[Two Pronged] Good-for-nothing husband

Jeremy Baer, Margarita Holmes

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He drinks, he doesn't want to work, he won't help out – what should one lady do about her difficult husband?

Rappler’s Life and Style section runs an advice column by couple Jeremy Baer and clinical psychologist Dr Margarita Holmes.

Jeremy has a master’s degree in law from Oxford University. A banker of 37 years who worked in 3 continents, he has been training with Dr Holmes for the last 10 years as co-lecturer and, occasionally, as co-therapist, especially with clients whose financial concerns intrude into their daily lives.

Together, they have written two books: Love Triangles: Understanding the Macho-Mistress Mentality and Imported Love: Filipino-Foreign Liaisons.

Dear Dr Holmes and Mr Baer, 

I’m Emma, 36 years old and married for 11 years now. I’ve been working abroad for 5 years now. I want to seek your advice with regard to my husband. I have a problem dealing with him when it comes to his attitude. He loves to drink with his friends and the sad things is, he’s never worked. He never had the chance to work even before because they had a family business, but now, the business went bankrupt.

And he still doesn’t want to work and help me. Since I’m away, its okay for me just to look after our son, send money every month just for his allowance, but still he doesn’t change. Whenever we argue about his drinking habits, he curses me and always diverts from the main issue with nonsense. He says he feels so stressed and keeps on asking me what he will do to forget all his problems aside from being drunk most of the time.

Whenever I tell him to go our separate ways, he keep on telling me that to look for another guy here because now they don’t have anything. Im trying to understand him but it seems like he’s used to this kind of situation. 

I feel that he doesn’t value my sacrifices here. To be away without my son is the most difficult things in life but I need to work for his future. I love my son and I want a complete family but I don’t like this type of miserable life. For 11 years of marriage, he was like this and never changed at all. I don’t know how to deal with him and hope you can help me.

Emma

————

Dear Emma, 

Thank you for your email. 

It seems from your account your husband has no saving graces at all. This is slightly surprising because after all you chose to marry him in the first place. If indeed he has never worked and always liked to go out drinking with his friends, this was how he was when he courted you and when you decided he was the one you were going to be with for the rest of your life. The question therefore is why has your attitude changed, and your email gives us no hint of this. 

Perhaps this is where you could usefully expend a little time and energy analyzing what you expected from marriage to this seeming wastrel and how the reality came to diverge from your hopes and dreams. You are now disillusioned and unhappy, yet he has not apparently changed so it is probably you who has done so.

Some practical solutions to your problem are immediately available. You can carry on as you are, working abroad, sending money home and having as little to do with him as possible. You can go home and sort him out once and for all. You can look for a new partner. One solution however is not likely if your account is accurate: having “a complete family” with him. 

Please write again if there is more information you would like to share.

All the best,

JAF Baer

Dear Emma:

Thank you very much for your letter.

Actually, while Mr Baer’s letter may seem unnecessarily harsh, his advice to “expend time and energy analyzing what you expected from marriage to this seeming wastrel and how the reality came to diverge from your hopes and dreams” makes perfect sense. 

This is not to berate yourself needlessly, but to help you understand yourself more deeply: Not why did you marry him in the first place, but what were your needs at that time in your life so that you perceived marrying him to be a good decision. You can then explore more deeply to ask yourself if you still have those needs.  Because if you still do and are unaware that you do, then even if you were to get rid of your husband, your future decisions will still not be the solutions to your problem. 

Since you first got married, you have lived with a miserable life.  If you want to stop doing so, you need to take a good look at yourself and determine what it is that is truly important to you. That way you will know what things are worth giving your all to. 

That way, you will change and no longer be the little girl who wrote this letter and does nothing but complain and play the game  “Why Don’t You – Yes But”. 

Eric Berne wrote an exceptionally groundbreaking book called Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis (NY: Ballantine Books). Since it was written in 1964, you are probably too young to have caught the excitement it caused, so with your permission I will explain a bit about the book’s concepts first, and then this particular game (the “Yes Butgame) second. 

Berne proposes that many of our social transactions are what he terms ‘games’: ‘social action based on ulterior transactions’. Games are often used as ways to maintain the status quo – a way of doing something or going somewhere without really doing anything, or going anywhere.

In Games People Play Berne said that “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of time in serious social life is taken up with playing games.

Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him. In this connection it should be remembered that the essential feature of a game is its culmination, or payoff. The principal function of the preliminary moves is to set up the situation for this payoff, but they are always designed to harvest the maximum permissible satisfaction at each step as a secondary product.” 

“Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy…(because) in order to get away from the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse…Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

I so hope the above passages are enough to get you interested enough to read the entire book but until you do, here is a brief example to illustrate the game which I feel you are unknowingly playing, the “Yes But” game.

White: “My husband always insists on doing our own repairs, and he never builds anything right.”

Black: “Why doesn’t he take a course in carpentry?”

White: “Yes, but he doesn’t have time.”

Red: “Why don’t you have your building done by a carpenter?

White: “Yes, but that would cost too much.”

Brown” “Why don’t you just accept what he does the way he does it?”

White: “Yes, but the whole thing might fall down.”

Such an exchange is typically followed by a silence. It is eventually broken by Green, who may say something like, “That’s men for you, always trying to show how efficient they are.”

In your case, it goes something like this:

YOU: “I don’t like this type of miserable life”

Other Person: Why not leave your husband then?

YOU: “(Yes, but…) I love my son and I want a complete family”

YOU: “For 11 years of marriage, he was like this and never changed at all. I don’t know how to deal with him and hope you can help me.”

Mr Baer and myself:  “So first you have to find out what things you value most.  Ask yourself what mean the most to you and prioritize them: 

  • Is having a “complete family which to me means not kicking my husband out?  
  • Is it changing my life from miserable to joyful (or, at the very least, non-miserable)?
  • Is it not having to work abroad anymore?
  • Is it staying married no matter what the costs are? etc. etc.”

Once you have that figured out, please write to us once again. Or, should you need more help in figuring out what are the things most important to you, why and how difficult is it to change your priorities, please write us again also.  

My heart goes out to you so, so much, Emma. Having worked overseas myself, I know the pain, humiliation and loneliness one feels when far away from home. I promise we will do all we can for you if you give us more to work with.  

MG Holmes

Need advice from our Two Pronged duo? Email twopronged@rappler.com with subject heading TWO PRONGED. Unfortunately the volume of correspondence precludes a personal response.

When leaving a message on this page, please be sensitive to the fact that you are responding to a real person in the grip of a real-life dilemma, who wrote to Two Pronged asking for help, and may well view your comments here. Please consider especially how your words or the tone of your message could be perceived by someone in this situation, and be aware that comments which appear to be disruptive or disrespectful to the individual concerned will be removed.

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