Contempt

Do you ever feel like your spouse is unable or unwilling to carry their weight in your marriage? Do they do things that you do not respect or believe in? Do they act in a way where it is clear that while they are married to you, they literally have no respect, admiration or love for you? If these thoughts about your spouse are similar on a regular or even an occasional basis, you likely have contempt for your spouse. If these thoughts exist, your marriage is over. There are no coming back from these feelings. If you have such negative thoughts for the person you married and even have children with, your marriage is nothing but a sham going forward and you are doing yourself a disservice by staying in it. Once contempt has made its way in to your relationship, it is time to end it.

Remember when you met your spouse and everything they did was wonderful. What they said and what they did made you smile and you admired the person they were. You also likely had a good sex life and wanted to be as affectionate as you could in any setting. At some point, something went wrong. You noticed your spouse start to say and do things that made you think less of them. They treated you in such a way that you realized you had no value as a person to them. The behavior spiraled until the point you had such hate and contempt for the person you were married to that your own behavior or attitude in response made you hate yourself because that is not who you are. This dynamic is a regular part of our society and many people stay married to someone who they have lost all respect for and who they have such contempt that if they were not afraid of divorce or didn't have children with them, they would not even speak to or care to know such a person. How does it get to that point with a person you married and had children with? These situations can occur early in the marriage or can appear suddenly when a spouse changes their behavior towards you because they no longer value you and are planning an exit and want you devalued as much as possible before the separation occurs to make the end easier to handle emotionally.

Let me give you an examples of contempt that occurred early on in the marriage to show that a spouses behavior or intent can show itself quickly and often intentionally having irreparable consequences that can affect families and children....

As a man one of the things you like to do(before you get divorced and become sour to the whole concept of marriage) when you meet your dream woman is buy her an engagement ring complete with the band that you slide on her finger on your wedding day. The pleasure and joy you feel with the diamond you bought and the happiness on your face gives you real satisfaction and inspires you to be great beyond what already inspires you as a man. You want the world to see how proud you are of your wife and that you are now building a life with her.

After months of showing the ring off like women do, your wedding day comes. The joy you feel and the shine on your face does not seem to be matched by the woman you are marrying. Maybe its just her nerves. Maybe its the fact she isn't going to fake love and happiness now that she has crossed the finish line and is getting married to you opening up an entirely new financial reward that goes beyond the cost of a ring. The marriage takes place and at some point you return home. The wedding ring is not on her finger. You ask and she gives some excuse. Your bullshit radar is always up but for now you aren't going to make an issue of it as you are excited to start your married life and have a family.

Over the next month or two you never see the wedding ring on your wife's finger. You stew in silence as you head to work making bank wanting to keep proving your gorgeous big breasted wife made the right choice in marrying you while she stays at home and the clean house you kept is being made into a pig sty. The woman you married does not value her surroundings because she did not contribute to its purchase and upkeep. The contempt is starting to form and the ink is barely dry on the marriage certificate.

Before things get worse and just a couple of months into the marriage, she announces she is pregnant. She does not seem overly happy or maybe its the contempt you are starting to feel causing you to see anything she says and does as basically fake and disingenuous. No matter what you are thinking in the back of your mind, you are still over the moon that your gorgeous wife is having a baby. The wedding ring you spent a good deal of money on still has not appeared on her finger. You don't want to cause your wife any stress or nitpick her while she is pregnant. You want a happy and healthy baby and God blesses with you with a beautiful daughter. Your wife stays at home and takes care of the kid while you work proud that in todays modern economic world that you are successful enough to allow your wife to stay at home with her kid. The women in this world who raise kids and work would give anything not to have to drop their kid at daycare but your wife is indifferent toward your success and efforts to make raising a young kid as joyous as possible for mom and daughter. You were thankful to grow up in a time where even your middle class earning father could work and your mom could stay at home and you got to see her when you got home from school without being raised in day care. You wanted to do the same for your wife as a way to show respect to your mother and father for what they did for you. Don't think the developing contempt in the marriage was caused over just failure to wear a wedding ring.

As time passes after the birth of the baby, you ask your wife why she does not wear her wedding ring. The excuse that her hand got too fat because of pregnancy and she needs to get the ring resized sounds good at first but you know deep down its bullshit because she is a stay at home mom and has had plenty of time to get it done. A woman who does not wear her wedding ring so early on in the marriage is basically saying she married you with an agenda. It wasn't based on love, admiration, or respect for you the man. It was about other things. You ignore the fact you were basically a blue pilled Captain Save a Hoe who moved her from her apartment she shared with roommates to your nice home where she could step into a stay at home mother role once she had a baby. The contempt had a foundation and it was building with other things that went on in the marriage that indicated no love or respect from the person you married. The situation was made worse by the fact that you had this gorgeous daughter and you wanted more kids. Your sex life wasn't ideal(another post) but damn you could get her pregnant and she was physically built to have kids. You wanted more kids and were not going to rock the boat of contempt even though it continued to build.

Life has a weird way of reminding you of your contempt for your spouse and to let you know its time to leave the marriage. You have one beautiful kid and want another and of course the wife is going to dictate when that happens. You are basically in a sexless marriage but she is on the pill until she decides on the next baby time even if you aren't in your twenties and many people don't get pregnant easily. More contempt added. You get reminded of the original contempt when you go the Dentist for your regular teeth cleaning and you see one of the dental assistants who checks you in. She's a gorgeous, friendly girl who is about 8 months pregnant. She's working full time and about ready to burst while your wife is staying at home doing things that are causing the contempt to grow. You ask her how her pregnancy is and she gives the usual complaints about being tired and swollen etc but the joy and happiness in her eyes are obvious about the fact she is going to have a baby. You never saw this joy in your wife. God being the messenger he is shows you another sign with this beautiful friendly pregnant girl. She's wearing a neckless around her neck that catches your eye. Guess what is around it? Its her wedding ring. Here is a girl about to have her first baby, working full time, her wedding ring clearly does not fit her finger, and she takes the time to get a necklace and put her wedding ring around it. She is proud to be with her man. Where do you find a woman like this? It is simple little things that make you appreciate your spouse. Instead your contempt for your wife is now growing as you walk in to the dentist chair.

Once contempt is in place and felt by one spouse, one of two things is going to happen. If the spouse who feels contempt is really just a whining type of person with the expectations to be spoiled and who is never wrong, infighting will begin because it is not really contempt that exists. It is simply unreasonable expectations by one spouse who is taking out their frustrations on the other. Being a non contributing or spoiled spouse leads the other spouse to fight back verbally and such behavior can and will lead to the destruction of the relationship. True contempt that is justified will lead to divorce but unlike immature reactions or behavior, it cannot be repaired. If you develop contempt for your spouse and it is truly justified, the offending spouse will suddenly know you know that her behavior is beyond immature or just having a bad day where good communication usually fixes it. Contempt cannot be fixed with communication because if the couple could communicate properly and truly cared for one another., contempt would never exist. The partner that is causing the contempt to present itself knows what they are doing to create the feeling of contempt by their partner. They wont fix it or change the behavior but instead will double down and begin behaving worse and trying to turn the issues around which includes gas lighting. What little communication that might still exist between the parties will dwindle to nothing because the spouse that behaved badly now knows that their partner is on to the behavior. There wont be any fighting or verbal wars but instead there will be two parties that know they are going to be divorced and its just a matter of when and how. 

Once the contempt has presented itself atleast one and probably both the parties will be in what is called Marital Purgatory(this will be discussed later). The spouse that created the contempt will amplify the bad behavior trying to mentally destroy the partner who woke up and spoke up about their behavior. If you mix in kids, inequality in financial production, and the division of assets issue, you are now basically living with a spouse who you have contempt for and who is basically the enemy. You aren't sleeping with this enemy because what little sex you were probably getting is going to become even less frequent. The spouse that has the most to lose suffers in this Marital Purgatory. All the bad behavior that brought you there will be made worse and it could end up being done with the subtleness that created the issue or it may be done right in your face. Again the economic inequality and the family court laws that give children to women usually mean that it is the wife who amplifies the bad behavior. She can do it because there is a financial award coming to her if you don't take her behavior and live a life on her terms. 

Not taking action is never good. Allowing someone you are going to divorce to continue to abuse you and behave badly, especially when there are financial resources and an unequal earning spread sheet is financial and emotional suicide. Not handling how and when you divorce correctly is going to lead to additional contempt and post marriage contempt exists and can put the final touches on a man who was mentally destroyed once he realized his spouse didn't care about or support him in any way. Add in unequal time with your kids and it is a tough blow for even the strongest man to swallow.

In the instance of contempt raised here, while extreme, it is no more important or shocking than the contempt that often takes years to form and show itself. As a man ask yourself why you stay in a marriage when you have contempt for your wife especially if you are the bread winner. If your wife has contempt for you be prepared to leave. Her beliefs as to your behavior and what type of man you are aside,  you don't want to be reminded of her. Delays are deadly.

If you don't understand why delays can hurt a man, lets finish the story of the man with the wife who wouldn't worry about anything that was important to her husband. Luckily the man got another beautiful daughter from the wife he had contempt for because he stayed rather than leave because having kids was at the time worth more to him than his self respect. He would have stayed for a third but his stay at home wife was unwilling to put in the work. He wanted more kids and stayed and ignored the ring issue and the ongoing behavior by his wife designed to mindfuck him and to let him know he had no value as a husband or man. She thought she could get away with such behavior because she was gorgeous and no man leaves a woman with young kids and no replacement woman lined up with all that he had lose financially being the icing on the case if he left. She saw him as stuck and would end the marriage on her terms not his. She wasn't trying to save it. The contempt only grew and the wife was a pro at mentally abusing him so leaving the marriage at some point was no longer a hard decision. The timing of when he left was never going to be right but the self destruction of the mans home only grew worse.

At some point after the kids were born the man was told there would be no more kids. I only have two hands was her excuse. Having a normal sex life and seeing if God might bless the couple with a third child was not an option. The wife was going to purposely try to avoid getting pregnant so back on the pill she went. She was basically egging her man to divorce her but didn't think he would because she knew from her prior marriage to another sucker that a divorce would reward her financially. The man had stopped wearing his wedding ring recently as he got tired of asking and wondering why his wife wouldn't wear the wedding ring he bought her. Not one time was it ever on her finger following the wedding day and even after she lost all the baby weight from the second baby and began working out to get skinny for the men in her life that were "just friends", she never put her wedding ring on her finger. It was likely pawned for money.

Nine years after getting married and five years too late the man walked out on the woman he had contempt for which started soon after the wedding day and continued each day the wife didn't wear her wedding ring, not once in nine years of marriage. He handled the move out wrong and did not protect himself like he could have. The wife did though. As time passed following his move from his home, he did an inventory as to what was gone or lost at no fault of his own. It turned out his wife was a flat out thief. We aren't talking about a thief who keeps pots and pans that were not hers which could be replaced, but instead family heirlooms and her husbands personal items that could not be replaced were made to disappear from the house over time before the husband gave any indication he wanted a divorce. Someone who recognizes their contemptuous behavior was discovered by their spouse knows the marriage is over. One of the things stolen was his wedding ring. She didn't wear her wedding ring one day during the marriage and chose to steal the wedding ring of her husband just in case he got the courage to walk out. She didn't want the wedding ring he gave her yet also didn't want him to have the wedding ring he got on his wedding day(that he bought and paid for). 

This harsh extreme as it relates to contempt is to get you men thinking and understand the affect it has on your marriage and failure to address quickly and decisively is only going to cause your spouse to amplify her own bad behavior while you gather the confidence to leave and lose your personal possessions. A women with who you feel legitimate contempt for does not change her behavior. You need to push for divorce if contempt shows itself. Some women once you are on to them will leave you while you are at work completely emptying the house. Its not even a crime and you do not get your stuff back or the fair value of it. There are men that have lost more than a wedding ring, a baseball glove, a relatives watch, video games, sports memorabilia etc. In addition to those things, the wife takes all the furniture and every item in the home leaving you a note to call her lawyer.

Don't think that just because you walked out on your wife that the contempt issue goes away. Her behavior post divorce, especially if you have kids, will only get worse. She wants you financially ruined and emotionally broken. She will be very good at it and you cannot reason with her to be fair about anything.

​No contact is the first step to healing.