Have a New Husband by Friday (10 page)

About an hour and a half later, Frank may notice that there’s no dinner on the table. He’ll probably scratch his head, go back into the den, and expect that you’re just running a little late. But after another thirty minutes, when he doesn’t hear anything in the kitchen, he’s guaranteed to ask, “Where’s dinner?”

Don’t blow up. Don’t whine. Say in a calm and casual voice, “I don’t feel like cooking dinner.”

“What do you mean you don’t feel like cooking dinner?”

Stay cool. Don’t get into an argument. Simply answer, “Well, Frank, you came home two hours ago, snapped at me, and said, ‘Where’s my dry cleaning?’ The fact is, I spent most of the morning cleaning up after the Monday Night Football party you had with your friends, and then your mom called and asked me to come over this afternoon to run some errands for her. I’m sorry I forgot your dry cleaning, but I think I deserve to be treated with a little more respect. When you attack me without even trying to understand what my day was like, it makes me feel that you don’t respect me. When I’m not respected, I don’t feel like cooking.”

Most often a husband doesn’t notice when a wife feels demeaned. (It all goes back to the fact that a male has less sensory perception.) So you have to do something to make him see that the relationship is broken. If you just talk at him, you won’t accomplish much. (In the next chapter, we’ll talk about what you say and how your husband receives it.) But if you create a situation, the chances that your message will get through will increase dramatically.

Women Talk

My husband was majorly taking me for granted. He always criticized me and everything I did. Nothing was ever good enough. And he always threatened to divorce me. Every time he mentioned that, I got really scared because we have three young kids. What would I do? So I’d go out of my way to make him happy . . . until the next blow-up.

Then I took your advice, Dr. Leman. You said it was time for me to take him by surprise—to tell him that
I
wanted a divorce—to see if that would wake him up to what he was doing. You were right. That stopped him just as he was starting to crank up the criticism again. His jaw dropped, and he just stared at me.

We’re now going to counseling together. He told the counselor recently that it was like a bomb went off in his brain, realizing he might lose me and the kids. You were right again: sometimes you have to take the bull by the horns in order to bring about change. Our home is changing—slowly, but it’s changing.

Alicia, Washington

Also, you need to take a good, hard look at where your husband came from. How did your husband’s dad treat his mom? How did his mom treat his dad? If your husband grew up with a father who was violent toward his wife or emotionally distant, what did your husband learn about marriage? Women? Himself? How did his parents handle curveballs? How did they communicate? By yelling, fighting, then freezing each other out until someone felt guilty and apologized? Did they fight like cats and dogs, yet never get anywhere? Perhaps they held grudges, making the environment tense at home. Problems were never resolved; they were buried and then built up, like plaque on teeth. How have those patterns your husband learned from his parents affected his relationship with you?

It’s all about the domino effect. I’ve learned a lot about that lately in regard to cars and electrical problems. In 60-plus years of walking around this earth, I still know nothing about cars and those things. But I do know that if I’m told I have an electrical problem in my car, it can end up costing me a fortune, because there are so many different ways the problem can manifest itself. In this day of high-tech engines, I can spend a lot of money at the local repair shop, especially at the going rate of 70-plus bucks an hour. I don’t want electrical problems; they’re hard to track down. Just when I think the problem is in one area, it shows up in another area. It’s like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Everyone is wired differently. Some of those wires are where they should be; others aren’t. If they’ve had no interference over the years and have been dealt with in the proper way, they’ll be in good shape and won’t cause you problems. But in some environments, those wires were pulled, played with, neglected, or abused. So is it any surprise that over a period of time those mangled wires will come to the forefront and cause problems?

The Pleaser

In marriage, each spouse should try to please the other. But there’s a problem when one person is doing all the pleasing and the other is doing all the taking.
2

A pleaser often looks confident and successful on the outside, but underneath, her private logic tells her that she can never do enough or be enough to make others happy. She is often a perfectionist who was actively influenced by parental pressure. She grew up
in a critical, unhappy home, with little fatherly attention, support, or love. In marriage she puts up with the way her husband treats her because she doesn't think she deserves any better treatment. At least, Mom and Dad didn't think so, and they had to be right.

A pleaser thinks everything is her fault. If only she’d done something different, if only she’d said something different, then maybe her husband wouldn’t have yelled, blown up, and hit her. A pleaser wants the highway of life to be smooth, with no road bumps. "Peace at any price" is her motto. But she's the one who pays dearly. She's the doormat, and everyone (husband included) takes advantage of her. She's valued for what she does (cooking, cleaning, laundry), not for who she is.

There’s a problem when one person is doing all the pleasing and the other is doing all the taking.

Ironically, a pleaser tends to marry a controller or a “dependent loser” who takes advantage of her.

A pleaser wants the highway of life to be smooth, with no road bumps. “Peace at any price” is her motto. But she’s the one who pays dearly.

The Controller

A controller grew up watching his father denigrate, harass, and verbally and/or physically abuse his mother, and he developed a philosophy that women are weak and are to be dominated. He’ll often repent of his outbursts: “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I won’t do it again.” The pleaser wife wants to believe it, so she’ll tell herself,
He really is sorry. He says he is. I guess I deserved it.
But the same scenario plays out over and over again. The controller gets his psychological jollies by dominating someone who is weaker than him. He might do this physically, verbally, or by controlling the flow of money in the household.

A controller isn’t always verbally or physically abusive, however. He can also end up controlling his wife through her pity and desire to help him. This type of man I call the “dependent loser.” His wife is a “Martha” Luther—a reformer—who is sure that if she just works hard enough, she can change her man into the guy she wants him to be. But she spends her life walking around her husband on eggshells.

Nipping Control in the Bud

Thousands of men hide from life behind women’s skirts. They’ll complain about things, like the flat-screen TV they bought that doesn’t work right. They’ll complain and complain—all behind closed doors. When it comes to talking to the salesperson, that same husband will take the low road. Oftentimes you, the
wife
, are the one who takes the TV back to the store. See what I mean? You need to become good at backing off and allowing your husband to step up to the plate and be a man, not a mouse.

You are not put on this earth to be your husband’s doormat or servant.

Is there a guy your husband respects who is a good influence on him? A mentor who could take your male creature under his wings and teach him how to be a good husband? Is there a small group at your place of worship that you could join? Any kind of group that would foster relationships? Would your husband see a professional?

Your husband’s response will tell you a lot about whether he’s willing to make a change. If he is, wonderful! Encourage him to pursue that change in every way that you can’t. If he’s not willing, it might be better to let your marriage go. There will be far more hurt in the long run.

Andrea was married to a high-powered business executive. He was a rat. He slept around and violated his marriage many times. He wasn’t a particularly good husband or father. He had just served her with divorce papers when she came to see me. He was determined to take the kids, and he had her over the barrel because he had money and good lawyers. Andrea was absolutely paralyzed at the thought of losing her children and worried about what was going to happen to them.

I finally got her to see that her husband was a controller, and he knew Mama Bear’s soft spot—her little cubs. Did he really want the kids? No. What would a jet-setting business executive do with two kids all day? Take them on his business trips? Have them sit next to him at his business meeting at the airport? Drive them back and forth to school and violin lessons?

You are not put on this earth to be your husband’s doormat or servant.

“The next time he threatens you with taking full custody of the children,” I told Andrea, “look him straight in the eye and say, ‘You don’t need your attorney for that. They’re yours. In fact, here’s their schedule so you know what they have to do when.’ Then hand him the calendar for the next month.”

“But, Dr. Leman,” she said, “what if he takes me up on it?”

“He might,” I said, “but then you need to use that time wisely. Go back to school. Cram in classes and finish your degree. If you’re going to be a single mom, you need all the job skills you can get in order to provide for yourself and your children.” I smiled. “But I can guarantee you that even if he does take the kids, it likely won’t last a month.”

I was right. It didn’t even last a week. She nipped his controlling in the bud by standing up to him.

If you had to do it all over again, it’s doubtful you’d pick the same man. But since you did pick that man, your attitude about the consequences will make all the difference in the future for you and your children. But there’s also a line you have to draw and never step over.

The rest of this section may not be for all of you, but for others of you it’ll be a lifesaver. Some of you picked up this book as a last-ditch effort. You’ve tried everything to change your husband. You feel so hurt, dissed, abused, and totally disregarded by your husband that you don’t even know where to start thinking about the possibility of having a new husband by Friday. Yours has been unfaithful, has been physically or verbally abusive (or both), has denigrated you at every turn, and has even harmed your children, and you can’t take it anymore. You want a new husband by Friday, that’s for sure, but you’re not certain if you want the
same
husband. You’d rather start all over. You no longer feel any love for this man you married because he has harmed you so much.

If so, what I’m going to say next is especially for you.

ARE YOU TRYING TO
TURN YOUR ZEBRA INTO
A HORSE ?

M
ost guys
want
to please their wives—at least the healthy guys do. The guys who are good, moral men know what’s right and act on it (even if they are dumb about relationships sometimes). But you might not have married a healthy guy.

Maybe your husband spends his time smoking weed, smashed on vodka, or loving the white lady of cocaine. Maybe he’s a philanderer (openly or secretly) or a wife beater. Maybe he lives in the zone of pornography, and you’re sickened just by the sight of him and what he forces you to do. Then let me ask you: Was he
ever
the husband you could respect, love, and prize? Or are you trying to take a zebra and turn him into a white stallion?

Here’s what I mean. Some people who hear hoofbeats would say, “Oh, here comes a zebra.” But if you live in the state of Illinois, chances are good that it’s a horse coming, not a zebra. Yet people tend to believe what they want to believe. Is that you? Did you fall into the trap of trying to paint your husband-to-be as something other than he was? Then I have news for
you. You can't rub the stripes off that zebra and make it a horse. It is what it is.

A lot of single or single-again women go looking for the man of their dreams—their knight in shining armor, the gentle, loving, relational man who will want to stick around for a lifetime—in singles’ bars. You might as well look for a zebra strolling down Lakeshore Avenue or riding up the escalators at Water Tower Place in Chicago.

You can’t rub the stripes off that zebra and make it a horse. It is what it is.

Just watching the crude behavior of these types of men and listening to the language they use when talking about their ex-wives or ex-girlfriends will give you a clear picture of who these men are. Most don’t like themselves very much, so how could they like—or love—anyone else? They go from job to job and relationship to relationship, finding fault with everyone but themselves.

Many have tempers. Most are looking for someone to do the mattress mambo with for a night or two; they’re not looking for a long-term relationship.

I ask you, is the environment of a bar what you want for your home? For you? For your children? Is a man who will hang out in bars really the kind of man you want as your lifelong partner?

Can this type of man change? It’s possible. But it would take a lightning hit from the Almighty. Some men are just losers. They’re not capable of being the kind of strong men who are able to love a woman and treat her the way she deserves. Perhaps it’s due to their background—the way they were treated at home (or the lack of a home) as they were growing up. Maybe it’s due to their chemical dependency. But some men are downright incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.

Can this type of man change? It’s possible. But it would take a lightning hit from the Almighty.

If this is the case for you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you married a man who isn’t capable of being a good lover or of thinking of anyone other than himself. You know now that you made a lousy choice; back then you were blinded by what you thought was love but what became rigid control and possessiveness.