I’m an emotional person, I get hurt by the smallest things and I cry. My husband will just get irritated by my crying or not comfort me at all. I don’t understand this behaviour. What does it mean?

There is a point when people don’t want to be the hero to someone anymore.

I’m not saying he doesn’t love you, quite the opposite. He may still love you very much, but he’s reached a point of frustration with a behaviour you yourself describe as excessive. This answer is going to feel mean and like I’m beating you up, but I’m not. I want you to know how men think and feel in these situations and why your response to “everything” is likely hurting your relationship.

I want you to realize something — all people are emotional people. We all have emotions. Anger, desire, joy, pain, and we all have these feelings very intensely. You’re not special. You don’t have more emotions than everyone around you, but your self analysis describes a person who has less emotional control than the average person.

Now think of your husband. Every single day he has problems and emotions, and he must control his emotions to get through the day. He comes home, however, and he not only has to handle his own emotional load, but now he must manage your emotions, which you aren’t doing.

Imagine a man who never does any chores, never helps with the kids, never does anything. Most wives have complained about what a terrible man that is, but what would it feel like to have a wife who never learns to self-soothe, never tried to control her feelings, and never learned to get over “the smallest things”, to use your words, without her husband coming to the rescue? Everytime you cry is like a pile of laundry created, the sink full of dishes, or the kids mucking up the living room. Every day he comes home to a mountain of chores, some he just took care of ten minutes ago, which is the task of managing your emotional load when he probably views that as your job to do as an adult. Know this truth, everyone wants to be around people who make them happy. If it is his job to make you happy, but you only bring sadness into the house, how happy does that make him?

Or, and this is more serious, what if he feels that you being incapable of managing your emotions on your own, means there is no one available for him? How can he possibly tell you about his crappy day when you’re crying? Furthermore, how can he express his profound and significant fears and burdens with someone he doesn’t respect because she can’t handle simple ones? When he finds out about layoffs coming round at work and he is afraid, while you’re upset about a show you’re watching, do you think he’s going to lay on you the wrenching feeling he has in his gut right now? The worst part of all, he doesn’t want to tell you about his fears and concerns, but he is also resentful that you can’t be there as his wife because of something trivial.

A third case, perhaps the worst of all, men often feel that people who cry unnecessarily are manipulative. Far, far too many times do women cry and men shut down when the two are having an argument. This makes an argument about how to handle the finances into one where the woman is now the victim of an oppressive monster. No one wants to be a monster so they usually compromise. He didn’t compromise because you brought reason, logic, and a good plan for the success of the family to the table. He compromised because you made him feel like an evil man who made the woman he loves cry. You made him feel like a bad person for being reasonable. If you make people feel like bad people for no good reason, and if you do it long enough, he’ll go someplace where the people won’t make him feel like a terrible person. If that’s a friend’s house, the bar, or someone else, he’ll go to the people or person who won’t make him feel like a monster for saying reasonable things. Most people are unaware they treat others this way, but that’s how a lot of people perceive it, and they become very resentful over time.

His behavior may be explained as him simply being tired of carrying the emotional baggage of two people. A marriage is a team where each person makes the other’s life easier so that there can be times where one carries the other. But carrying one person forever with no hope of support isn’t a marriage. If he is, that’s a problem and you need to do something about it to not lose him. Or, and this is a much better case, he may be trying to help by not providing you a safety net on trivial issues anymore. He may see your crying and then him helping you as enabling the crying and ultimately damaging, so he’s trying to cut you off from the emotional support for things he now views he shouldn’t be supporting, as continuing down this path seems to be leading you down a very unhealthy road. He may view you as manipulative and to stop caring about your tears is his defense from feeling powerless in the relationship.

Either way, the cure is the same. You have to stop crying at everything. You have to be the adult for him. When he sees you’re not getting upset about small things, that he can look to you as a place he goes not just for support but happiness, he’s not going to see the girl he married, but the woman he wants to be married to. Then he will be responsive when you need him because you will actually need him.

This is writing from “Jon Davis”