her words and tone to communicate how important this is to her?

How many times is she supposed to be calm, collected, and nice before she’s allowed to act wounded or mistreated?

People in pain will inevitably behave like people in pain. Painting all women as emotionally manipulative in this way is part of what encourages so many men to keep behaving in ways that will consistently destroy trust in their most important relationships.

Why can’t I trust him to be more careful around my injury? Whether he’s doing this on purpose or by accident, I don’t see how I can trust him to not keep doing it.

5. The man accepts her role as the judge who rewards or punishes his compliance.

The word “compliance” again implies subjugation and submissiveness.

There is a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between complying with every passing whim and fancy of your relationship partner, and doing the work of honoring that which matters to the people we profess to love.

If you don’t know the difference, I want to encourage you to learn it.

Please don’t just do what someone else wants you to do because they have more power than you in what is supposed to be an equal partnership. But please DO make every effort to say words and make choices that leave a trail of evidence in your shared lives together which indicate that you can be trusted to treat what’s precious to your partner as equally important to what is precious and meaningful to you.

The alternative is love and trust dying slowly on the vine.

6. Having internalized this framework, the husband is subject to the wife and regards it as his duty to obey and respect her.

Demanding someone obey you (in the context of a shared, equal partnership) is NOT respect. This, to me, is largely a repeat of No. 5.

I will always encourage men to not subject themselves to emotional abuse in relationships, but my experience suggests that the opposite happens WAY more often. Women experience emotional abuse at the hands of men.

When it’s intentional, it’s despicable, and I don’t wince when they are left by their partner.

When it’s accidental, and occurring in an otherwise good person’s blind spots, then the work becomes learning how to eliminate the blind spots so that our words and actions honor the experiences of others who don’t think, feel, and experience relationships and the world the identical way that we do.

Who is for Subjugation in Marriage and Relationships?

I grew up in a politically conservative and traditional, religious environment in which the word “feminist” was definitely a negative label. Even women were judging women who identified as feminists with their angry, bra-burning, march-organizing political demonstrations demanding equal pay for equal work. What jerks!

Maybe if they’d just get married and have a bunch of children and submit to their husbands, they’d be happy like the rest of us! they implied.

I don’t have any problem with so-called “traditional” marriage when it works. And it really does work for many people, and it’s great when it does. “Traditional,” which seems to be a synonym for the patriarchal, biblical Father Knows Best model. Wives submit to their husbands. He has the final say. He’s the head of the household. He’s the financial breadwinner. She’s the dutiful, loving, service-oriented homemaker.

Sometimes, this model works. So long as the two people involved share the same values, want the same things, experience love and respect from another, and don’t have a bunch of trust-eroding or trust-breaking situations with one another.

But it’s not, and can’t be, the ONLY way.

A young woman who spends her entire life pre-marriage in pursuit of some dream—becoming a doctor, or a scientist, or an engineer, or an elected official, or starting her own company—will rarely, if ever, find contentment in sacrificing her lifelong dreams to be a breeding factory for some dude. Relational balance cannot and will not be achieved by one partner getting everything they want at the expense of the other sacrificing everything they’ve ever worked toward.

I struggle to make sense of someone who insists there is a one-size-fits-all model for marriage, and that the model must involve men ultimately running the show. I’ve been alive for 45 years. Mostly men have been in positions of power (the government, big businesses, local organizations) for the entirety of that time. I’m not sold on the idea that we’re collectively better off for it.

But whatever. I’m in no way against men. I’m just for healthy relationships.

I think when everyone has great, stable, beneficial interpersonal relationships, they thrive, and then the things they’re involved with every day thrive too, like work, family, teams, and communities.

The definition of feminism is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of equality of the sexes.”

There’s probably some confusion and semantics at play among the masses at large (Sign ‘em up for all of the difficult, dangerous jobs and see how well they like being treated equally!), but if my brain is working correctly, being against feminism is equivalent to being AGAINST the idea that women and men should be treated equally or fairly.

While I probably disagree with some politically charged feminists on some issues some of the time, I certainly count myself among the people who believe everyone should be treated equally and fairly.

I’m against subjugation. Domination and control of another person or persons is the primary theme of tyranny in every horrifying story I’ve ever heard about world history.

Therefore, it has no place in a healthy marriage or long-term romantic relationship. (Unless you’re trying to make things spicy in the bedroom, you big BDSM dirties!)

Safety and trust are the hallmark principles of relationships which last.

And there is neither safety nor trust in tyrannical relationships. This is true regardless of the sex of the person trying to exercise power over the other.

…

I’m not a theologian. I have never pretended to understand the mysteries of the universe and then presume to tell others what to believe or not, what to worship or not. I’m perfectly comfortable sharing that I don’t think I get to decide what is right or wrong for everyone else.

For me? Actions or circumstances that bring harm to others is generally how I define something being “wrong.”

And it’s THIS very idea that lives at the heart of all relationships with conflict and eroding trust. Regardless of how good, or smart, or well-intentioned we may be, sometimes, we do or say things, or sometimes there are circumstances outside of our control, which result in our relationship partners experiencing harm.

You and I may judge that harm as minor. We may register it as a petty complaint from someone who needs to “grow a pair” or “man up.”

But I’m here to remind you that if someone is experiencing things they clock as harmful, and you are in a position to adjust your behavior to help eliminate or mitigate that harm, and then you do not on the basis of choosing what you want or not taking them seriously? They WILL stop trusting you over time, and once trust is fully eroded or broken, you won’t get to have a decent relationship with them anymore.

If this is your marriage and you share homes and children and pets and money and social circles, your life is going to get shittified in a hurry.

Aren’t they worth more than that?

Aren’t you?

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.

P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF