Women Suffer Men
I was a psychotherapist. I owned and operated a private practice for over 15 years. During that time, I provided therapy to men, women, children, couples, and families. I had several areas of concentration that included martial therapy, childhood behavior disorders, anxiety disorders, and OCD.
I enjoyed working with couples because it was challenging, interesting and dynamic. I often worked with highly distressed couples, ones dealing with substance use problems, infidelity, or violence. I provided divorce counseling for some couples and Family & Divorce medication for others.
People getting married know that 50% or more of marriages end in divorce, yet so many still approach marriage as though they are immune to it. It’s hard to imagine that this man that dotes on you would ever cheat or lie, or do something remotely bad enough for you to want to leave him.
The problem is that men are highly motivated to engage in courtship behaviors for a period of time before it fizzles out. The man that you know for the first 1-2 years of your relationship is not the same man that you will know 5 years into your marriage. Your marriage is like an airplane, where you have two co-pilots flying; when they can’t agree on how to fly, the plane crashes. In other words, you’re not in control of much, let alone your spouse’s behavior. Most divorces occur at the 1-2 year mark, and most between the 4 and 8 year mark, and about 50% occur before 10 years. I think the reason so many occur before 10 years is that the difference between who you thought you married and who they really are emerges early on. Nearly 70% of divorces are initiated by women, yet, I think many of those initiated by men are still approved by women.
The rate of filing for divorce is entirely asymmetrical. Why do so many women file for divorce over men?
Women find it harder to happier in marriage, and that is absolutely note because women are as many men like to complain, “harder to please.” The fact is that men contribute much, much less to marriage than women. Women do the work for housekeeper, babysitter, chef, and so on. Research has repeatedly shown that women do 75% of more of household management. Some women manage finances, do maintenance, and yard work as well as attend school conferences, medical and dental appointments, manage their children’s extracurricular activities and much more. Then you have men who act like a child that still needs to be taken care of - they replaced their mom with their wife, berate her for being moody or unhappy, make her feel crazy and like a failure for not keeping up her looks. So many men simply fail to grow up and be a man, an even mildly functional adult who contributes to the family more than just their income. Since more women work, income is much less important than it used to be; some men find themselves embarrassed when their wife brings home more and they still have the audacity to pretend they know best with how to manage finances.
I remember the first couple I worked with as well as the last and many of in-between; I think because as a therapist, you get to know people so well, it’s hard to forget them, maybe their names, but not their faces or their stories. In fact, it’s as though my brain won’t let me forget. Day-to-day, something will trigger a memory of a couple, for example, driving by Dunkin’ Donuts reminds of a time when I saw a client sitting intimately with a man, not her husband, having coffee early in the morning; another time, in line at the checkout lane at the hardware store, the woman reminds of a client with three children who started working as a cashier after her divorce.
A commonly quoted statistic is that the suicide rate for women dropped 20% after no-fault divorce became legal. Prior to that, many women saw suicide as a solution to the problem of remaining trapped in an unhappy, unhealthy marriage.
It’s hard to forget hearing a client Mary,* tell me about how she was choked by her husband in the course of an everyday argument, then later message me photos of the bruises on her neck out of concern that her story was unbelievable because her husband was “so nice;” or, the story of Lisa* whose husband intentionally broke his ankle at work so that he could get more Oxycontin from a physician; or, Tina* whose husband led a secret life paying dozens of escorts over a decade on annual trips to a party town with the guys. The stories were endless, seeming to arise from a bottomless pit of pain and suffering, flooding my office with tangible emotional pain, followed from tears pressed out of tightly squinted eyes and flushed cheeks. I witnessed this four to five days a week for 16 years. I witnessed it from a safe distance, as someone they could rely on to be calm, non-judgmental, patient, open and empathic. My initial goal was to make sure they felt heard, understood, and respected.
Men would almost never admit to using drugs, getting drunk, breaking or throwing things, bullying, hitting, kicking or choking; they would minimize or deny most behavior problems most of the time. It was only when women threatened divorce that men would change, or try, and that would usually be short lived or half-assessed.
There were low cost and high cost behavior changes, and most men, most of the time, would do a series of low cost behavior changes, like doing some chores or getting home earlier from work. They would avoid high cost changes, like no longer golfing every Saturday, or watching football all day Sunday, or quit drinking. Maybe they’d cut back for a while though.
I recall some men admitting or sharing deeply disturbing behavior, for example, John* who said he sat on his wife’s head in an attempt to smother her to death. He very well could have killed her, but stopped short of it; or, James* who admitted to drinking a case of beer each day and wanted help with his addiction. These admissions from men were uncommon. In the majority of cases, they would be defensive and stonewall their spouse, or gaslight her. On the other hand, I found most women would readily admit to their behavior problems within a relationship with the exception of parenting behaviors or styles. I this difference is driven by pride - men have pride, and most I knew had way too much of it, so much that it made them defensive assholes, people who could never admit they were wrong - not even for the simplest mistake. Most women didn’t feel a need to defend themselves. They had self-respect but no pride - these two things get confused by people but they’re not the same.
Working with couples is challenging for many reasons, but one primary issue is that the “relationship” lacks material substance and it is fluid. Couple’s come in the room talking about their “marriage” like it’s some concrete object that they set on the coffee table and said, “Look at this shit! Can you believe this?” Nope. There’s two individuals and all of their experiences are doubled, and from that, I have to form an impartial, realistic image of the marriage and work from that; but my image is based on the stories of each spouse; how am I to know who is accurate or credible, who is acting in good faith with no hidden agendas, who has a reliable memory and so on? There are three sides of every story, “his and hers” and the truth.
What is important is the how people are feeling in the moment. When someone comes to a therapy appointment, you have to have a plan, but you also have to be ready to push that plan aside for whatever is presented to you today. In marital therapy, there was always the latest iteration of a chronic problem, but the clients often do not see the pattern staring them in the face; they come to therapy ready to argue or fight, defend themselves or point out the behavior problems of the other.
As a therapist, I didn’t expect a pattern to emerge in marital therapy, but it did, and it was something that I also saw with women I worked with who came in without their significant other for anxiety or depression.
The pattern was that the majority of women’s emotional or mental health problems stemmed from negative experiences with men.
Major Depression where marital therapy is the treatment is actually a very common presentation for couples - I argue that it’s the most common. There were severe cases where the outcome was obviously connected to men, such as in physical abuse, but there were many other cases as well, like Joe* the 50 year old guy who looked 75 from cocaine addiction; he started using Crack; his wife took the kids and left him. He would arrange visits with his kids but not show-up and failed to pay child support.
Another man, Robert,* was an alcoholic who was mentally, emotionally, financially, and physically abusive to his wife and children; he lost custody and had a restraining order against him. He would spy on his x-wife every way possible, violating the order of protection without any consequences. Once he tried attaching a listening device to my office phone line; during visits with his kids, he would drive them around town while drinking beer in the car, interrogating them about who their mother socialized with. He was constantly pulling his wife into court and accusing her of parental alienation**; but, the fact was his kids hated him - and I mean hated, not just for his mental and emotional abuse of the, but because of how he treated their mother.
This is something I have thought about a lot but have not ever tried to put in writing; as I write this, I’m flooded with memories and thoughts that I have trouble keeping up. To sum it up, most women I met were honest, most men were not, and most of the women who were dishonest did so out of fear, but most men that were dishonest did so out of selfishness. The reverse was true in cases, but if I had to put a number on it, I’d say 80-20. 80% of women were honest, but only 20% of men.
The dishonesty was mainly in the areas of substance use, spending, and infidelity. Denial is included as a type of dishonesty, but the type that makes your spouse feel crazy because it invalidates their reality.
Over time, I rarely met a women who suffered from mental illness that didn’t seem to have a man around as a risk or causal factor for it, usually some type of trauma: rape, incest, physical abuse, serial infidelity, gaslighting, theft, and so on. I thought incest was something I would never see, and I recall feeling in shock and disbelief when a client explained how her father had sex with her weekly up until the day of her wedding. I was also shocked at the number of clients I met whose spouse was physically abusive, and severely so. Sometimes i worried that I was going to read about the death of one of my clients in the paper one morning.
Women would come to therapy blaming themselves and being blamed by their spouse for their emotional problems. It was easier to accept the blame than it was to confront the reality; accepting blame was a form of survival, whereas confrontation could lead to death. Outside observers might not see it that way, but when your husband starts crushing your throat with his hands, anything is possible and probable.
I often wondered where the evil in men comes from, nature or nurture and every time I came to the conclusion that they were raised this way. They weren’t literally raised to be violent in most cases, but some. In most cases, they were physically abused and learned that violence was a means to end of control. In other cases, they learned that violence was how they got what they wanted. So some boys were ingratiated by their parents, and others were abused. When they “grew up” they did what they learned to do - the violent child gives birth to the violent adult. The explanation is absolutely no excuse; they know it’s completely wrong in any circumstance, and that is why they deny it.
If you are a woman reading this, take some time to reflect on your life with regards to the impact men have had on your mental health. Was your father mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, abusive? Your boyfriends? A stranger? Your brothers? Your spouse? Men can be violent, sometimes very violent or even murderous. Not all men are this way, there are those 20% or so who were nurtured and grew up to be calm, patient and insightful.
Everything is political, however. If you’re dating or married to a man who identifies as Republican, you’re ten times more likely to be shot to death by them than by a man who identifies as a Democrat. It’s something to consider - you may idealize the man who comes across as “strong” but over time, you may learn that men who cannot control their anger are weak. Also, men who are projecting manliness may be superficial and anxious compared to men who are comfortable with emotions and the diversity of life.
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*Any names in this article are changed and stories are altered to protect identities; any similarity of the reader to someone in this article is likely coincidence, especially because these problems are common or even very common.
**Parental alienation is a made-up syndrome. It was alleged to exist by a man named Richard Gardner. Gardner was a psychiatrist who apparently sexually assaulted his own daughter and lost custody of her; later in his life he committed suicide by violently stabbing himself to death. I believe him to be a very sick man who created this phony syndrome as a way to blame his x-wife as an explanation for why his own daughter did not want to see him, nevermind the sexual abuse. Gardner went to great lengths to validate his special syndrome. Today, unfortunately, other bad men have caught on to this phony idea and use it in courts around the country to try to take custody from their children’s mother, or get visitation rights that were otherwise taken away, probably for good reason.
https://stopabusecampaign.org/parental-alienation-syndrome/