Last fight

I've had some difficulty losing weight over the last three or four years. I've never been obese or anything, but I still needed to shed some weight: a year ago it was thirty pounds that I needed to drop, and now, it's around twenty. I realized that the biggest problem was that my wife kept feeding me high calorie food almost every morning, and even when I asked her to switch me over to vegetable drinks or something else, she would keep cooking for me.

At the start of this month, I just decided to tell her to not cook anything for me for a few months, and that I would take $100 off of her monthly payments from me (my food budget) while I got back down to a good weight. It worked very well for the first two weeks of this month, and I lost almost ten of the last pounds I wanted to lose, but then my wife started cooking for me again.

Today, she asked me for more money this month, $60, citing the fact that she had made food for me a few times. I said that I was already giving her over $100 for her Christmas shopping, so she should make do with what she had. She went quiet for a moment, then said that she felt uncomfortable, that a family shouldn't be quibbling over specific amounts of money like that. She was, of course, completely ignoring her own hypocrisy in bringing this issue of $60 up in the first place. I locked my eyes onto her like cutting lasers, and spoke deeply and strongly:

"You can't pay for everything with $1200 a month? For the last four years, I've given you over $1200 a month to pay for nothing but food, clothes and insurance, and that still isn't enough?"
"..."
"I paid my way back at my apartment with $700 a month, and that included rent, bills, taxes, food, everything. Why is it that you need to spend almost twice as much for just food and insurance?"
"I don't know."
"Over $1000 a month, every month, for four years. Just one month I give you $1000 exactly, and you can't pay. What are you spending it on? Considering that you seemed real happy to make this out to be my fault in the first place. What are you spending it on?"

She counted up all the costs, and came up over $1000 short, so she started adding in things that I pay.

"No! I pay the bills, I pay the taxes, and I pay our son's college fees. You pay your mom and our rent with your salary. That leaves $1200 I give you for food, insurance and clothes. What are you spending it on? What have you been buying, every month, for four years?"

She tried to change the subject and say that I had to pay her more the previous years because she tutored, and she paid the bills with that money.

"That has nothing to do with what we're talking about! And by the way, I still pay you the same amount of money every month that I did back then, even though I pay the bills now! So what have you spent $40 a day on, every day, for the last four years? I get barely $3 a day of my money to spend on gas and food. I wish I could spend $40 a day!! So what are you spending it on?!" I demanded.

She cited our son's milk, about $100 a month, and toiletries, barely $50.

"That still leaves over $1000! What are you spending it on?!" I roared.

She got quiet, and then came over to the Angry Chair to do some calculations. I went back to watching TV until she stopped writing and went back to the floor to wrap up Christmas presents. I took a quick look through the checkbook, which she religiously writes in for thirty minutes a day, implying that she should know exactly where all the money is going. She stopped $800 short, and she didn't explain any further.

I hate acting like a blasted ape. But I have no choice: when I'm nice to my wife, she presses her advantage and treats me like garbage. When I try to reason with her, she gives me the silent treatment for hours on end, then explodes later. It's only when I'm forceful after she is completely wrong that she backs down. And does this compare at all to what my life was like before I got married?

My wife is an obstacle, in every sense of the word. She stands in my way on everything: money, emotional support, my sex life, she even blocks doorways with her enormous girth. Everything I do in life has to be done around or through her. When I tried to treat her like a princess for the past four years, hoping she would understand just how much she gets from me as her husband, guess what? She started acting like a princess. And she never listened to me when I asked her to stop treating me badly or acting badly to our son. It wasn't until I started treating her like a wife that she began to settle down on the drama.

I want to treat my wife like my friend, as I did when we were dating, but the permanent and draining institution of marriage led her to be a fat, demanding shrew when I tried to be nice. She basically got tenure the second I signed on the dotted line for this "job," and nothing she does will ever get her fired, so the only way I have to keep her from acting up is to make her as uncomfortable as possible when she tries to start a fight. It's like raising a second child.

So now, I have to be someone I don't like being, just to keep the stereotype that is my fat, hairy, frigid, irritable and money sucking wife in check. And with our son relying on us to stay together and provide a good home for him, I have nowhere to go, and I still have over 14 years to wait until I'm free.