When Her Anger Is Just A Tactic

The reader asking the question I answered on How Not To Be Affected By Her Anger.

Reader:  How do you do it??  I have been working on this and it has actually worked.  I am faking it at first, because as I walk away from her when she is starting to get upset, I am actually holding back my emotions (something that she either can’t or won’t do, and admittedly,  I have sometimes reacted with equal anger to hers in the past).  If I can hold out and give her enough space she has come back calmed down and nice again.  She rarely apologizes to me, and even when she does its usually feigned, but after a recent outburst where I took your suggested approach, she actually approached me after about 15 minutes and apologized for real.   Wow!  Who is this woman and what has she done with my wife?

Thanks for the very sound  advice.  I wish I would have understood this years ago.

Athol:  Wives using anger as a routine thing, are doing so as a tactic to get you to change your behavior by evoking a submissive response in you. When it doesn’t work, it becomes a useless tactic, so she’ll stop. And obviously when you make a display of submission to her, that reduces her attraction to you.

Bear in mind I’m talking about anger as a routine thing, not an occasional response to an obvious inappropriate event. Her being angry after you attempt to drive into the garage without opening the garage door first, would be a perfectly fine use of anger. Getting yelled at four or more times a week for minor and trivial infractions means she’s just being a bully.

Note that you don’t have to actually “win the fight” in the moment, to actually pass this sort of testing. You just have to continue doing the behavior you want to do, in the face of her anger and/or fail to perform the task she is demanding of you.

And bear in mind that most women aren’t even consciously aware of themselves doing this sort of thing. They don’t even know why they turn into venomous screechtards, they can even start turbocharging their dislike of the husband by “Hating that I turn into this screaming bitch around him. I’m not like that!”