_ Do you see yourself in this at all? What would you do?

Oddly enough, you can inoculate yourselves by looking at situations ahead of time so that when they happen, you are less likely to have an over-reaction. This is a composite of several couples.

Dear Couples Counselor:

My wife said she was beginning dinner at 5:45 in order to eat by 6:30 pm. 6 pm rolls around and I start looking in the fridge. My wife thinks that I am starting dinner and goes outside and starts talking to the neighbor. I was not starting dinner, but I now have to because, if we want to eat by 6:30, we have to start. She comes in at 6:15 asking if she can help.

I was livid with her. I do not trust her words. I do not trust that she will do what she has said she will do. I am angry that I believed her again. How could I be that dumb?

I looked out the front window to see her chatting with the neighbor, left again to pick up the slack. I clean up after her and feel like she is another of my children.

She does not pick up after herself on a regular basis and just assumes I will. When I refuse to pick up, she does not even notice and she does not clean it up until it is disgustingly dirty. Then she gets angry at me for cleaning and doing “her job.”

She won’t let me schedule chores for her and the boys (and me, of course) because that is not “spontaneous.” She wants to just let it flow. I take that as code that she does not want to be accountable.

Anyway, if I say that it is 5:45 and dinner has not started, I feel like I am being a jerk. If I go out and interrupt her with the neighbor, that is worse. If I do not start dinner, that is being passive aggressive. I cannot do the right thing in this situation because there is no right thing. I prepare dinner, resentful as all get out.

She then gets mad at ME when I bring it up to her. I am very gentle, slow start up in bringing this to her attention and she gets mad at ME. So, I am not allowed to be angry or resentful. I get blamed for being rigid with dinner times and she takes the focus off herself, or so she thinks.

What is worse is that I used to come home for dinner with the family, a big value growing up. I have stopped doing that because there were enough times that she was not home when I got home and forgot to tell me or didn’t have food ready. There were tons of times there was food, though.

Do I have the right to complain? It was inconsistent enough that I stopped coming home for dinner and made up some lame excuse.

Confronting her on it has not worked and I am not sure I am being reasonable. But I have changed my behavior yet again to accommodate her and I do not like it.

Help!

I was compiling information to do a question and answer. I found myself answering differently depending on which gender was writing the question. Please read the following and guess if it is the original gender or if I changed the gender. Then, what would you advise this person?

Disclaimer. To avoid breaking confidentiality, I am compiling complaints and questions. Therefore, these did not happen exactly as I portray them. I combine several complaints/issues into one letter.


Dear Couples Counselor:

Am I being a jerk?

My wife is never on time. Rarely, that is, let me be accurate. Last week, she said, I’ll be home by 3pm. 3:45 pm she pulls in the driveway. The kids asked, “When is mommy coming home.” I told them, “She told me she’d be home by 3pm.”

Mind you, we have had this conversation a bunch of times in the past. If you are going to be home at 3:45, tell me 3:45. If you don’t know, tell me you don’t know, be vague and tentative. I even coached her with, “tell me you don’t know. Tell me sometime before 5 pm. It is always better to be early than late in my book. I take you literally. If you tell me 3 pm, I expect you to keep that promise. Part of me knows you are not lying when you are not home when you say you will be home. However, I have come to not rely on you. I cannot take you at your word. Your word does not mean anything to me. I do not trust what you are saying.”

It would have been different, if she kept her word on other things or followed through. Now, when she makes a promise, I have trained myself not to believe her, not to take her literally. I have given up some things in order to accommodate this style of communication.

Dear reader- what would you advise this person if they were male and would it change if they were female?

_Another article I ran across shows how differently we respond. This stuff fascinates me:

When women are blue, sad or mad, they are more likely than men to think about their problems in a repetitive, unhelpful way. When men are down or depressed, they're more likely than women to hit the bottle. That's one of the findings of a University of Michigan (U-M) study of 1,300 adults age 25 to 75.
 
The combination of high job stress and large family responsibilities spells significant and persistent increases in blood pressure for white-collar women who hold a university degree, a new Canadian study shows. And unlike men, their elevated blood pressure persists at home after working hours.

In the Canadian study, it was only among white-collar women who have university degrees that a significant association was observed between blood pressure and stress on the job and at home. "The effect of this double exposure on the blood pressure of university women seems to be the sum of both effects, on the job and at home," says Chantal Brisson, PhD, who headed the team of scientists from several Québec City research institutes. "We found the increase was present through work, evening, and night, suggesting a persistent effect beyond the work setting."

In an experiment with 60 married couples, husbands displayed greater cardiovascular reaction when they thought their skills were being challenged, while the wives had greater reactions when they disagreed with their husbands. The study was conducted by Timothy Smith, PhD, of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and colleagues.

The investigators found that the husbands displayed greater cardiovascular reaction when they thought their verbal abilities were being judged, but not when they disagreed with their wives. The wives showed the opposite pattern: disagreement with their husbands produced greater cardiovascular reaction, but having the quality of their speech judged did not. "Wives were responsive to a potential threat to the quality of the interaction while husbands were responsive to a possible threat to competence or dominance," the researchers say.