I read a book about love languages. It was from a Christian perspective but I think anyone could get value from it. Basically the take away was that we all show and feel love in different ways. One of the best things you can do is figure out how your partner feels loved (their love language). It may be verbal, physical touch, actions etc. You then make a conscious effort to make sure that your partner knows you love them by using their love language and not just your own.
Edit: wow a lot of people apparently saw this. Here is the book on amazon if anyone was interested:
It's apparently less than $5 as an ebook. No I'm not the author. Good read even if you ignore the religious perspective it is great to work through with your significant other.
In case anyone doesn't know the reference: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-that-Lasts-ebook/dp/B00OICLVBI/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=five+love+languages&qid=1600148058&s=digital-text&sr=1-3
This book would have saved my marriage, if I had read it early enough.
Umm... no no no no. First of all he should be going with you, secondly, he NEEDS to get his butt in gear and stay home with the kids. If it's him that has something less important to do, then HE should find a sitter if it's so damn important, because what you are doing IS important.
You might want to check out the book All the Rage: Fathers, Mothers and the Myth of Equal Partnership
You don't have to read it chapter by chapter or anything, you can pick it up and put it down, but it really breaks down a lot of men's bullshit and gives some ways to counteract it. I read so many passages of it to DH I thought he was gonna slap me.
She’s pretty clearly motivated by the idea of having money, and I cannot stand her thus far, but this conversation reminded me of The Five Love Languages. (An absolutely amazing book and a breezy read that everyone should check out. I can’t believe how much it made me understand myself and others.)
Basically, for some people, gifts are their love language. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a materialistic way. Giving and receiving gifts, however small, makes them feel loved. I don’t like using the phrase “gold digger” because it has such misogynistic connotations and also implies that there’s something wrong with transactional relationships when they’re actually perfectly fine and quiet common.
But I’m curious about Larissa—I wish we could tap into a parallel universe and see how she reacted to him having a bouquet of flowers for her when she arrived. Would she have bitched about the quality of the flowers like Daya in season two? Or would it have given her a little reassuring emotional boost that protected her from feeling such deep disappointment when she saw the underwhelming dreariness of Las Vegas for the first time?
I want to like Colt and dislike her, but I suspect they both may turn out to be quite different from their portrayals in the first two episodes.
Sorry for the long rambling! My brain has not had enough caffeine injected into it yet.
If he doesn't want to work towards fixing his issues there's not much you can do. He has to want to change before it's possible.
I recommend he give this book a read
https://smile.amazon.com/Running-Empty-Overcome-Childhood-Emotional-ebook/dp/B009VJ4B4C/
Therapy helped me make the decision, but I also got a lot out of this book written by a therapist: "Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship"
I really like how this book gives you a list of "diagnostics" that identify things that in this therapist's experience mean you'll be happier out of the relationship - and also defines which things don't really matter for happiness.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002JPGQ34/ref=ppx\_yo\_dt\_b\_d\_asin\_title\_o08?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Chances are you're talking when you should just say, "This conversation is over until you can speak me respectfully."
Stop telling her what you do then, it sounds like you're asking her for permission to do the things you are going to do anyway.
I highly recommend you read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Women-Want-When-They-ebook/dp/B00JV8UYO4
I'm not OP, but if the reason you have a hard time processing your emotions is at all linked to your upbringing, I've found this book quite helpful: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009VJ4B4C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Basically, the book is about how your parents can inadvertently teach you that emotional expression is bad, which can screw you up, because expressing emotions and by extension, your needs, are a fundamental human drive. The book will give you techniques on recognizing your emotions, and a lot of useful support on encouraging you to be more comfortable expressing them.
Read book. Forgive, forget.
Parents suck a being parents. Maybe one day we all can be a little less shitty to the next generation.
If you’re really not a troll, if you really want to understand why your wife, and probably your mom and your grandmother, feel like they have no choice but to do everything while feeling resentful and enraged about it, you should read this book:
All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership.
If you want to score points with your wife, buy two copies so you can read it together, and then READ IT and discuss with her.
But I agree with everyone else, your mom and grandmother grew up in times when divorce was harder and women weren’t usually breadwinners. Your wife makes good money and can do everything without your help AND is clearly unhappy with you and your life together. If you think she’ll never leave, you’re living in a fantasy that will soon come to an end—unless you do the work to educate yourself, understand her point of view, and become the partner she needs.
I'd say read the book "What Women Want when they Test men", as it's literally written about insecure women like this.
One solution is the dodge:
"Who ever gives me the bigger boner at the time."
**Smile and smirk**: "I know what I want to save from death, my blue balls because they're about to explode." Then you start kissing her and loving her up - and go to sexy town.
Others have said not to play her game, that the only winning move is to not play... The other thing you do is change the damn game. Women say these things when they're feeling insecure, so the nature of the solution is to give her emotional comfort & security.
Someone on this sub once linked me this book. I read it and it really helped me start having some conversations with my husband. Is everything perfect? No. It is better though.
Here's the Amazon link for it.
It bothers me that I know people genuinely believe what they say to me, but I don't so I need to pull out an appropriate reaction out of my ass.
> of which I love more than the world
You are showing to much emotions, that's is not healthy, women hate it and it's unattractive to them!
> was like a dream come true for me
This is where you disaster starts!
You showed her that she is the best you can do!
That you are always available.
That she is your only option!
> I also find myself comparing myself to those 4 mouth-breathers that are nothing compared to the man I am.
Buddy, women want to chase love, and work for it, or else it will be a boring relationship for them, unattractive to them, you are just too available, those 4 mouth-breathers knew how to push her buttons and be attractive to her!
But you can maybe solve that problem!
You answer is in this Amazon top rated book (Read it, and don't let her see you reading it):
The Married Man Sex Life Primer 2011 - By Athol Kay
Work on the MAP (When you read this book you will know what it is!)
Good luck buddy and update us after you read the book!
The reason that the penis evolved to work like a plunger was precisely because in order to increase the odds of impregnating the female with it's genetic material, it had to pump out a lot of other semen first.
Cumdumps are as old as humanity itself.
Read Sex at Dawn. Gay men don't get turned on when we gang bang a bottom because we're gay. We get turned on because we're men.
Monogamy is a relatively modern concept. It's not how we evolved to be. Many couples make it work and while it is common, it's not normal... for gays or straights.
Read Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
I believe I came across an even less determinate consensus in the book Sex at Dawn based on observations of the Kalahari bushmen, probably the last real hunter-gatherer society.
One of the authors, Christopher Ryan, used the word "Monogam-ish" at a presentation in Sydney. You can picture him using that hand gesture with the fingers spread out and waving in that "sorta, kinda" fashion.
Anyway to the point, within a single tribe he observed both trends toward monogamy and non-monogamy. Some members liked to be exclusive and the others - the decision making didn't differentiate between men and women - would change partners every so often. Basically just like sexuality is a spectrum, not a polarity.
Parenting - aside from the direct birth mother link - was a duty of the whole tribe. The promotion of the nuclear family ideal is a tragedy.
EDIT: Clarified my closing sentence
You're probably missing a fundamental thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-that-Lasts-ebook/dp/B00OICLVBI/
Until encountering that concept ( which I then dug-into via a website, not a book ), I was always getting it wrong, the mis-match between communication-styles with other people.
I cannot understand "gifts" as communication-means: just not wired that way.
Other people, cannot understand any other means of communicating valuing...
Please dig into the concepts of that, whether in a book or on Le Web ( La? Web? .. do French people deem the Web to be masculine or feminine? ), & maybe it's fundamentally a communication-language problem...
( :
Oh I have been here...sooooo many times. I've been married now for 25 years and it was decades of this pattern for us.
Eventually I realized that he has very little self-compassion. And I started focusing on that and thinking about how different I am in that way. I have a lot of self-compassion and can easily forgive myself when I screw up. He is more of a perfectionist overall, and he would rather avoid thinking about a mistake because it feels so bad for him. He doesn't have an internal voice that says "It's okay, you didn't mean to" or "It's okay, you'll learn from this and everyone makes mistakes".
Also, some people can get caught in a "win-lose" mindset during conflict. They feel like in any conflict, someone is at fault and must be blamed. My husband saw conflict this way, and used to always say to me: "You always have to win". He didn't believe me when I said I didn't care about "winning" and that there is no one to "blame" and I just want him to understand me, and to understand him.
When I spent a little more time getting inside his head, then I could see how painful this mindset must be. I was so tired of reassuring him when I was the one who was hurt, but now it's so much better.
Also got him a book called "I Hear You" because it teaches how to validate someone. It helps change his mindset from "I did something wrong, I am to blame" to him focusing on "I can make her feel better in this moment".
https://www.amazon.com/Hear-You-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-Relationships-ebook/dp/B071K4MWMK
I hope that helps
Read this book first before making any decisions: Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship. The decision to divorce was made by my STBX. I wish I read this book ahead of time as I could have recognized reasons I should have left.
In dem Buch The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life gibt's ein eigenes Kapitel für genauso Menschen wie dich. Ich hab das Kapitel damals nur milde interessiert gelesen weil es für mich nicht relevant war, aber ich bin mir sicher dass es dir (so wie andere Kapitel in dem Buch mir) weiterhelfen kann.
Ich hab das Buch auf Englisch gelesen, aber auf Amazon gibt es das auch auf Deutsch: Die Kinderentscheidung: Wie Sie die wichtigste Entscheidung Ihres Lebens treffen.
Vielleicht magst du auch Mal in ein paar subreddits stöbern, vielleicht kannst du dich mit ein paar Posts dort identifizieren. r/fencesitters und r/singleparents vielleicht?
https://www.amazon.com/Running-Empty-Overcome-Childhood-Emotional-ebook/dp/B009VJ4B4C
Go enrol in new hobbies, group classes, etc. so you can build a group of friends around you. It's hard work and takes years but is so worth it.
A few books for you so you can heal (it's up to you): https://www.amazon.com/Running-Empty-Overcome-Childhood-Emotional-ebook/dp/B009VJ4B4C
I’d recommend checking out this book or something similar: https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Decision-Make-Important-Choice-ebook/dp/B01FSZ51J6/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=854c308a-f183-45da-963a-d5771841e877
It has some good thinking exercises to help you drill down on the reasons why you want a kid and help you make sure it happens for the right reasons. Remember, you’re not just having a baby, you’re becoming a parent.
> But the way I see it, if it’s not 100% certainty, then you shouldn’t do it, right?
Very few people have 100% confidence in whether they want kids or not. You just have to figure out which decision you’re least likely to regret. I found this book to be quite helpful in figuring it out.
If you’ll want kids and she won’t, it’s unlikely to work out in the long term. But you have a lot of time to figure it out, there’s no rush.
I’m convinced there was a pregnancy pact this year that everyone except me was in on, so I feel you. I just worked through a book that I felt was really helpful at figuring out my feelings on if I actually wanted a kid or it was just peer pressure. It was “The Baby Decision” by Merle Bombardieri and it was really unbiased imo. It’s definitely something you can work through on your own and just use it to guide the conversation if your partner doesn’t want to do homework.
It's not just the male brain. Human sexuality evolved for something approximating what we now call polyamory. Read Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships.
Monogamy in males is relatively new from an evolutionary aspect. Men only started to control the sexuality of women when we invented agriculture and the concept of personal property that we could pass on to our own children. Which meant we needed to control which men the women were around to ensure that any of our multiple wives only bore children that we created.
Men were never expected to be monogamous until very, very, recently. I'd even go so far as to say that the sexual revolution in the 60's didn't free women, it restricted men.
Bonobos are our closest evolutionary cousins but they don't have all of the religious dogma surrounding mating so... they all fuck like... well... basically like gay men do if left to their own devices.
>But it seems like it’s a lost battle and I should attempt to reframe my mind for shorter term relationships.
Not necessarily. I've been in an open relationship with my partner for over 12 years and I've been monogamous for the last 11 or so. The fact that monogamy is not in our nature does not mean that you can't have a monogamous relationship. It just means that you have to deal with the reality of that fact.
ADD is a spectrum, just like Down syndrome, while you could have had a long and difficult road for your masters, I had a long and difficult road just to get my bachelor’s degree (took me about 6 years and 3 different colleges) and I was diagnosed in 1st grade. While I had some support from my parents (I did struggle with the “you have so much potential” and “you need to figure out a system that works for you”) but they got a tutor for my school work but they ended up just doing the work with me instead of teaching or exploring with me ways to do school to benefit me. I didn’t realize until I was fired from my second job the impact ADD has on my day to day life. I was always told as a kid that ADD was just attention issues and only a school thing. One thing I found really useful was a book called: the ADHD effect on marriage. (Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MRBEAG?ref=KC_GS_GB_US )