RR, I feel like I can identify with many things you have expressed. Some of those things really hindered my progress.

You are kicking against the goads on several levels. And when it comes to action, education and enlightenment can sometimes work against you. For example, knowing "too much" can cause you to take positions of justice, or distract you with philosophy instead of doing acts of caring that meet your wife's ENs that you already know need to be done and how to do.

I would encourage you to consider accepting some things, even if it feels blind. Forget understanding. Forget whether you agree with the specifics. Make a decision to commit to MB principles and just do it. Do whatever it takes to decide that this program is worthy of your trial.

Try it for a week, then another week, then another week. You WILL look back and see progress at some point, and will get into a good groove. Stay there.

Consider just accepting these:

1) For a period of time in winning your wife over, there is likely to be a long period of painful, lonely, unfulfilling, unfair experience. (No, you haven't been "doing this a long time" because your posts clearly show you are love busting.) Your kayak has rolled. Accept it and respond with appropriate, effective ACTIONS, based on logic and reason that will get you upright.

2) You keep citing a laundry list of things you rule at (making money, doing dishes, cooking, cleaning, time with kids, etc.) When I repeatedly read those things (in your old and new posts), it leaves me with several feelings: a) As an intense person myself, your intensity makes ME feel tense, b) if I were your wife I'd feel either like you were competing with me or would feel pretty intimidated, and c) it would make me feel like you are justifying your behavior which is very uncaring. Stop with the HiPo talk. Interact with your wife in a way that meets her needs.

3) Of all the things on your laundry list, what of those is fulfilling your wife's emotional needs (according to her)? Cooking and cleaning may or may not. Or she may value something else a lot more and you may not be doing that at all.

4) Relaaaax, dude. You say, "I feel complicit in enabling lazy behavior. How could one human being allow another do do nearly everything?" That can happen because she rejects your CONTROL. Accept the fact that you are married to someone who doesn't see the world as something to be conquered. EMPATHIZE. Decide whether you want to maximize your "HiPo" or have a relationship with her. Can't have both. She may be telling you to "go HiPo yourself and leave me alone".

5) I am going out on a limb here. A short, green, stout one. You are not almost always right in marriage. In marriage, even if you are independently right you are automatically wrong. This is really similar to the intensity issue for me.

6) UA. From one of your very first posts, your wife said, " We don't ever do anything fun anymore, forget the romance." and "What ever happened to walks to Starbucks, cooking together, anything for that matter.", and more. This is screaming a need for quality UA to me. As in, if you don't get this right, you are going to have big problems. UA must. be. consistent!

7) Emotional reactivity. Your emotions are very difficult to control during the period of winning your wife's heart because of your own unmet need. Understandable. But you'd better figure out a way to get a grip because I guarantee there is no way around keeping your cool. I am pretty sure I tried every other option and they don't work. You MUST keep your cool even when it hurts like rip.

Sure things are unfair. And they will continue to be until you take the necessary steps to fix your problems that you have control of. ONLY after you have done your part can you ever know whether your wife is being "unfair" out of reaction to your lack of care, or whether she is just being abusive. You first.

Oh. And #8 - it is unfair being the man because we have to go first.

Your posts are full of I, me, my.
This quite possibly makes you an obnoxious person to be around.
Secondly, you obviously feel vastly superior to your wife and this will show in every interaction.

If you are not enthousiastic about standing up early of doing all the housework, don't do it. Dr H recommends dividing the chores and hiring someone to do the chores nobody wants to do.

Why not spend UA time instead?

Why not follow the program again?
You are talking about accepting as in not having your needs met.
You could have your needs met and more, if you learn how to be a pleasant partner to your wife.

RR,

I am in a similar situation. We will agree on how to raise our children or what to do with our finances or rules for our children and my wife will change her mind.
If I remind her about POJA, she will tell me she changed her mind and doesn't care that she agreed to it and she will do what she wants. Or she will tell me she is selfish and can't help it.
On the other hand if I don't follow what I agree to she will tell me it is wrong and threaten to tell the kids that I am not a good father. Also, she will threaten some type of punitive action if I don't fix it.
Lastly, she will tell me I complain too much. My solution is to keep my mouth shut unless it is something unbearable. At that point I make the complaint and we have a multiple day argument and have to renegotiate the things she didn't do since she doesn't want to have to do those anymore.

***EDIT***

Givnup, I don't see where you responded with the outcome several yeas ago after recommendations were made for you to seek personal counseling with MB for this issue. How did that turn out?

RR, the advice given to Givnup was that if POJA is not being honored, the process may not have been done correctly, and the spouse violating POJA may not have been truly enthusiastic about the agreement.

Another issue could be that she doesn't feel safe being open and honest during POJA negotiations.

Are you sure POJA negotiations have been "pleasant and safe"? Four Guidelines for Successful Negotiation. Also, have you read He Wins She Wins?

I assume that at least some of the POJA violations are happening where she makes you aware in some way that she has changed her mind before she actually takes action. How do you respond in those cases?

In order to truly say that your wife refuses to follow POJA and is acting independently, you have to remove any barriers that may be caused by your own behavior, for a period of time. You also have to demonstrate care and exercise POJA properly on your side, even when she does not. When she sees you doing this, it DOES influence her in a positive way.

POJA is an essential, foundational policy. You cannot succeed in having an integrated marriage of care for each other without it.

Givnup, threats regarding kids and punitive actions, etc. are selfish demands. Have you read Love Busters? Has your wife?

"Complaining too much" indicates that you may be using complaints as a selfish demand - an attempt to badger, educate, or change her. That won't work. Neither will "keep my mouth shut".

On suggestion: When you come with a properly worded complaint, given in the right attitude, do you also bring a possible solution or two to the table? That was a big one for me that helped me check myself when it came to SD complaints. Generally if I did not have a solution in mind, my motivation for complaining tended to be one that would not work.

Givnup, if you are still in the same boat after almost three years, consider posting more about what is going on and get some direction.

I think that separation would be the ultimate destination if your wife is truly as you indicate. But feeling like you have done everything right, and the reality can be two different things. Especially if you are looking at the situation with tunnel vision without any outside perspective.

In my own case, that was very much true. I was putting a lot of effort into doing things incorrectly, incompletely, and spending a lot of energy on emotional reactivity instead of solving problems.

Ok, ok, ok. So here is where we are at to a "T" at the moment:

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_Nagging.html

Full blown stage 3. We have been there for a long time. She wants to feel heard and cared for, and I am totally overwhelmed at the sheer volume. I feel maxed out as it is, so catering to her incredible volume of complaints needs to be categorized and organized into 1 thing at a time. Honestly I feel totally badgered, day after day after day, and I know my kids do as well. We have to fix more, buy more, do more, read more, more bike riding, more activities, more, more, more! The hard part is, she wants me to do it all, her role is just nagging all of us to death. In the mean time, she heads off running for hours on end or consumed with posting on Facebook, Instagram, and her other platforms, comes home while I've been with the kids all day, and then finds the one thing that hasn't been done and complains some more. My solution has been to "check out", go silent, or get backed into a corner and snap. It isn't working obviously. What I haven't been able to deal with consistently is the resent. I feel that I am doing my job and half of hers, and since I get nearly zero needs met I am having a hard time not getting sucked into the trap of badgering her right back. Something has to change. Clearly I am not meeting her needs, but sometimes I feel like who on God's Earth could?

One more thing. There is a pattern. I am the kind of person that does things right away all day. I clean up after myself, get my workout in, go run my company, then come home and make dinner, and clean up the dishes. My wife doesn't do anything all day usually. She goes on long runs, shops, meets friends for coffee, then at night she is ready to get all of her stuff done. Different philosophy for sure. So I think there are perception issues for both of us. She doesn't physically watch all that I do all day outside of making breakfast and dinner, so it is almost like I don't get credit. In the mean time, my wife is texting me with pictures of her run, telling me what she is buying, or who she is meeting. So by the time I do the dishes after dinner, I feel accomplished and totally spent and want to relax, but she is just getting started. So what happens is that she gets irritated at all the stuff she needs to do and begins to get irritated at the rest of us. We all feel like we did our job for the day and we are entitled to relax, so she feels like she is the only one working. So over and over the kids are getting nagged to do things that irritate my wife, and my wife starts to tell me how unfair it is that she is working at night while we are all relaxing. Sometimes she'll push me too far and then I will mention about she could have done some of these things during the day instead and she comes unglued and says there is no time in the day and there is too much to do.

What are you going to do about your disrespectful judgements?

I think that's the 3rd or 4th time I've asked.

If you check users posts, you will see you have asked similar questions quite a lot more than 3 or 4 times.

Awareness is the first key. I think part of it is because I've been out of this process for so long and part of it is because I've let resent dominate the relationship. Here are some statements without DJs that I think reflect how I feel:

1. I'm feeling frustrated that my needs are not being met in my relationship.
2. One of the biggest reasons for this is because I am regularly engaging in disrespectful judgments to "straighten out" my spouse.
3. When that level of frustration crescendos I also often engage in angry outbursts.
4. I want to find other ways to communicate these frustrations respectfully.
5. I realize that my need to be "right" is getting in the way of getting my needs met.

Do you want to come here to complain, or do you want to come here to fix your marriage?

It seems you have been here a couple times now to complain about your marriage, but when posters took the time to help you their posts where ignored. You disappeared for a month without responding to people, and are back here a month later with more complaints and nothing has changed (shocker).

Are you ready to take advice and make some changes?

I read some of your posts from 2011. This is what I gathered

1. Eliminate Love busters. Have you re-read Lovebusters without thinking "if she would just ..., then I wouldn't..."?
You need to be very active. Get a journal, makea list of DJs to avoid. Add to the list as needed. Work on your anger, get a GSR if you need. Stop fighting.

2. Start spending at least 20 hours per week on fun dates. You need to fall back inlove with each other. No relationship or problem talk on dates.

3. I suspect you have OCD, which will be difficult for your wife. You think there is a "right way" to do everything but that is just your way. Wives find this extremely stressful, being constantly "corrected." Stop it. She is not a child but an adult with her own way of doing things.

4. Reading 80-90 personal development books in a year(or even in a few years) is useless. There is no way to meaningfully incorporate what you learn. It is a good way to accumulate ammo in your disrespect of your wife. Stop it. Read and re-read Dr. Harley's books until the lessons sink in to the point that she notices a difference. You need to actually DO Marriage Builders, consistently, not just read about it.

No. It is because you have a condescending attitude toward your wife and feel superior to her. Anyone who reads your posts can see that very clearly.

And you give yourself permission to behave this way because you are resentful.

Here is the problem, your behavior is contributing to the demise of your marriage. Until you decide you are not entitled to this behavior and STOP, your marriage will NOT get better. When do you plan to stop behaving this way?

Until you eliminate the lovebusting, this is futile. I would not want to spend 5 minutes alone with you with your condescending and disrespectful attitude, let alone 20 hours a week. You need to STOP being so unpleasant. If you can do that, and as apples has said, commit to the POUA, you have a great chance of turning this around. But your attitude towards the lovebusting (entitlement) needs to change FIRST.

I'm not entitled to feeling superior to any other human being. I have to own that and become it. I presently struggle with this, but I will continue to work on accepting myself and others, especially my wife, as they are.

Which is why Eliminate Lovebusters is #1. No woman wants to date a man who is unpleasant all the time.

The problem seems to be accepting yourself as you are, therefore justifying the lack of change in your behavior. You need to refuse to accept that you are a disrespectful person and become respectful.

You have been aware of this problem for at least the 6 years you have posted here. Awareness has done nothing. You need to focus on action.

I am currently engaging in disrespectful behavior, which is a problem. I have a choice however. I choose to be respectful.

Ok so how do I handle mornings like this one? If feel completely berated and I also feel triggered by my wife's badgering of our boy. Neither one of us can ever do anything to please her. I am so angry and want to explode. Now she is yelling at our 6 year old because her hair is tangled and it is hurting her. I feel the need to defend my children on a daily basis and it is the most common disagreements that we have. She is texting me through the process telling me how ridiculous it is that I didn't pull her hair back. Now she could have pulled her hair back, not sure why that was my job. So I am not responding because I feel blamed for something that wasn't even some kind of assigned duty. I'm sure my non-response is pissing her off, but I don't want to just say, "Sorry dear, yes dear."

Do I need to respond to disrespectful judgments via text or do I just completely ignore them? That may sound ignorant, but I feel stuck in a no win situation.