Bellx15

Thanks. But there we are.

She didn't remind me about the bins because: " I always get offended if she points jobs out to me." It's a scam, but read on.

Let me be fair about this. I am not giving the whole story. What I really need from you good people is a sense of reality. I am not trying to make out a case against my own wife.

This morning my wife asked me whether I had put out the recycle bins, and I said no, I forgot. I went out to do it, but the truck was already there and so there was no time to sort out the containers sack.

My wife was clearly in the middle of a hormone crisis, crying on the spot, so I tried to play the whole thing down and said I'd take everything down to the Tesco site. Not to worry. then she brushed past me, saying "Easy job, well done, you didn't do it."

I felt this sarcasm to be unacceptable and asked her why she thought it necessary. That triggered a verbal cataloguing of all the things I hadn't done in the past year. I asked why she had waited until now to mention all these apparently essential things and she told me that she felt unable to tell me at the time, because in the past I had always overreacted to being told anything.

[This has some truth behind it. I used to be like that, but several years ago we had a really good discussion about it and I accepted that as long as she asked me respectfully, rather than boomed commands, along with sarcasm and patronising tone, I would be happy to do it. I actually accepted that I was pretty hopeless about noticing what needed to be done around the house, and invited her to point things out to me. So to appeal to that historic inhibition now is just dishonest. She knows perfectly well that every time she asks me to attend to something domestic I receive it in good grace, and usually act on it.]

So anyway, the game seems to be this: Keep an eye on all the mistakes I am making, wait for a really good hormonal imbalance, pick on a trivial error, start the sarcasm, and then back it up with a full catalogue of all the mistakes I have been making but she has been unable to point out at the time, because I can't take criticism. Therefore, we are incompatible. We are incompatible because of what? Dress, socialising, my domestic standards, etc.

I said to her this morning: "You know, I do believe that if a psychologist were looking in on this s/he would suggest that you are actually manufacturing a reason to declare us incompatible. Why are you doing it.?"

In the middle of the argument she says that if she could just have her own flat and we could be apart we could stop annoying each other and get on with our lives. But as I said, this is 90% hormone talk. She actually loves me, even though she is unable to see that now.

What am I doing wrong?