My wife is unhappy, and I don’t like our life together
A man finds his wife’s overreaction to the messiness of their teenage children frustrating. Mariella Frostrup says he needs to sort himself out first
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The dilemma My wife dearly loves our two teenage children but becomes hugely frustrated at their general untidiness. I have sympathy with them, as they are both improvements on me as a teenager, but my wife becomes very frustrated with my seeming lack of support. I find this extremely irritating as I do my best to provide a consistent front, although I sometimes refuse to do so when I think she is being absolutely unreasonable and creating an unnecessary row. It is clear that she has some really entrenched resentments towards me and I increasingly feel that I don’t like her very much. I know that I compare poorly to her much-loved father, who provided unlimited support to her often unreasonable mother when he was alive, and I also realise that she is generally unhappy (demanding mother, challenging perimenopause, OCD tendencies, health worries). I don’t know what to do, as I can only see our life together getting worse.
Mariella replies This definitely isn’t about the kids. You’d struggle to find any parent who doesn’t despair of their children’s messiness from time to time or indeed, more commonly, on a daily basis. It’s a terrible trait in the younger generation that only escalates as the years accrue and must partly be nature’s way of ensuring we’re relieved to see the back of our little darlings instead of traumatised by their final departure from our devastated homes. In severe cases this lingers well into a child’s 20s, as any mother who has turned up to visit her kid with a dustpan and brush will attest to.
Teenagers appear entirely oblivious to the devastation they leave in their wake. My son is only nine and already I dread my weekly forage into his wardrobe where stuffed among his clean clothes are dirty underpants and sports socks, discarded apple cores, wrappers from an as yet unlocated sweet stash and empty bottles of Lucozade, his performance-enhancing drug of choice for weekend football matches.
If your wife’s experience is anything like mine, I can easily understand and sympathise with her frustration. But as I said at the outset, this really isn’t about your children. Despite their capacity for chaos they are simply caught in the firing line between their parents. The fact that your teenagers “are both improvements” on your adolescent self is hardly cause for celebration. I’m not sure where the benchmark was set during your childhood, but aggregate improvement is not the same thing as setting standards. I’m interested in why you feel you should be the measuring stick for your family’s behavioural expectations. Perhaps you have delusions of functionality?
You describe attempting a “consistent front”, the insinuation being that your wife is a victim of the ebb and flow of everything from hormones to mood swings to mental instability. She’s clearly not making you happy, as evidenced by the wide-ranging list of frustrations you chuck into the simmering emotional pot. There’s her “entrenched resentments” of you, her perfect father who can never be surpassed, her unreasonable mother, her menopausal symptoms, her health worries and OCD tendencies. It’s more of a character assassination than an assessment of your situation.
I appreciate that you are finding it difficult at home, but simply admitting that rather than apportioning blame would be a better way to tackle the situation. You’re probably living with a woman in the throes of menopause, and if periods of hormonal overactivity (in either sex) were the catalyst for divorce then we’d all be singletons in our 50s. She may need medication, and you definitely need a greater degree of empathy if you are planning to stick around. Your choices aren’t excessive: try to ride out the present storm with sympathy, affection and the sure knowledge that it will end; seek marriage counselling to help you both through your present difficulties, or carry on waging a propaganda war against your wife in preparation for your eventual departure.
If you’re asking for licence to leave based on unreasonable behaviour or confirmation that you are the better parent, I can offer neither. These days you can opt for a no-blame divorce, but you may find it’s far more rewarding for you all to stay together.
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