• She is always the victim, and she will recreate past events to make herself the right one. I need a recording device just to come to a compromise!
• She plays games with me so that I never have the upper hand: anything I like, she will block out of our home
• If I say, “You look nice in that dress,” she will never wear that dress again
• She buys lipstick that looks fantastic on her – but if I say so, she’ll say it chaps her lips and stop wearing it
• It doesn’t matter what it is – sex, neck rubs, her best cooking. If I like it and show it, I’m punished for it!

I can’t stay in a relationship where expression of desire and love (whether of each other or objects) is not allowed.

- Erik

My Passive Aggressive Wife: Playing Me is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

• Anything I did was wrong in her eyes
• If I tried to confront her about a problem, tried to express what I thought or felt about an important conflict, she would use the “I’m going to divorce you” threat
• She would badger me about my favorite hobbies and my goals until I dropped them to avoid trouble.
• She did the same thing with my family and friends
• At one point, she even told me, “I only need you to do what I say, when I say it. Stop doing things on your own”! I said enough was enough, and she turned on me, sobbing and threatening divorce
• Like the other men on this blog, when I tried to propose counseling, she refused – saying she wasn’t going to change because there wasn’t about her that was causing a problem.

The information here is opening my eyes to how she really is, passive aggressive. Our relationship is still in limbo, but I felt I should point out that not all bad spouses are men.

- Karim

My Passive Aggressive Wife: Breaking Me is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

• She never apologies, period. It is always someone else’s fault.
• She is withdrawn and often silent, and rarely initiates affection or intimacy. I have to draw things out of her, and often get a stone wall.
• She often changes plans or ways of doing things, without telling me or calling me to let me know.
• Last year she was hospitalized for attempted suicide, for which she blamed me and my “abuse” – I was the one who didn’t appreciate her, who wasn’t involved enough in her life to know about her eating disorder.

We’ve been sending her to therapists and hospitals across the country now, and I’ve just recently found out that her family and therapists have been referring to her as “passive aggressive” for a while now. I still feel guilt and pain for my wife’s pain, because I love her very much, but we are realizing that this is more complex than me not knowing about her disorder.

- Paul

My Passive Aggressive Wife: Blaming Me is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

Realizing this has helped me clarify that her behavior has nothing to do with me personally.

The passive aggressive things she’s learned from her parents were things I still saw in her daily behavior:

• She thought communication and showing affection need to be withheld or minimal in order to maintain control over me and our children
• She viewed me as someone here to give her children and be useful as a father – someone to be controlled
• Once my usefulness as a father was over (as our kids grew up), my role in the marriage was lost
• Now, she exerts control over our children and I have to fight with her to see them
• She obstructed my relationship with them as a way of controlling all of us, and also refused to admit that our relationship problems were caused by her
• She even went so far as to prevent and block my goals for losing weight and changing my looks

I’ve since left my wife because she refused to try and make our relationship work and make some sort of compromise. My advice is not to be the victim in the relationship. Don’t let yourself get pulled down to her level, or you’ll make yourself miserable. Get her help if you can, or move beyond the relationship.

- Allan

My Passive Aggressive Wife: Controlling Me is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

There are many signs of passive aggression in my wife, I’ve just never known what exactly it was:

• She will leave the room if I come in
• If I ask her to find some time to spend with me, she draws away even more
• Nothing is ever her fault; she’ll ignore me if I try to confront her
• She pretends there isn’t a problem with our 22-year marriage
• She ignores my needs to be intimate like we were, and makes me feel weak and selfish for wanting that intimacy in the first place

Now what?

- Luis

My Passive Aggressive Wife: Ignoring Me is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

What Passive Aggressive Behaviors Have You Seen In Your Spouse?

passive aggressive spouse  (Guest EP)

My soon to be ex-wife exhibited most if not all the behaviors listed above.

• Silently hostile for no reason,
• Constant criticism that I wasn’t a good husband/father/provider even though I paid for everything.
• Her favorite thing was to never discuss any issues, just totally withdraw into 9-10 hours of soap operas, and “Lifetime” TV every night.

After 2 years of counseling (I went, she refused) I started to see that the situation would never be resolved and I would never be anything more than a “Maintenance man with a large paycheck” to her, so I filed for divorce.

Always defensive (Guest EP)

• Never answers a question straight up, instead she must always probe to find out why you are asking.
• Always thinking “nothing.”
• Never puts anything back in its place so you always have to walk behind her.
• Savagely sarcastic even to her own sleepy child who is about to hurt herself because of her sleepy state.
• Blames you when her inconsistency shows up in the kids.
• Does not bat an eye to blame, to lie or cry. Always agrees and promises but rarely follows through.
• And she throws a temper tantrum when I ask to talk about our marriage…

Can’t stand it anymore (Randy)

All this time I thought it was me. It turns out my wife is the Passive Aggressive Master!

• She is the ultimate Victim, and never takes responsibility for her own actions.
• She is always late, even for stuff she says she wants to go to. I am convinced she will be late to her own funeral.
• She can’t follow through on anything. Our garage is filled with the latest, greatest, money-making opportunity stuff sold on TV.
• She has a way of answering a question that is so vague, it takes 3 or 4 questions to finally get the info I needed.
• She has told frequently told me that she is afraid of being alone, and she has a deep seeded fear of trusting anyone.
• Lastly, she can dish out all kinds of criticism, but can’t take the slightest remark against her.

I thought her behavior was all about her control-freak tendencies, but now I understand. And I’m leaving her.

Some reader’s posts: is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife

Here is an informal conversation with a man (Matthew) married to Alice, and his description of his marriage as passive aggressive:

Question:

Welcome, Matthew. Your wife Alice behaves in a passive aggressive way. How do you recognize this behavior everyday?

Matthew: If you met Alice for the first time and you are not counting on her to deliver some project, you’d find her enthusiastic, alert, charming, and eager to tackle new tasks.  Many times she volunteers to do tasks, and then the problems begin. Day after day there are delays and she has a list of excuses at the ready…

Any task can be delayed or postponed in this way Getting weekly groceries can be a fuzzy busisness; we never know when she will have the time to do it. Medical appointments are rescheduled because she forgets that she is the one to take the child….When we needed to provide our accountant with taxes paperwork in time, she misplaced them and we filed out of schedule.

I remember when some papers to get my registration at the university got in her hands, (to be posted same day) and she lost them in a store. Luckily, someone called me and I could recover them! Now I recognize that this way of acting is part of her personality and I try to give her tasks that are not very important or that can have costly consequences if we don’t fulfill them in time.

Question:

You must have gotten some expertise in how to manage this. You don’t get surprised by her behavior.

Matthew: There’s a real problem there. If I don’t watch and be ready to intervene, jobs don’t get done at all and Alice will keep shifting blame away from herself. Over the years, it’s amazing the number of jobs I, or someone else, has volunteered to do for her.

Question:

how does she react when you confront her? Or when she knows that you are waiting for something to be delivered by her, and she is not coming through?

Matthew: It’s interesting, because as much as she knows that she needs to deliver (an action, an information, etc), and that I’m waiting for her to deliver, she retreats in a sea of silence. She goes about her life as if everything was normal, but silent. When I ask what happens, she gives me a dirty look and continues silent. She can be silent for weeks! The last time I counted, I began feeling that we were in a cloister…No voices, no chatter, no sex life, nothing.  This marriage is a very lonely one!

Question: what else is a problem?

Matthew: lateness for appointments is a major feature of her behavior. It is one of the most infuriating aspects for me. In the beginning of our marriage she’d think nothing about arriving 30 minutes or an hour late for appointments with me.

It would drive me crazy. I’d be angry, waiting for an explanation or an apology and she’d calmly say, “I do my best to be on time but I can’t help it if there’s a crisis at work that needs to be solved”. There’s often a crisis that makes her late.

Question: How did you handle her lateness so that it stopped making you angry?

Matthew: I would assume she’d always be at least 20 minutes late for appointments, which lowered stress levels for me. I didn’t tell her this because she would have added the 20 minutes to her usual lateness.

Question: Have you ever confronted her about her behavior, told her she needs help or needs to change?

Matthew: I have often told her we need to talk about our marriage. I need to overcome several obstacles to have a talk with her: if using lateness, obstruction, forgetfulness, stonewalling and silence don’t work for her, she’ll escalate to emotional upset.

If I’ll tell her I can’t carry on, because I need to sort out our problems, she’ll say, very calmily:  “It’s strange that you’re unhappy when you’re the one with the undemanding job that allows you to work from home. I should be the unhappy one. This marriage would fall apart if I allowed myself to be unhappy.”  And if I press her with my feelings of unhappiness, she has a temper tamtrum, ends up crying, slams the door and the issue never gets discussed. I have learned that I can’t go beyond her emotional upsetness…

Question: In other words, she will not shoulder any of the blame for tension in your marriage; will not accept she is responsible for some of your marital issues, like the feeling of loneliness? She will not take responsibility and improve her responses so that would make you happier?

Matthew: The main theme of our marriage is shifting blame to me or others, or to circumstances. She will not shoulder any responsibility. She describes herself as the one making all the sacrifices, working the hardest, and enjoying herself the least. She says she has done more than anyone to make me happy and that I seem unconcerned about her happiness. I am ungrateful, she says. This will all be said very calmly. She doesn’t get angry, doesn’t raise her voice.

Question: What happens if you give her specific examples of her obstructive and destructive behavior?

Matthew: She’ll say, “It’s fascinating how you’ve got time on your hands to watch my every move, while I’m too busy getting on with my life and doing things for the family to have time to observe you. Stop harassing me, please”

Question: How do you explain to yourself what’s going on? Have you considered how you might have encouraged her obstructive behavior?

Matthew: I have the hard evidence of the behavior and I have to live with and cope with its consequences, finantial and emotional.   I am not an expert, so I can only speculate about the deep-seated motives of her passive anger. Because she won’t seek help, I have to find ways to make the marriage more bearable.

I think she has a lot of anger, resentment and frustration. Her passive aggressive behavior might have started as self-protection but it has become self-destructive, and it is definitely destructive of relationships and opportunities. Early on, I encouraged her behavior by allowing myself to be manipulated by it, by feeling guilty and wanting to help her. I also believed many of her lies and excuses.

Question: Have you developed any strategies that improve the situation for you?

Matthew: I now treat her behavior as something programmed into her she can’t control. She won’t seek help, so she isn’t going to change. I have to be smart about finding ways to live with her condition if I want to stay happy.

I now refuse to participate in her behavior, refuse to take part in the game, the destructive patterns. I don’t rely on her and don’t trust her. If I want to do something or be somewhere, I do it. If she turns up, fine. If she doesn’t, fine.

Passive aggressive people get what they want by manipulating your feelings. I should have been stronger from the start, refusing to play the games, and calling her bluffs.

I enabled Alice’s obstructive behavior by allowing myself to feel guilty, and thus not confronting her in time. You need a lot of self-confidence and a thick skin if you’re going to handle living with a passive aggressive person.

Question: How does this help your marriage?

Matthew: It helps me; I don’t know how or if it helps my marriage. I am no longer walking on egg shells trying to make someone happy who cannot be made happy. I don’t enable Alice’s obstructiveness. I don’t allow her to set the agenda for our lives.

Question: Have you ever thought about separation and divorce?

Matthew: No! I love my wife, even with her problems. Divorce is not an option for me.

Question: Do you think she loves you?

Matthew: Sometimes she says she hates me — but I don’t know if she means that.  I don’t think she likes me as in the beginning of our marriage,  because I have fought her so much about her behavior.

My passive aggressive wife is ruining our marriage is a post from: Passive Aggressive Wife