My husband and I have been married for almost a year. I 100% know he is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. But I keep creating ways to fight with him about the dumbest shit. I don’t want to do this. I need help.
He says he thinks it’s because I haven’t healed from my previous relationship which was pretty turbulent.
I met my ex and thought he was ‘the one’ so I gave him everything and believed he was reciprocating. He was seemingly my perfect match: adventurous, kind, good with my family, and declared he wanted a fully committed, mature relationship. Within a year I discovered this was not the case: he kept in contact with his ex *without* telling her he was in another relationship, never admitted to any of his girl ‘friends’ he was in a relationship, would make ‘friends’ with women only to avoid mentioning he was in a relationship and would have inappropriate conversations with them, and at times, in general, act as if he was single. I dealt with a constant feeling of waiting for him to leave once he found someone who was better, younger, and prettier than me. I had the feeling he wanted to sleep around and continue exploring other relationships. Based on body language and conversations of his with other women, I asked him as much and tried to talk this through but he denied wanting any of it; I felt like I was always trying to figure what he *really* wanted out of a relationship because he didn’t think it through all the way; like I had to ask him the hard questions that he should have asked himself before dragging me into the relationship. I stayed for 4 years because we would talk through something that started a fight (i.e. openly and inappropriately flirting with women in front of me) and he would convince me he wanted a relationship, that I was just jealous and damaged. I went to therapy to figure my shit out and work on myself thinking it was going to help the relationship. That *I* was the one who needed to change and heal. In some regards that was true; I needed to work through some trauma from my 20s.
After we broke up, we continued to talk through our issues to see if we could make it work. He also admitted to sleeping around and enjoyed being single. *BUT….* he still wanted me to be emotionally committed to him while he explored other ‘options’.
After hearing this and fighting with him in hopes to get him to see how much I was hurting and why, (that failed. he still blamed me) I eventually walked away feeling like I was over it and mourned the loss of the relationship. I wanted him to be happy and encouraged him to follow his heart’s desires but knew I couldn’t be happy in an open relationship.
I feel it fucked me up worse than a physically and verbally abusive relationship I had in my early 20s because he was genuinely nice and treated me with respect in other aspects of our lives.
Flash forward a year+; I meet my current husband and we get married. I thought I was healed from the past but I keep finding things to fight with him about.
For example (I know this is dumb as shit) he changed the background on his phone from a picture of us to a picture of just his motorcycle.
I slightly panicked. I told him ‘that hurt my feelings. Did you do that so you can appear to be single? So when you have your phone out people won’t know you’re married? It would be so easy to look single. You take off your ring, remove any evidence of the marriage and you’re now free to do whatever you want and I would never know.’ (He travels for work so is away from home 3-5 days at a time.) I told him this is a small red flag. These sorts of actions are tell tale signs of someone being disconnected from the relationship and I have to look into these signs so I can determine if I need to leave or not. There are other examples like this.
I have a hard time reconciling his actions with his words.
He said I sometimes treat him like my ex when I ask him if he wants to be single, or when I try and figure out what he really wants… He says he doesn’t want to be single, that he wants me around and wants to stay married. If he wanted to be single he would tell me, he would ask me to leave or he would leave. He tells me I don’t have to read between the lines like I had to with my ex. He always clearly tell me what he wants.
Has anyone else been through something similar? If so, how did you get past it? How did you move on to have a healthy and happy relationship?
**TLDR;** damaged from a previous relationship and it’s affecting my marriage. Can’t tell if he really wants to be married or if I’m reading into things.
10 comments
Our insecurities are not our strength. I think you should seek expert advice on this topic. There is a lot to unpack here. I am sorry, I can’t be of help. I wish you all the best.
I think u need to seek out therapy.
Sounds like you need to find the core of why you keep repeating the same patterns and then see if you can stop.
Therapy is great for that. But it should be from a place of honesty with yourself or else it will be wasted time.
You need to go to therapy and move past your issues with your ex. You don’t trust your husband, and you shouldn’t have gotten married so soon after leaving that relationship and meeting someone new.
He is not him.
So u need to Sit down think of your mental model of “a partner” get a piece of paper divide it into 4 with a pen. The two left boxes are each one attribute of what you associate with a partner ie “loving” or “cares about me” “makes me happy” “ proud” “ impressive” “stands up for me” etc efc
You then write examples in those left boxes of what your partner does to demonstrate these things to you. The right two boxes are examples google or your friends (if you call them/ talk to them” so you can compare and contrast.
Repeat on new pieces of paper for every attribute you can think of.
Whats valuable is the things you can think of as attributes and your mental model vs. The general definitions.
The reason the attributes is important is once you have exhausted your thinking it is the list of things you value in a partner(doe they actually match up? Or not) . Come back a day or two later and compare what you think you want, vs what you have. Also its useful to see if your views of what makes up the definition of antribute correlates with what the world associates with that. Which is useful to understand if your model of whats great is off vs the world.
It also helps because you can discuss with your friends
And thus why you start fights
Hope this helps as an exercise
Time to go back to therapy.
Look at this from the other perspective. These arguments are basically you threatening to leave him if he can’t predict what will make you feel secure.
It’s unfair for you to constantly dangle the possibility of leaving him in his face, especially now that you are married.
You are heading towards being an emotional abuser.
I understand that this comes from your past trauma but it is cruel to put your husband’s emotional stability on the line to quell your own insecurities. Any relationship is an act of faith since you can never really KNOW what someone else is thinking. But realize that if your partner keeps hearing from you that you can’t believe that they are someone capable of being a decent honest partner to you, then they rightfully have to question whether you actually love and respect them, or that if you do love them while believing they are so flippant in character and they are not that way, you are actually in love with an illusion of what you think they are.
Get help and good luck
It’s interesting that you say you start fights over dumb things and acknowledge that your history with your ex is clouding your judgement…and yet you say you can’t tell if he really wants to be married.
It sounds like he does want to be married, but your insecurities will make him not want to. A small red flag? If anything it was a red flag about you making up stories about him. If you continue to accuse him of not wanting to be with you, he will get tired of being seen as the bad guy.
Don’t bring up your accusations with him. Ask reddit first, and see a therapist before sure. And wow you are already married. Obviously he wants to marry you if he already did. I thought you two were only dating. You shouldn’t be looking for signs to leave when you are already married! Therapist stat.
You trained your brain to look for signs of cheating over 4 years with your ex. Your brain spent plenty of time analyzing and over analyzing and reanalyzing his behavior for signs of cheating. And now that he’s gone and you are in a new relationship, your brain is still firing off on all cylinders looking for suspicious behavior, because that’s what you learned to do. You have become hypervigilant because if you didn’t, and you slipped up, your ex would step out on you. And add on top of that your previous relationship trauma. You’re hypervigilant because you had to be. You couldn’t afford to make mistakes, because other people would hurt you if you did. So now, you’re looking for mistakes in progress – even POTENTIAL mistakes – before they can become something that hurts you again.
Fortunately you recognize that some of this stuff is “dumb as shit”. So whenever that thought occurs to you – recognize what you are feeling, accept that it is there, understand why it is there, and then let it go. You should go back to therapy and look into some CBT for that.
You are the problem. The mental gymnastics that take you from a motorcycle background to *he’s cheating on me* are worthy of the Olympics. You’re projecting your ex onto him. He will leave you if you keep this up.
You need help. Seek it before you lose a man who actually treats you well or will you forever spend your 40s divorced, alone and lamenting the failures of an ex who never gave a shit about you?
I have a different take … you know he’s untrustworthy, youve convinced yourself of a lie (that he’s “the one”) so you are generating tension/problems. You are doing this BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE”S UNTRUSTWORTHY. Stop lying to yourself and call it off. Youll be much happier and so will he. — EDIT: Nevermind, I thought you married your ex. I misread. Ignore me… go to therapy.