Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane: I occasionally hear from wives who are participating in behavior which they know is hurting their marriage and yet they can not stop. Many of them want to understand why they are acting as they are in the hopes that this knowledge might help them to pin down their motivations and help them to phase out the behavior. One example is that of trust.

A wife might be having severe difficulties trusting her husband and yet she doesn’t know why. She knows that this is seriously damaging her marriage and frustrating her husband and yet she can not stop. She might explain it this way: “honestly, my husband hasn’t done much to justify the way that I am acting. He hasn’t ever cheated on me, that I know of. Yesterday in our joint email which we both use I saw that he had a friend request from an old girlfriend. He obviously wasn’t trying to hide it. He didn’t even delete it. I looked on his list of friends and she wasn’t even on there so I can be pretty sure that my husband didn’t even accept the request. I am now panicked about this even though I obviously do not have any reason to be. This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened either. I always suspect my husband of hiding issues of money with me even though he’s never bounced a check and I’ve never caught him doing anything financially that would put us in jeopardy. When I bring up any suspicions to him, he understandably gets angry at me. He says he feels like he just can’t win with me. He says that I am always looking for flaws. He’s right. But I can’t stop my suspicions from coming up. It’s just a feeling that nags at me and I don’t know why. Any ideas as to why I am feeling this way? Is my intuition trying to tell me something?”

Ask Yourself If You’re Projecting Something From Your Past Into The Present: This is a tough question to answer since studies have shown that women’s intuition can be accurate. However, we’ve all had that experience where we think that we just “know” something to be true and then it turns out that we were projecting our own worries onto that thing and we were absolutely wrong. So not only did we bring a lot of anxiety onto ourselves unnecessarily, we have hurt the person we suspected in the first place even though they were completely innocent.

I suspect a couple of reasons as to why this might be happening. The first is fear of an undesirable outcome in the future. We are afraid of losing our husbands. So we approach the situation with dread. Likely because of something that happened to us in the past, we expect the worst and so we are always looking for it.

In my own case, I find that much of this, at least in me, stems from a couple of different issues. I’ve had a good therapist confirm that this is probably the case. And although I can’t tell you for sure if this is your issue also, it’s my understand that it is very common in women whose fathers were distant or absent. My parents are divorced. After their divorce, I went from being very close to my dad to rarely seeing him. Because of this, I felt somewhat abandoned by the man who was closest to me and whose relationship I needed and wanted the most.

I suspect that this is why I was always afraid that my husband was going to leave me. So I was always looking for signs that he wasn’t happy or was dissatisfied. Ironically enough, he wasn’t unhappy in the beginning, but after dealing with my fears and accusations for long enough, he eventually became unhappy. (And we eventually separated, but more on that later.)

Another thing that I think contributes to the lack of trust is dealing with infidelity at any time in your life. In college, I had a two year relationship that was quite important to me. This was the guy who I very naively thought I was going to marry. As many young men will do, he cheated on me. And it was so very painful and shocking. I’m not sure why it shocked me so much. I’d seen my own mom be cheated on by many of the men that she dated after her divorce.  I had seen high school boyfriends cheat on my friends.  And we were so young that we both did things to each other that weren’t indicative of serious relationships. And yet because of this, my subsequent relationships were damaged. I was always waiting for the next guy to cheat on me and I was always watching for signs that he would. Of course, my behavior made it more likely that he was going to cheat.

I can’t know if you have any of this in your past, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of women have at least some of it.  Almost all of us have a man in our childhood or young adult lives who severely disappointed us. So how do you change this when you can’t change the past? Well, you can vow not to distrust your husband until he gives you a reason not to. Unless you have caught him doing something, then why punish him for something he never did? In short, when I do this to my own husband, I am making this innocent man pay for my father’s mistakes and my ex boyfriend’s mistakes. And this just isn’t fair. So I always try to be very aware of when I am projecting and when I need to back away.

As I alluded to, I firmly believe that my lack of trust and paranoia was at least one of the things that lead up to my separation.  Luckily, I was able to change my outlook and save my marriage eventually.  You can read more on my blog at http://isavedmymarriage.com

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