My wife is unbearable

Dear Agatha,

I got married almost six years back and is blessed with two wonderful children. I have a problem understanding the kind of wife I married. She is so unbearable and picks quarrel on every little thing.

She lacks respect, even for her person. The most annoying thing is, she appears oblivious to the fact that she is married. She uses her time in discussing irrelevancies with my cousin to the extent she does not notice when I come into the house.

This is a woman I have tried very hard to make happy even though times are very rough for me due to economic recession in the stock market.

She hardly can apologise for anything. I’m not a drunk but her excesses usually make me hit her when I’m fed up by her attitude.

 I’m tired of her and don’t feel anything for her anymore. The feeling is mutual as she also doesn’t feel anything for me too. What can I do? I had wanted to leave the house for her but can’t because of the children who will suffer as she doesn’t have anything doing. She is currently schooling and learning how to make hair.

  She doesn’t tell me anything and I hate that with passion. She also hates correction. I’m becoming crazy and don’t want to commit murder.

Please counsel me.
George D.

Dear George D,

Obviously there is a huge problem in your marriage; the kind that requires a lot of thoughts, wisdom, honesty as well as sacrifices to change. You also require a reason for this marriage to succeed. Thank goodness, you have a valid one; the children who will really suffer if you make good your threat to abandon home for her. This, itself is a positive sign that your marriage can survive the storm if properly guided and managed.

One thing you must first understand about every marriage is the imperfection of it. No marriage is perfect because it involves humans; two people with different ideologies, cultures, attitudes, up bringing, values and out look. To expect anything less than imperfection is to delude oneself about the entire concept of the institution.

Often than not, our partners are mirror images of our deficiencies. The more you dwell on the flaws of your wife, the more you destroy the chances of the survival of your once happy home. This is because she too will refuse to take her eyes off your own faults too.

The essence of marriage is companionship. And in the process of it, lots of compromises must be negotiated to achieve its main function of offering friendship in our adult lives. No matter how much you each love your parents or kids, a time would come when you would need each other; the grey and brittle days; when the dimness of the eyes reflect all the pains, sacrifices of all the years and when the laughter web tell the happy moments in life.

That is the age when the consequences of certain decisions taken in haste come back with all viciousness of a nasty ghost to hunt. By then, the children would be at their homes managing their affairs. Then it won’t matter so much to the children who was at fault; their attitude would be, “you should have stayed for us.”

It is this future you should consider. How would your children view your decisions now in later years? Would they forever condemn you, making it impossible for you to enjoy their comfort later in life or bring them closer to you?

Frankly, If you hope to solve this problem substantially, you and your wife must be ready to tell each other some basic truths at every point in your marriage.

First, you must realize that no woman respects a man who is violent. Your wife is a grown up adult hence to hit her, someone you vowed before the world to protect in the presence of her children is devaluing your integrity and position as the head of the house. You must know that feelings are not like taps that can be turned on and off at will. For every hand you raise against her, you kill something deep and valuable right inside of her. So if she is rude and very disrespectful of you, you asked for it by your own conduct of hitting her.

As a father, how would you feel seeing another man batter your own daughter? Any man who is unable to control his temper has no right to label his wife as being insolent. One of the first things you must do is to divest yourself of that foul temper. Even if you leave this woman to marry another woman, you will still have problems if your way of establishing authority as a man is through physical use of force.

Every man knows that women generally exhibit very little restrains when it comes to the application of their tongues. It is the nature of a woman to talk before thinking. Sensible men have since come to realize that reacting to every word the woman says in her moment of agitation will make them appear very insane to a world that is ignorant of the genesis of the situation.

This is because, when a man beats his wife, it is her cries and pains people get to hear of, not the reason for those cries. Therefore, do what some men do, walk away if you aren’t strong enough to ignore her or stop eating her food for a while to drive home your anger. No woman is always comfortable when her husband ignores her food and person for too long.

Trust me; this works better than hitting her. Over time, she will begin to respect your approach and person better than when you were hitting her. She will begin to exercise some restraints in her attitude and disposition towards you generally. A mere glance from some men is enough to make the woman think twice before saying anything.

The reaction of a woman to a violent husband is like that of a child. When a child is subjected to frequent beating, the child soon develops a thick skin; making correction very difficult to impact.

No matter how bad your wife is, you have erased all your advantages by being physical. By beating her, you not only expose her to the riddle of neighbours but yourself too as a man unable to control his temper.

Nasty neighbours and friends cash in on such situations to make fun of the woman; call her names in the process causing her to be more determined to make life a living hell for the man exposing her pains to all and sundry.

Her attitude of insolence is to make you too feel her pains and embarrassment; to let you know how it feels to be humiliated.

Even if you cannot apologise, let her know you are willing to change through your attitude towards her. But as the man, it behooves you to take the decisive steps of growing your home into an ideal one by initiating a dialogue aimed at getting to the bottom of your problems in your home.

There must be something you saw in her that tilted the scale in her favor during your days of searching for the right woman. Dig it up from wherever you kept it. Such memories are what you need now to help pull your marriage of this abyss.

To get the full picture, encourage her to talk about all her disappointments. By so doing, you will get the benefit of her thoughts, likes and clues on the way forward for both of you. Always remember that just as it takes two to tangle; it also takes two to create a situation in a marriage. She cannot on her own have brought about all the pains and distress in your marriage without your help and inputs.

Where you are wrong, be humane enough to apologise and where right, insist on it with love. Marriage is compromises and sacrifices. Both of you must learn to shift grounds a little bit for the sake of yourselves and those children who for now need your presence and care.

All you need is determination to make it work.

As the head of the home, you can stand in gap for your wife. Pray out what you don’t want in her. God is very much in the business of making right what has gone wrong.

Good luck.

Share a problem With Auntie Agatha, gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com, Tel: 08054500626