My husband (M40) and I (F36) are currently going through a rough patch. We have been together for 15yrs. Essentially, I accidentally stumbled over a very bare dating profile and when I confronted him about it, he said he only created it because I had stayed the night at a friends’ place (a woman) after we drank too much wine and he thought that was ‘weird’. He spoke to a friend who thought I looked similar to a profile he had seen on this site, so hubby created the account to see if it was me or not.
Spoiler alert, it was not me.
I found no evidence of cheating and I met with a therapist to go through my feelings but my free sessions ran out. My husband has been on a knife’s edge since it all, and I told him I was angry because I felt like he was gaslighting me by claiming I caused him to create the dating profile. I wrote him a long poem of all the issues we have had over the years that he has consistently ignored and I explained this felt like the final straw.
Well, a flip has been switched. He has been using this poem now as motivation to improve on all the things that were problems in the past. We are seeing a marriage counsellor and he’s following the homework, but I just feel apathy.
I told the counsellor that he can’t win right now – I was angry he was doing certain things, and now I am angry that he is making the effort I wanted. I can’t seem to get past the fact he’s only improving now that the marriage is threatened – he never made this effort the millions of times I asked him to over the last 10yrs+. Why now?
Can anyone please give me some insight into why I can’t seem to accept his efforts? I feel repulsed and uncaring, and he is freaking out. I’m scared I will rip this family apart if I can’t figure out what to do.
TL;DR: I found my husband’s shell of a dating profile, and he is now trying to fix all the issues we’ve ever had but I’m struggling to accept his efforts.
25 comments
INFO:
Does it feel good or rightous in any way that you see your partner struggle and for you being able to deny him a positive response to him trying to better him?
My suspicion is that you are punishing him for his precieved wrongdoing and everything positive he does makes you regret him even more because how dare he trying to get out of you punishing him..
If you want to save your marriage and your family then you need to let go off this feeling. Go to IC if you can not to it for yourself.
If you do not want to save your partnership you need to face this truth and change the subject in marriage counceling into “how to splitt up amicable”.
Are you afraid that if your husband improves you won’t be able to match the effort he puts in?
Are you in fear of feeling like you might become the problem in the relationship?
Therese are the type of questions you need to ask yourself.
You sound mad because he is putting in the effort when he felt threatened but he did not do it when you asked. Essentially, he is only doing it for his benefit, not for yours. Makes sense that you would be frustrated and it’s ok to tell him exactly this. But if you want to stay married, you can’t let this be your permanent feeling. He is doing what you want just not for the reasons you wanted it. Ok to say I’m mad and it won’t go away immediately but I recognize your effort and I appreciate it. I’m not going to be mad forever but it is going to take some more time. If you are mad no matter what he does, he is going to go back to his old self since the change is not bringing any positive change and that will be the end. Carrying resentment in a marriage is a killer. If you want to move forward, you have to let it go. “Sometimes to move forward, you have to give up on getting even”….love that quote.
If you punish him for doing good, it’s gonna stop…
> he never made this effort the millions of times I asked him to over the last 10yrs+. Why now?
I think anyone would be pissed off if they were constantly dismissed by their spouse, to have begrudgingly accepted living in a sub-standard relationship, only to have that spouse show they were capable of meeting their needs all along and just chose not to.
There’s an expression called Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, which if you google will pull up a bunch of Reddit stories from women in similar situations.
And why now? Because infidelity is a big enough fuck up for you to leave him over. Although for you, it’s the last straw.
You’ve built up 10+ years of resentment, that’s not going to go away overnight. All you can do is be honest about your anger and keep working on it in counselling. In time and with continued effort, he’ll earn your faith in him again.
So, you can’t get rid of the feeling. What you can do is be honest with him about how you feel. Then, if you want to stay together, *actively choose* to reward his efforts. You can’t control how you feel, but you can control your behavior.
Remind yourself every night of his good qualities and the reasons you want to stay together. Repeat these like a mantra. Remind yourself that the past is over, he can’t change his past behavior, but he can and is changing now, when it matters, because now is the *only* thing that matters.
If you feed your anger it will grow. So accept your anger, but try to feed your gratitude by meditating on it and choosing to perform grateful behaviors.
Your emotions will eventually fall in line. It just takes time.
You’re feelings are valid and sometimes it just takes a while to sort through them. You both need to sit down and be 100% honest and communicate. Here’s a link. These two are amazing and give really good advice on communication etc https://youtube.com/@2bebetter
Do you generally do better conveying your emotions and thoughts through written word? Instead of lists what about maybe a regular state of the union type letter that you both sit down and discuss?
A relationship requires ongoing effort to keep it alive and thriving. He waited until it was dead to throw water on it.
The ironic part of this is that by you not accepting his efforts is that if you divorce him, he’s just going to use this experience to make someone else happy.
What have you been doing to make him happy? Obviously he wouldn’t have done what he did had he been getting what he needed out of the relationship.
No you’re quite right to hold out for more. Anyone can improve for a week or a month. And we’ve often seen that people will then slide back into their previous habits once the danger is past. So I think it’ll take a while for you to be able to appreciate that it’s a sustained effort.
If you just melted at the sight of him doing the dishes once, he’d only do them when he sees you’re pissed off, rather than doing them regularly.
Your story doesn’t mention what those long standing issues are and how you have tried to address them in the past. All we know now is that after the poem (in which we assume you have explained everything clearly on paper) he is systematically improving all the issues.
By him working on all the issues you (finally) feel acknowledged in your disgruntled indignation and your pot up emotions are coming out. So now you are angry. You feel it is a little too late, despite the fact that he is responding very well to your poem.
This subreddit/forum will always focus on the negative and encourage break-up and divorce – it is its default position. You will rarely get advise on how to save a relationship. However, it must be clear that it will benefit all involved (are there children in this marriage?) if you can snap out of your anger and embrace the effort he is making to safe your marriage. You can emotionally turn the switch if you really try. It is not easy, but let’s assume that the changes he is making are not easy either. A very effective exercise to help in this endeavor is to start each day writing down positive aspects of him and your relationship for 30 minutes. Once you start it will become easier. Focus on the positive!
(The dating profile thing sounds plausible, so we don’t need to address that)
I assume you’re mad because he didn’t put in effort after knowing that he hurt you. Like that wasn’t motivation enough to change. He has only started trying when he felt like he stood to actually lose something. He didn’t change primarily out of love or respect or concern for you, but for himself because he didn’t want to lose the life he has.
And although I know that you didn’t issue an ultimatum here, this is more of a side note, but this is why I’d never make an ultimatum to my partner. Because if it was something I’d brought up multiple times and that wasn’t good enough for my partner to change, then I wouldn’t want to stay with someone who only decided to change because they finally stood to lose something. Because I would end up feeling just like you are now. If I’ve told my partner that I was feeling hurt and unhappy and they didn’t give a shit until I threatened to leave, that’s not someone I want to continue being with in the first place.
The “why now” could just be that you finally handed the guy a simple, written list of shit you wanted to change. Never underestimate the power of simple, clear communication in a format the other person works best in.
You may feel like “why did it take ten years for him to make these changes”. He might feel like “Why did it take her ten years to just write down a simple list of what all exactly she wanted?”
You are upset because he just proved that he is capable of doing all these things you asked, but for 15 years he just didn’t care enough as long as he was getting his way. There is no timeline for healing, and he is going to have to accept that and either keep trying for the rest of his life or you guys break up. The damage that has been done over 15 years cannot be healed in a few months, it may take years. YEARS of him keeping this up before he sees progress, and then keeping it up for the rest of your relationship or you will end up right back here. It is not on you to heal on his timeline.
It’s horrible to find that you ignorantly married an imperfect man, unlike your perfect self. Now that you’ve seen that he’s human and flawed, dump him: cut off your nose to spite your face. Life will be so much better in a large empty house and him not bothering you as he tries to improve your life together.
Divorce him and stop wasting his time
I was told that women see things quite differently. They try and try and complain and make excuses and this goes on for years and years until…until finally they’re done. Just over it and done. And when that happens, it’s a rare thing for us to care anymore. It sounds to me like you’ve arrived at that place. I hope that there’s still a way for you to care eventually but I’m not sure. That dating app may have just been the straw that broke the camel’s back. I wish for you all the best!
Thank you everyone for your perspectives (both validating and challenging). It is giving me lots to think about and has already helped me understand a little more about how I am feeling, what words I could use to describe it, and some tools I could use towards a path of forgiveness.
I value the time you have taken to give this internet stranger some encouragement.
Thank you.
It may be that you are still angry bc the answer he gave you about the profile is bullsh*t and that remains unresolved. Also, you may be angry bc for years his failures cost you real time and energy—you lost sleep getting up with the kids, he did not.
In a nutshell: When he could get away with it, he treated you like you didn’t matter. Now that cannot get away with it, turns out he *knew all along* how to treat you better.
You are resentful. And rightfully so.
You may also be afraid that the moment you cave and begin enjoying his newfound niceness, he will return to his old ways.
It can be devastating to find out that your partner of over a decade was capable all along of being the partner you deserved. It can be more hurtful than all the years of you trying, while they didn’t.
My advice to you is, give it time. He is likely in the “win you back” phase. He knows HOW BAD he’s messed up now. He may do whatever it takes to right the wrongs he’s done. Keep up with counseling. If he’s still on the same “good partner” path a year from now, you may be able to truly save this relationship.
You’ve both put in a lot of time. This is not going to be easy. You will have a lot of stong emotions over learning how great he can actually be. My heart goes out to you. I wish you all the best in healing and finding the best path forward for your life.
Sounds like he took a match to things. He made a concerted effort to cheat. Did he go through with it maybe not. But what a whiny reason to even think about infidelity. That right there gives off the ick.
It seems that you’ve discovered you don’t need him or his crap anymore. Your brain hasn’t caught up with your heart. I hope you decide your happiness is worth something.
I don’t believe that biologically the brain of men and women are different, but we are certainly socialized differently. This means, for a good number of us, that we don’t make great scenes most of the time, we don’t push to get our needs met aggressively, we are socialized to tolerate and empathize and be externally agreeable.
But of course we’re humans, and we do have the emotion of anger. More often than not however, we don’t manifest our anger to the outside world, we let it grow inside and turn into resentment. It’s often said that women end a relationship when we’re still on the relationship. That’s certainly true for me, I already hated, loathed and felt contempt and disgust at my exes, before I actually ended the relationships for good. It’s not that I didn’t communicate before what changes did I need, it’s that I did it in a way that gave them room to change their behavior… but they didn’t, and again I repeated it all, and again they failed to address any change. Over and over and over again, which I’m sure is how you feel.
There’s an expression that goes “too little too late” and I believe that applies to these situations. But I think the explanation for it is “So, you were perfectly capable of doing all these fantastic things. You just **decided** not to, for years, and made me **suffer for years**, on purpose, because you didn’t care about my suffering. You only care about you now, about **you not being alone**, not about the fact that I suffered for years and would continue to suffer all my life if I hadn’t threatened to leave you”.
If you want to save your relationship you need to be this angry, manifest all your anger to the outside, make him accountable for how he ignored you for such a long time, make him explain how will he make it up to you and how can he assure you that the change will last, and how can you be sure that he really loves you, and cares about you and that he’s not doing it just so he doesn’t end up alone. Make the burden on him to show you that he decided to actually address his selfishness and that he will do sustained change.
A long poem? Jesus, poor bastard
You act as though there is some ghost outside of you preventing you from doing/not doing something. In reality you are being just terrible and not controlling your emotions and resentments