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Nerd. Love, the only dating advice column that helps you speedrun through your awkward dating years and get straight to the final level of relationship success. This week, we’re talking about how you fix things when you’ve just done screwed up. What does it take to pull a relationship back from the brink of destruction, especially when it may be your fault? What damage can be repaired, and what is the point of no return? What sins do you need to confess to and which are better left unsaid? It’s not a fun topic, but it’s often a necessary one. So let’s dive in and deal with these glitches. Good Morning, Doctor Nerdlove,I am sorry to bother you and frankly have no idea why I am doing this. I have been married to a wonderful woman for 5 years (we just celebrated our 5th anniversary), and have been together for just over 1. We have three children, a girl from her former relationship who is pretty nerdy but struggles in school, and twins who are witty and smart as fuck. For almost the entirety of our marriage, there have been problems usually coming to a head near our anniversary. Some background: Right after we got engaged I made some really bad financial choices. This sets both of us back years in terms of money and where/what we wanted to do with our lives. Simply put, I put us from mid- middle class to poverty line. A year after this happened, my job was eliminated in a corporate acquisition. I used to make as much as my wife (an RN nurse with two master degrees and a lot of letters I can’t remember after her RN) but the loss of my job hit us hard, especially with the twins so new in the world. For 6 months we struggled by with her pay and what little I could get from unemployment benefits but it was hard. I was eating only once a day and my wife was taking what she could get in free food and handouts at the hospital. It didn’t make as much as my previous job. At first, everything was good, it was good pay, good hours that we could use family to babysit for, etc. However, soon my hours got switched to evenings and all went to hell. Our problems weren’t just about money; some was my being an oversized man- child at the time. I was not nice or civil in any of our arguments about money, I belittled her, yelled, and basically threw temper- tantrums, using false equivalencies, gaslighting, every dirty trick you could think of. I also started to fall into a depression due to the fights and soon gained a good chunk of weight and stopped helping out around the house. My wife would ask me to do something (like change the basement light bulb) and it would be months before I did it. This persisted for a long time. I got less mean during fights, and eventually, the biggest point of contention was that I refused to admit when I was wrong (I used what I have come to call the Obi- Wan argument of “from a certain point of view. We couldn’t afford me working and daycare costs after the hours switched to the evenings. Eventually, we settled on me just being a stay- at- home dad. I was (and still am) pretty bad at it. I love my children, but being put in charge of teaching them, getting them ready for their school years to come, playing with them, housework, cooking—basically successfully doing what women in Western culture have been doing since the beginning of time—was too much, and things began to slip. First, it was long spats of laundry not being done, then it was a drop in quality of food prep. Eventually, I shaped up a bit but it was too little, too late. Now if I forget a child’s sock on the floor all my past crimes are drilled back into my head. And to me, that’s the issue: everything I have ever done she remembers in crystal- clear detail, and I, on the other hand, can’t remember what shirt my kid wore to school today. Last week I messed up 3 times. My wife came at me with all the mistakes, in a very negative way, and in front of our kids I blew up at her. We tried to talk again last night and that blew up too after I asked why she was being so passive- aggressive with me. I don’t like to admit it but I have come to a point that I resent my kids—if they weren’t around I wouldn’t have had to leave multiple decent- paying jobs. If they weren’t around I would have the time to do the work about me. I still would have fucked up the money but maybe that wouldn’t have been such a huge issue if it weren’t for the existence of children. I am sorry. Essentially, my life sucks, my marriage is near collapse, I think I hate my kids and I need advice on how to fix it that doesn’t involve marriage counseling because my wife refused utterly when I broached the subject. Signed,Out of Time. The time to fix things was a long- ass time ago, Oo. T. You don’t need Dr. Nerd. Love, you need The Doctor. There are relationships that can sustain biblical levels of hardship, and everyone involved can still cling to the core of love, respect and affection. Others can be as fragile as spun glass, where the slightest hint of conflict causes them to fall apart. The thing that defines whether a relationship survives or falls apart is how the couple responds to hardship. Do you see the struggle as something that you have to endure and hope for the best, or is it something that you work to overcome as a team? Do you celebrate even the minor successes while finding ways to downplay the bad, or is it just one giant shitstorm? Couples who fight as a team tend to be the ones who come through the crisis. In fact, they tend to be all the stronger for it; they’ve been tested and tempered in fire. You and your wife didn’t come together as a team. In fact, this comes pretty close to being a textbook way to not survive a crisis. You did almost everything you could to push her away. Yelling and fighting is bad, but it happens. But you made a major mistake: you weren’t fighting to fix things, you were fighting to wound. And boy fucking howdy, did you. Everything you listed—gaslighting, belittling her and those tantrums—are a horrible way to treat someone you love and a great way to damage your relationship. I get that you were dealing with a lot of shit all at once. Working the night/graveyard shift is a motherfucker on people, your mental health and even your ability to just rest. It’s understandable how that’s going to fuck with your head, just on a biological level. Similarly, there’s no shame in things being difficult or in being frustrated or angry. For a lot of men, being The Provider is a core part of their identity as men; when that’s taken away from them, they’re at a loss. Their status as a man is threatened. Studies have actually found that men whose wives make more money than they do suffer from depression and erectile dysfunction. But while all of this was understandable, it doesn’t justify how you behaved. The way you behaved toward your wife didn’t just wound your relationship, it created an infection and allowed contempt to creep in. That, more than anything else, is destroying your marriage. Your wife isn’t interested in fixing things because, frankly, she doesn’t want to. Meanwhile, you’re at a place where you see your wife and kids as hindrances as you try to fulfill a role you seem to be unsuited for. This on the whole is a recipe for a marriage that is already over. It’s just shambling along like a zombie, waiting for someone to put a bullet in its brainpan. And to be perfectly blunt: that may be a better option right now. If you’re sitting around in a stew of resentment over your kids and your wife has decided she’s never going to forgive and certainly never let you forget, then it may be better for everyone to make as clean a break as possible. It’s a heartbreaking choice, but it may also be the kindest, especially for your children. Trust me: the kids would rather not be living in an environment of constant anger and resentment, even if it means that Mom and Dad aren’t together any more. If nothing else, the distance may also be what you need for the wounds to heal. If you two are always relitigating old fights and reopening old injuries, then being around each other is a constant irritant. Ending the relationship may be what allows those grievances to fade instead of both of you storing them like passive aggressive squirrels stockpiling hate- nuts for the winter. I really wish I had happier advice for you, man. Can you save things? It’s a shot so long you might be better off just buying a lottery ticket instead. Your wife may not want to go to marriage counseling—again, she seems to have basically checked out—but you can go by yourself. Going to a marriage counselor could possibly teach you the communication and relationship management skills that you need with the way your marriage is now. That mixed with some therapy and a whole metric fuckton of apologies and work might—and I stress the word might—mean that you could pull this marriage out of the nosedive it’s currently in. As it is, though, you’ve lost your “but”—as in “Yeah, he’s not great as a stay- at- home dad but he makes me laugh” or “but he makes up for it in other ways.” Once the “but” is gone from those complaints? Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the end credits to roll. TL; DR: you screwed the pooch a few years back, dude, and there’s really no way to un- screw it without 1. Flux Capacitor. Good luck. Hi Doc, I’ve always loved reading your columns, but now it seems I may need some advice regarding my situation. This story involves two guys, let’s call them A and B. A is my current boyfriend. We’ve been in a relationship for two months. The beginning of our relationship was built online, though we actually met in real life after a little more than a month. B is a Tinder hookup I slept with a few months back. We’ve barely maintained contact. One thing to note, however, is that I know A through B, as they have both been friends for years.
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