Why Many Women Are Unhappy in Marriage

Resentment blinds a wife so completely that she sees an enemy in her husband. Yet she is the one carrying that stone, and no one else suffers from it.

When I read the comments and talk to married couples during consultations, I often see that a woman’s resentment toward her husband blinds her so completely that she starts seeing an enemy in him.

The situation is quite remarkable: I, a stranger off the street, try to explain why the most important man in her life — the one she married — is not actually her enemy. I lay out arguments and turn her attention toward what is good in that relationship.

But when a woman carries deep resentment, arguments and logic barely work. Many women fail to see that resentment is the thing hurting them. Not her husband, not the children, not her parents, not her friends — nobody suffers from that resentment as much as the wife herself. Forgiving and letting go of that pain is something you do for yourself, for your psychological and physical health. Resentment is a stone a person carries on their shoulders seven days a week, 365 days a year.

It may well be that her husband never realises he should apologise for the situations where he was wrong. So what — carry that weight for the rest of your life and poison every single day? To achieve what? Who is worse off for it, other than the woman herself?

When I wrote that saving a relationship only requires one person in the couple to step up, some women in the comments started explaining why none of it would ever work on their man.

Think about it. Instead of pausing for one second to consider how to make the family happy and trying a different approach, women set out to prove that their man is a self-absorbed peacock incapable of answering kindness with kindness.

But I have another piece of unwelcome news for women. None of us chooses the person we love by accident. He matches our own inner standards and demands. It was not chance that made you pick him out of thousands of men. And it was not chance that made him propose to you. The two of you are at roughly the same level of development and understanding of the world. If that were not so, you simply would not have found each other interesting enough to build a family. There are exceptions, of course, but in most cases we choose a person with our own head and without outside pressure.

So if you decide to forgive him and start working on yourself, your family can become a very happy one.

And if you think you will do everything right for the man you love while he, the selfish scoundrel, simply uses you and gives nothing back — then try doing what I wrote about in previous posts for at least a couple of months and look at the result. Treat it as an experiment.

Some women, hurt by their husbands, believe he was cunning and calculating enough to start a family with her specifically to ruin her life, to argue, to shout, to endlessly pick fights and insult her. Because single men live such miserable, boring lives, obviously. Why not ruin the life of the mother of your children? So logical, so enjoyable. You get married and then you fight every day. What a treat.

But that is absurd. Why deliberately build a family only to suffer inside it? You can live perfectly calmly without one. Both the man and the woman enter marriage to be happier in it than either of them was alone. That is why I keep saying your husband is not your enemy. He, too, wants to come home gladly and spend time with his family. But if what waits for him at home is a resentful wife telling him what to do and how to do it, then of course he will run from that atmosphere and shut down.

So once you forgive him, you will be able to see the situation soberly, without emotion, and understand that he is not your enemy but your friend. That the two of you as a couple simply have not yet learned to hear each other and truly meet each other’s needs. That is his responsibility and yours alike. In a family it is rare for one person to be doing everything right and the other to be wrong about everything.

So first our attitude toward the person we love has to change, and only then can something change in the family itself.

Some women refuse to believe their husband could be anything other than selfish, and they treat him with no respect and undisguised contempt. Curious, isn’t it, that with an attitude like that he shows no eagerness to prove them wrong.

The next post is about why so many men are unhappy in marriage.