What to do about my marriage

[Keys]

First of all, I would like to thank you for reading this post about my marriage problems. I appreciate any help and advice you can give and I appreciate your time.

 

Over the past five years I've been married, my husband has slowly started to communicate with me less and has made our marriage very frustrating.

 

He hardly ever listens to me when I'm talking to him about LIFE. I could be talking to him about my day at work to our future goals with savings, retirement, buying a home, our careers and he shows the same amount of interest with it all, which is NONE. He is so distracted when I talk to him, that sometimes it feels as if I'm talking to myself. He'll lose his attention on sports of course, the dogs, the kitchen, the bathroom, ANYTHING when I'm talking to him. So most of the time I just give up and do what he does, watch TV.

 

I don't have any close friends and I'm not close with any of my family members, so communicating with my husband is extremely important for my psychological well being. Unfortunately, my husband can care less. He acts like he does and when I vent, I just get the "yeah I'll change, I'll fix it" and nothing ever changes. EVER!

 

When I break down and cry every so many weeks because of the frustration, he yells at me and tells me to stop being so sensitive and to stop thinking so much about stuff. Who says that??? It's as if he thinks what I have to say is not important enough to talk about and especially cry about.

 

If I ask him to help out with anything, like paying the bills, running errands, taking care of the cars, etc. He always forgets because guess what, he was never listening to me in the first place to do what I ask him to do. I'm constantly running our lives and our household all by myself. I'm exhausted. If I try to communicate with him about this, I either get no response because he'll change the subject or a "yeah of course I'll help and do it" (but he never does). It's crazy. And if I ever ask him to do things with me and he wants to do something else with his friends from work, we fight about it because he always has to have his way with things. Guess what, he ends up getting his way or I feel like a huge careless loser because of the guilt trips he puts on me.

 

I can't stand living a life where I'm living it all by myself. I love my husband so much, but overall, I've been unhappy more than I've been happy in my marriage. I think I've cried more in my marriage then I've done throughout my entire childhood.

 

Please help, I feel so alone and useless.

[melrich]

You have obviously tried talking to him about things and are not making any headway. Do you think your husband really knows how big an issue this is for you? Do you think if he read this post he would be surprised?

 

I am not a fan of ultimatums but I do think sometimes they have their place. I think this may be one of those times. You need to get your husband to realise how serious things have become. To do that you probably have to inject some change yourself.

 

If it were me, I'd be sitting down with your husband and telling him that you need your marriage to change or you are going to end it. I'd put a time frame in teh region of 3 months. In doing that I think you need to be very clear with him about what you see the probelms being and what compromises you think need to be made. Schedule a weekly "meeting" to talk about progress.

 

Of course the key thing about issuing an ultimatum like this is that you have to be willing to follow through with it. If you are not then do not go down that track. But from what you post, just nagging him about the way things are is not going to work and my guess is you will only potentially achieve change by slapping him in the face.

[amtjrtcet]

Welcome to ENA, & I must say I felt like I was reading my story of my relationship with my ex. I know just how you feel hun. I went through the same thing. I wish I had better adivce for you. But I can tell you how things ended. I left him. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Its been a yr since I left, I'm completely in love with my boyfriend. He's so wonderful to me. Yet I think about my ex every day, I wish he could have been this guy. Some people just never change, i kept waiting for my ex to change. I thought that if I stuck it out long enough he would. Nope.

 

Good luck hun, I wish you the best.