Ignore Your Wife

I’m serious.  I’m aware that every woman reading this probably wants to deck me right now, but there is one particular instance when my husband ignores me, and it works like a charm.  When, you ask?  When I want him to yell at me – seriously.

Growing up I learned to argue and argue well – and when someone had the audacity to disagree with me, you had better believe that people two houses down would hear me.  My parents came to be the main targets of my arguments, and they had no idea what to do with me.

Then I met Jason.  He works with folks who are mentally ill.  In order to get into his program, an individual has to have a recommendation from someone highly qualified, had x number of psychiatric hospital stays in the last year, x number of visits to the ER in a month, etc.  It’s pretty intense.  As you can imagine, Jason’s skills for dealing with people have – shall we say evolved over time?  One thing that he has learned is that yelling in argument never solves anything – it just creates more problems.  As a result, when I’m yelling and being unreasonable, he ignores me.  He lets me know that when I’m willing to talk about the situation like a rational human being, that he’ll talk to me.  Until then, the Orioles game is on, and he’ll be watching that.

At first – it made me even more mad.  How can he ignore me when clearly he has made the world fall apart by doing x, y or z?  But after time I learned that yelling at him and getting all worked up wasn’t going to do a thing, so I started to bring up my issues like a rational human being and we’d talk them out.

So now we’re the couple who never argues.  We’ve only been married for 2 months, so that might change, but even while we were engaged – the last time I think we had an argument was about a year ago.  In Katrina arguing years – that’s forever.

Tagged as: Marriage, Women