The Subtle Domination

For twelve years our relationship was perfect, with love, respect, physical communion, and spending every possible moments together. I was satisfied with my married life. I believed I had finally found that one man who would love me without problems to the grave. Long years in different relationships had taught me to doubt the existence of such heaven on earth.

We lived in a beautiful house on the edge of a park, enjoying the free and fresh air, wonderful sunsets under which we went for walks hand in hand, and growing children who were promising to be geniuses in many talented fields. There was not any possibility that this could change. Stability and trust in each other abounded. We were each other’s lives, the very breath that we breathed.

Roles

For these twelve years, he had a stable job. I had been the homemaker. I had left my job to dedicate my life to running the house on love and on the motivation of our helpers. A routine had been established, and roles nicely fell into place according to what needed to be done. We found ourselves taking up roles without assigning them to each other. It was the perfect relationship, in which we competed to do good for each other. I managed the home, I ensured the welfare of the children, I gave the rhythm of the house. I maintained lists of what needed to be done, and who to do it. I drove around to suppliers, service people, and friends, to maintain a social life for the family while he was at work. I invited friends over, and ensured my husband enjoyed the friends I brought home. He pampered me with praise and gratitude for whatever I did.

He went to work, he brought in the money, he did the shopping on his way home from work, he played with the children when he came home, he organised weekend trips.

We ministered to each other’s needs. We cared for each other’s happiness. Going swimming together as a family was a favorite. Sharing stories of events of the day, helping each other to make the best decisions when anything bothered the one or the other was natural to us.

We had the ideal life. And we wished for nothing more than staying in this life of heavenly contentment.

How a job loss overturned everything

When one day he came home with a drawn face and announced that he had lost his job with immediate effect, we felt like a concrete sack had been dropped onto our shoulders. Pessimism descended like a dark cloud. I saw my husband for the first time in this dark phase and swore I did not know this new man. It was a hard time for him. I, however, understood his need for support and provided that in abundance. There were many talks and a look at many options. I assured him that we would go through this dark patch and come out of it happy again. We just had to go through it together.

Despite all my promises, I watched him descend deeper and deeper with each passing day into depression, and tried all I could to brighten his mood. I started to revamp my small business and use the money wisely, in an attempt to show him that there were options. But this was a far cry from what he needed.

The harder I worked, and the more money I brought home, the more depression he got into.

The turn

Then I began slowly to see new traits in my husband that I had not dreamed could emerge even in the hardest of times. This devastated me slowly.

In the first days, I simply ignored them and excused them on the basis of stress. I even defended them and accepted them as part of a process. They did not matter. They were minor. They were insignificant. They were errors. They could not last. In fact, they were not happening.

I brought money from my own efforts, to show him that the family would not starve, and that he could relax. I bought things with money whose source was not him. His reactions to this grew more and more awkward, to say the least. He reacted displeased. He reacted unhappy. He reacted skeptical. He reacted untrusting. What more than a working earning wife does a man want?

A Spiral

The more his reactions became negative, the more money I wanted to bring home, in order to cover up the larger growing gap. Maybe he was unhappy because the money I was bringing was so little. He had been used to enough money. We had been comfortable. Maybe now struggling for every cent was hurting him, and indeed, was hurting our relationship.

Feeling that I had lived on his finances for long, I began a full-time job that gave me a reasonable income. I was very happy when this chance came my way and I threw myself wholly into my work. At home, I did not forget to support him morally and to show him love. But of course, the times spent together got reduced as I burdened under hard work time tables. Plus, he did not take up the roles that I had always had as an unemployed woman. So all those roles sat on my shoulders, while he catered for his bad mood. It was a shocking turn of events for me.

Then the pressure of it began to weigh heavily on me. When would he relax and trust that I could work and bring in an income that could sustain the family? The more I thought about these things, the harder I worked, the higher I aspired, and the more promotions I got.

Still, he began more and more to drown in unhappiness. Could he never recover? Could he never enjoy life again?

Thrown into confusion

I fell into serious confusion. What more did I need to do to make him happy? What more did he need in order to trust my earning capacity that the family could be sustained? He now could live the same life as he lived before he lost his job. The only difference was that the money was being earned by me. Still, I observed that he was rejecting the situation.

With the passsage of time, the situation began to be bothersome to me. In all the strength I had used, a lot of energy had gone to emotional upkeep, to keep myself from breaking down under the load of his unhappiness. I felt sorry for him. I felt, however, that he simply needed to sit back and relax. I had shown and demonstrated everything could be, was fine. Failing to understand the situation, and not knowing what else to do, I continued working harder. And he kept the pressure finger on me through his bad mood.

Feeling mounting pressure, I got a job abroad, which would give me an even higher income. Presenting this to him brought upon us a new wave of a bad mood from him that I quickly shelved that idea. By this time, I was beginning to think my working, and not his loss of a job, was the problem.

A holiday could do us good

When I booked a surprise holiday for the family, I was surprised at the reaction of my husband when I presented the tickets. And when we went on holiday after a lot of persuasion and promise that it would do the family and especially him a lot of good, that holiday turned to be a total disaster. When one day he refused to go on a holiday adventure and chose to stay in the hotel room, I went with the children. Upon my return in the evening, he burst at me, accusing her of having gone alone, leaving him alone, and therefore making him feel neglected. Initially, I thought he was joking. But the serious look on his face told me otherwise. I stood there, open-mouthed, wondering if he was losing it. It could not be true. It could not be happening. It was the first time, three years after he lost his job, that I admitted that he was being irrational. I wondered, in alarm, if all along I had ignored a medical issue. He would not hear of visiting a therapist. What insult was I throwing at him suggesting therapy?

Despite these thoughts, I blamed myself. Yes, he has a right to feel neglected. Yes, he spent a whole day in the hotel room, bored, while I laughed with the chidren. I tried to rationalise this behaviour, but still, a seed of suspicion had been sowed into me.

Jealousy of a spouse’s success?

Why had I not thought of this before? Had his character totally changed in these three years? Was it possible that the more I provided for the family financially, the more I hurt him? Was it possible that he was…I did not want to let the word sink in … jealousy? Jealous of her success? Was it even a success? I was just trying hard to keep our family afloat. Would he have been happier if I had done nothing about our financial situation? This would never work, for our life depended on a steady, reasonable income. We had not lost our home so far. We had not fallen into bankruptcy. We had not gone one day hungry. Why then was he still unhappy, and increasing the weight of dissatisfaction?

Buckling under

I thought hard about this and found myself buckling under the weight. Either, he stopped this behaviour or Ie would stop working. But by now, there was no longer any discussions between us. Any topic of discussion I brought to the table was brushed aside with either “It doesn’t matter!” or “It is not important!”

Sitting in between working to keep the family up and bearing the pressures from an irrational husband had its toll on me. Six years in this situation and I succumbed to physical and emotional fatigue. Without the support from my husband, I felt the weight of my life and admitted things would not go on like this for much longer. I had to quit either my job or my marriage in order to keep my life and that of the children going sanely. When I told him this, to my surprise, he was happy. Was the happiness because of the promise of a divorce or of quitting work?

Tough choices

After quitting work, I found his mood rising. He had been suffering from a feeling of incapacitation, he said. Now, we were equal again. In frank discussions, he said he had been suffocating as he watched me clunch one promotion after another while he sunk further into limbo. “The brighter you shone, the duller I became,” he said.

Coming out of such a torment, I understood that he had squshed me into the ground out of jealousy. Telling myself that the jealousy had been borne out of a righteous desire to be the breadwinner for his family, helped me get over the revelation. Finally, we could discuss openly and rebuild our lives together. He had to be the one earning. I had to be the financial receiver. Only now, he understood through reflecting in the freedom of equality brought about by me quitting my job. That way we would be peace in our house.

These six years, though intense, had given me invaluable knowledge of the many faces of a man. He had not known what and why he was doing what he did in those years, he said. Could I believe him? Or was this just a way of explaining his bad behaviour away?

Processing

Right now, I am in the process of thinking about what to do with this knowledge. I feel that he has used a subtle domination on me, requiring financial domination over me. Did he also exaggerate his responses to our situation as a way to manipulate me?