If my wife gave me an ultimatum about something like orange juice then that would definitely bother me and make me want to resist going along with this demand just as much if not more than her reaction to alcohol simply because it would demonstrate that she is the kind of person that typically gets so upset about insignificant things like this when no harm is done and it doesn't really make that much of a difference either way. If it was only one thing then it would be easy enough to just get in the habit of doing things the way she wants but with her it is always one thing after another. First I need to fold the laundry a certain way, then she doesn't like the way I dress, then I need to wash the dishes or clean the bathroom or mow the lawn or work on endless home improvement projects right now because it can't wait and then she says I didn't do it right.

Little things add up over a lifetime and that's why basically saying, "yes dear" to every single thing that by itself was clearly not as important as my marriage has not worked very well for me so far because after a while I started to feel like my marriage was mostly a source of pain and frustration and I couldn't hardly stand to be around my wife for very long anymore. So of course things that ideally should not be more important than your spouse's feelings can easily seem to be worth fighting over once it gets to this point. That's why I think the question of whether or not I had a serious drinking problem or not is beside the point and mostly distracts from the real issues in my case. The truth is that if I had married someone that didn't think drinking was such a big deal then there wouldn't have been any problem whatsoever but at the time I thought it was important to marry a Mormon true believer from a good Mormon family.

So far the only possible solution I see within the context of Dr. Harley's advice would be to try to reverse the following trends if possible: 1. Dishonesty; I didn't like to share my feelings because I was mostly concerned with how my wife would react. 2. Lack of negotiation and joint agreements. Our disagreements would quickly escalate into fights or I would just agree with my wife and resent it later. 3. Love Busters; my wife's selfish demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts outweighed any positive feelings I had about her to the point that I went into a state of withdrawal and basically gave up on her and thought it wasn't worth trying anymore.

And to think, all this is so you can drink. Its that important to you. It is not a selfish demand to insist you stop drinking. I think your wife probably understands you have a serious drinking problem that you value more than her or your marriage. You are simply in denial.

Stop "yes dearing" to everything. It's not working. It's leaving you resentful.

Stuff like folding the laundry wrong is pretty fixable, ask her how she wants it folded. Or do the laundry with her.

Whether you think it's dumb that she thinks you should't drink is not the point. If you want a happy marriage, you cannot continue to do things that irritate her. Of course this is more than likely because she is a Mormon and that is against her beliefs. But you married a Mormon knowing that those were her beliefs.

One huge issue is neitehr one of you are using POJA or trying to get rid of the Love Busters.

You married a mormon, you stopped drinking as what you felt was a condition of marriage (obviously she agreed), you admit to a history of binge drinking where things got out of control, drinking upsets her to the point of dumping alcohol down the sink, and you think SHE has the problem?

The only person here you are fooling is yourself.

You are at risk of turning to an affair - you are pretty much saying you want to go back to your single life and do whatever the heck you want, be damned if it hurts your wife, because you resent not being able to do whatever you want no matter who it hurts.

Your wife is mormon, she married what she believed to be a now non-drinker, she's not going to suddenly accept drinking no matter how insignificant you think one drink is. She is not a fool, you clearly are turning to a life ridden with IB's and driving your marriage to disaster.

Is this about wanting to be a young single carefree guy again?

A demand is when you demand that your spouse DO something, not when you demand that your spouse NOT DO something.


When you call your wife's concerns insignificant and say that no harm is done, you are making a disrespectful judgment of her.

This plan does not work if you are not willing to eliminate disrespectful judgments. There are certainly things that she needs to change if your marriage is going to work, but she will not be motivated to do so until you change this fault on your side.

If she had been fine with drinking when you got married, I would be on your side and encouraging you to find out why she had chnaged her mind about it and help you negotiate a solution that makes you both happy.

But we both know that's not what happened. You agreed to be a non-drinker. Then you drank anyway. And now call her controlling for holding you to an agreement you made willingly! How frustrating that must be for her.

Sometimes we have to grow up and honor the commitments we've made. If you worked with the tools here to make your marriage romantic, you would not be resentful over your past choices, becuase your current life would be so rewarding.

My wife was not as strict about this before we were married and earlier in our marriage. She would drink sometimes too but I think she just didn't want it to become an overriding habit and I think she was scared and disgusted to see how much I drank a few times. So then she would freak out and call me names which made me depressed and then I would drink even more. I honestly don't want to make my wife suffer because of something I am doing but I would like to at least be able to talk about it at some point without fighting and if she is still uncomfortable with the idea then I will drop it.

I don't really want to be single again, I mostly just resent being told what to do as if the way I feel about it does not matter. My wife also threatened to leave me if I didn't go back to church and act like a good Mormon and when I told her I didn't believe in the LDS Church anymore. So she probably already thinks this is not exactly what she was signing up for when she married me but I didn't feel like I had any choice but to tell the truth and I don't know what else I can do about it now. At first, I thought about not saying anything about it and just going through the motions to try to make her happy but the LDS Church requires such a high level of commitment that it can be a real pain to deal with if you don't think all this is worthwhile. She was upset about this at first but after a while she got over it so I think she just needed some time to get used to the idea.

Grim, I would start with the 20 hours of UA time, and make that time playful and enjoyable. Keep your LBs in check, and respond to hers with a simple "ouch" or something similar. Repair the love, then revisit these topics of religion and drinking. It is so much easier to be thoughtful toward your spouse when you are in love with them, and you will get that through enjoyable UA time.

You already know she is very uncomfortable with it, so it needs to be dropped. It causes fights so why would you want to fight with her? It is just a beverage and certainly not worth it.


TElling you that your behavior bothers her is not "telling you what to do," she is informing you that your drinking depletes her love for you. If she didn't tell you, then she would fall out of love and you wouldn't know it. You might not like to get overdraft notices from the bank, but what happens when you don't get them? Your bank account goes into the red and you are screwed. It is reasonable of her to ask you to stop something that clearly bothers her so much. Continually badgering her about it tells her that her feelings don't matter.


You should stop agreeing to things that make you unhappy. Her trying to FORCE you into church is as bad as your trying to FORCE her to accept your drinking. Your church is an area that needs to be re-negotiated. This program can teach you how to negotiate but I wouldn't START on this issue. Put it on the back burner until you become skilled at negotiation. Thats IF you become skilled. I have serious doubts that you can or will actually work this program because of your drinking problem. We will see..

My drinking was not even close to our only major source of disagreement or even our most serious one. I basically conceded defeat in this case and was not even thinking about this much for years but that was definitely not the end of the pattern of control because the line in the sand just kept on moving and I was almost always the one losing ground. It seemed to me that after the initial game of bait and switch my wife was clearly becoming increasingly self-righteous and stubborn about always expecting to get her way.

Sometimes I worry that my wife is basically turning into her mother; I noticed my mother-in-law would drag my father-in-law around shopping all day long and could see that we were headed more or less the same way and I didn't like it at all. Once I started to see how much my wife had been controlling me that's when I no longer saw drinking as simply an unnecessary habit I should just be content to live without but instead it became a constant reminder of the fact that I basically did not feel like I could be myself around my wife because I felt like I always needed to put on an act mostly based on what she wanted and expected.

By far my wife's most frequent complaint about me is the way I typically avoid her, ignore her, or tune her out. After she would freak out about it I would try to pay more attention to her but after a while I would always go back to doing the same thing again. The number one complaint I have about my wife is all the criticism, demands, disrespect, and disapproval I constantly get from her. Focusing on whether or not I had a drinking problem will not help with any of this. I understand that real alcoholics can be impossible to work with until they overcome this problem but that is not me at all. I know that there are many other men besides me that are basically being pushed to change so much by their wives that they start to wonder whether it is worth it anymore so that's why I don't know if it's a good idea to encourage this overbearing pressure because some of them will just give up without even trying to work things out.

You tune out, she freaks out about it, you pay attention to her for a while but then gradually withdraw again. Can you see how unloved she must feel when that happens?


Can you see the deadly dance here? Neither is interested in meeting the others emotional needs because the romantic love has gone. So you withdraw from her and she nags you. Eventually she will withdraw too and you will be lonely strangers leading a joyless life. Fun times eh?



Ah but it will, see below.


The best, the very best way to test your relationship is to apply the Policy of Joint Agreement(POJA) to anything that matters to either of you for any reason with no exceptions. Nothing makes a spouse more loved or more secure than the feeling that he or she is protected by this.

If POJAing an issue is making you feel controlled rather than safe and secure, then you have an attachment to something more important to you than your spouse.

Yet it is a major source of contention with you according to your posts. You apparently don't want to give it up as indicated here even though you know it makes her very, very unhappy and leads to fights. Normal people don't fight this hard for a mere beverage. Sorry, but that kind of crazy thinking is typical alcoholic thinking. It is not "control" to ask you stop doing something that bothers her.

While she does not present her complaints in a way that is productive, at least she does complain. Complaining is a good thing in marriage because it gives you an opportunity to change your behavior. It is an irritation in a bad marriage and an opportunity for improvement in a bad marriage.

Are you here to get help for your marriage or are you here to whine and argue with people who have what you say you want: a great marriage?

I am not going to waste time arguing with a man who doesn't know how to save his marriage. But if you want help to turn this around I will help you. Otherwise you are wasting valuable time here. Whining is a distraction from looking for solutions.

Complaining in Marriage

Dear Dr. Harley,

My wife says that she wishes she could talk to me about the things
she is dissatisfied with in our marriage, so they could be addressed.
But when she does talk to me about these things, I get frustrated
because it seems like she is never happy with me. The progress I
make doesn't seem to matter.

I often see her explaining what she is upset about as complaining and
only focusing on the negative. I don't often feel like she has
recognized the good things about us. I want her to be more positive.
I think she complains too much and does not see the good in some
situations. I want her perspective to change, but she doesn't think
she has to do something different to make this happen.

Thanks for your help.

R.D.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Dear R.D.

On average, women complain far more often than men, in both good and
bad marriages. But there is a difference in how the complaints are
received in those marriages. In good marriages, a complaint is
regarded as a problem to be solved with wisdom and compassion. In
bad marriages, a complaint is viewed as an unnecessary irritant --
something that should be either ignored or reacted to with anger and
disrespect.

Remember what a complaint is -- it's a reminder that you are losing
love units in your account in your wife's Love Bank. She is simply
giving you accurate information about the present state of your
relationship. While it may be discouraging to hear that you are
losing ground, to be kept in the dark about such losses would be
worse in the long run.

More than anything else, your wife wants to be in love with you, and
you want her to be in love with you. So to achieve that crucial
objective you must know when her love for you is being threatened by
behavior that makes her unhappy. If your marriage has any hope of
recovery, she must tell you how she feels about your behavior, and
you must make corrections to eliminate her negative reactions.

Your wife's high incidence of negative reactions simply reflects the
number of issues that have yet to be resolved in your marriage. If
you want her to be more positive, you must address those issues, and
eliminate them one at a time. You've had success in the past, and
she has been very encouraged when that happens. But when you seem
to be overwhelmed by it all, and tell her that she must learn to be
more positive, she feels hopeless because there remain many issues
that must be resolved if she is to be happy and in love with you.

The harder you try to become sensitive to your wife reactions, the
more successful you will become in doing what it takes to make her
happy. The more you try to avoid anger, replacing it with empathy
(an effort to try to understand how your wife feels without being
defensive), the more your wife will feel your care for her, and
that in itself will make massive Love Bank deposits.

Remember, all of your efforts on your wife's behalf make a
difference in the way you think and behave. You are rerouting
neural pathways in your brain that will make it easier for you to
care for her in the future. While it may seem like a lot of
effort now, in the future, it will be almost effortless to address
your wife's complaints, and solve her problems with compassion.

Best wishes,

Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Asking your spouse not to do something that bothers you is not control. Did you read my earlier post?


This isn't really true. Complaints are not limitless.

Grim, you are as much the problem as your wife. When you understand that, things will improve.

You say you don't want to give her affection because she makes demands, but she makes demands because you are withholding affection, and so the cycle goes on. You are locked into a negative cycle and the only way out is for one of you to do something different. Why not you?

You say that you are mad because she doesn't care about what you want, but you don't care about what she wants. Each of you doing whatever you want is incompatible and will lead to unhappiness and then divorce. That means you need to figure out how to make decisions that make you both happy. It may sound impossible now, but it isn't impossible.

Keep reading.

Agree with Penni. You are locked in a negative cycle of perpetual bitching. That won't fix your marriage. All that bitching keeps you distracted from implementing a plan to recover your marriage.

You need to take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth. Accept that you don't know how to save a marriage and stop arguing with people who have good marriages.

We are here to help if you will listen.

The reason it sounded like a controlling demand to me was because she didn't just say it bothered her and then wait for me to respond; she was basically saying, "Either do what I say or else I will leave you." There was no opportunity for any real joint agreement I could feel good about because she did not even listen to or try to understand my point of view at all and was not willing to take no for an answer. Maybe drinking was a bad example to bring up because it is a touchy subject for some people and some real alcoholics probably could use a strong intervention so I guess it makes me look like the bad guy and some people will mostly sympathize with my wife in this case.

However, my wife has given me similar ultimatums at least 8 other times I can remember and I already called her bluff for about half of them when I felt like my back was completely against the wall. Also there were many times she didn't make any threats but when I disagreed with her she threw a fit and then I was in the doghouse for a while. For most of these disagreements once she calmed down and realized that she was not going to get what she wanted then they weren't really an issue anymore after that. That's why I don't know about the idea that just because my wife acts like she is really serious about something then I automatically need to drop what I'm doing and permanently change my habits more in line with what she wants.

Sure there probably is some point where every single complaint someone can come up with has been heard. However, it seems like some women are relatively high maintenance and have a much longer list of things they want and expect than others. Where is it supposed to end? For example, should men basically be trained to think and act the way women typically do? Also, there are personality differences because my wife is a perfectionist and is very fussy about minor details but I am naturally lazy and I just don't care about many things she thinks are so important. At least at work I can prioritize but when I get home it seems like everything is suddenly important all the time. My point is that I think trying to do everything my wife asks for will only make things worse in my case because it will mostly be at my expense and I will eventually lose motivation to keep up the charade. I will do what I can to try to apply some of these ideas but what I think would probably help the most for me at first is simply being more honest and working on negotiation and trying to reach joint agreements.