‘My Husband Is A Selfish Child’
“The more I do for Tom, the more he demands,” sobs Meredith, 30, a slender woman who runs a small music school at home. “If I’d known that marriage to him would be like this, I never would have gone on that first date.”
Meredith was 20, a music student newly arrived in New York City from a small Idaho town, when she met Tom, a talented pianist who also played flute with a small, prestigious orchestra.
Romantic Tom sent flowers, wrote beautiful love letters and was an excellent critic of her technique. In time, they went for premarital counseling with a minister. “We talked at length about our feelings and fears. Tom was fabulous,” she adds. “He said things like ‘If we have kids, I intend to participate 100 percent’ and ‘He who cooks will never have to clean up.”’
Once married, Meredith was floored to discover that her husband was a typical helpless male. Tom comes home from work, steps out of his clothes and expects them to turn up magically cleaned and pressed. He wants Meredith to fix elaborate meals every day, including homemade bread and soup. When their daughter Elyse, now 18 months old, was born, he wouldn’t think of changing a diaper or walking the floor with her at 3 a.m.
Meredith was so anxious to be the good little wife that she did as Tom expected. “Mother was a slave to my father, and if I learned anything from her, it was that the house must look perfect and anything your husband wanted automatically took precedence over your needs.”
A few months ago, when Tom was passed over for a soloist position, he quit in a huff. At home, he has interfered with Meredith’s teaching, costing her students. She says his talent doesn’t extend to teaching kids. And he has done nothing to improve the handyman’s special home he insisted they buy.
Tom, 32 and intense, doesn’t know why things have soured. “Maybe I was just too preoccupied with being the man of the family,” he says wistfully. “I had this tremendous desire to succeed for all of us.”
He believes the problems started when Elyse was born. “She was a colicky baby, and Meredith expected me to be this super-attentive parent, but there is only so much time left in the day when you’re working as hard as I was.” He wasn’t good with an infant. “I looked forward to the time when Elyse grew up and I could teach her to play the flute,” he explains.
Tom admits he put his own career needs ahead of his wife’s. “I felt that working for a nationally known performing group was more important than giving 6-year-olds scales to practice,” he says. But now he resents being blamed for the school’s financial problems. “Kids dropped out because of the recession,” he notes.
Rewriting the script
“Meredith and Tom suffer from an unequal division of responsibility,” notes Amy F. Cohen, a Westchester County, N.Y., counselor. Tom consistently put his needs ahead of his wife’s on the rationale that his professional advancement would ensure the family’s future happiness. Meredith failed to stand up to him because she had grown up expecting to be a good housewife and mother.
The following measures helped these two put their problems into perspective and turn a rigid marriage into one of sharing flexibility:
Define the problem. Meredith and Tom had a long habit of polite dishonesty, and there were many discrepancies in their stories. To resolve this, both kept a diary of major events, conversations and arguments. After two weeks, they compared notes and found that Meredith often described a certain argument as lasting a few minutes, and Tom invariably reported that it had continued for hours. Seeing this on paper gave them the impetus to more accurately assess what was happening in their marriage.
Focus on each partner’s needs. Think in terms of how much and in what areas you can give, and how much you need to get.
Set comfortable boundaries. Meredith had to outline specific home repair tasks she wanted Tom to do. Tom got to say which ones he could do and when. In turn, if Tom hoped for an elaborate dinner, he could suggest it, but Meredith could say no.
Get help. Be Creative. Even if you’re on a tight budget, consider hiring a high school or college student to baby-sit or run errands, freeing up time to concentrate on yourself. Or you might swap time with a neighbor, as Meredith did.