Sulking

Day 6- I’m starting to feel a lot of confusion during this. I was cooking dinner last night, I’ve been messing around with clay pots and such. My husband really loves when I cook with clay and he’s bought me quite a lot of pots to use. I figured, you know this is something that we are both going through and even though it feels like he’s heartless sometimes, I still care about him. I’ve had people tell me to just stop cooking and doing things for him if he’s going to act this way. I’ve never been good at doing things like that though. Even though I go through moments of hate and anger, I very rarely hold on to those feelings. Although in hindsight, maybe holding on to some of those feelings would be better, or at least documenting them… I don’t know, I need to stop going on these mini tangents.

Anyways, he comes home while I’m cooking and I apparently didn’t show enough affection to him. He says that if I keep acting apathetic and don’t care when he comes home than what’s the point. Fair point- my emotions are difficult to control sometimes and they can be all or nothing. This got us talking a little bit though because he wanted to know why I wasn’t acting normal. I finally just told him, I don’t know if I believe you about wanting to change. That got him pretty mad, I haven’t even given him a chance to try and work on it yet. So we go down this long talk again and this time he did show his frustration and anger a little bit. He wanted me to explain to him everything thing that frustrated me about him. I’m not a fan of it when he asks me this and he does it often whenever we have fights, because I know at the end it’s going to sound like I’m just being mean. Well I tried anyways, things like- It would be nice if you would help me out around the house. He said that’s easy just tell him what to do and I said I wish you would just learn to see what needs to be done and help a little bit. This probably is just a man thing because I’ve heard this from many other people, he said he doesn’t notice because I already do them, it’s like I’m the fairy house keeping mother.

Well I made a chore board a couple months ago for both of us so it took the guess work out of it, he new exactly what he needed to do. It wasn’t anything crazy, like clean out the litter box one day, sweep the kitchen floor another day. I wasn’t asking him to scrub the bathtub with a toothbrush it was just little things. I gave up after up two days of the chore board. He made my life so freaking miserable and it was such a massive fight every time I asked him to do it. I could have done all of the chores for the whole week during the time that we would spend fighting. Anyways, I brought this up and he says this: “I don’t mind doing them but what’s the fun in just doing them, I like it when you have a little fight in you”. I have told him time and time again that I hate fighting, fighting sucks the life out of me. Well for him, fighting gives him energy. Anger and fighting make him feel alive. I don’t know how to work with him on this one so we kind of just move on.

We go into his anger and condescending attitude, I told him that he uses his forgetfulness against me, I don’t understand why he won’t do things to make his life better instead of blaming it on bad luck, etc. He keeps asking me to bring up these things that bother me, and each time we would talk through it. Most of everything led back to the condescending attitude and forgetfulness. He can say something completely horrible to me and apparently not remember saying it the next day. Two weeks ago, he wanted to know where some stuff was for our kayaks and I said I saw him with them last. He told me that wasn’t true and I said I distinctly remember this and you must have just forgot. Then he said that I was acting like his mother, he told me that I was gas lighting him! So when I brought this up as an example for forgetfulness, he actually said, well I don’t remember that, when did that happen? I thought I was going to throw the clay pot with the chicken inside of it at him. This went on and on and he told me that it sounds like I want to change his whole personality, I said I would just like you to work on the key points. Then he said he doesn’t even think he can change but he’ll work on it. He also told me to stop lying to him about my feelings and when he’s being a jerk to just tell him (I do this all the time, so I’m not sure what to do here). So this whole conversation boiled down to him trying to help the anger and me telling him he’s being a jerk when he’s being one. The jury is still out and we will reconvene in November to see how the progress is going. In the event we do get a divorce we will just file the paperwork and quietly go our own ways. That’s what he said and I hope that’s the case if it comes to it. He didn’t really talk to me for the rest of the night though and wouldn’t look me in the eye. This time it wasn’t really the silent treatment though, I didn’t feel the rage like normal. This time it felt like he was just sulking, like he was sad. However, now that I’ve asked him to start helping, he took that as never being able to ask for anything again. He won’t even ask me to turn off the light switch when I’m up. When I told him that I like helping him but I was just feeling a little used, he said “Oh don’t worry, I won’t ask you for anything else”.  I don’t know what to do anymore, he’s just sulking around the house petting the dogs and sighing. So now we’ve covered rage, apologizing, love bombing, talking, and now we’re on to depression.