My (35M) wife (37F) of three years seems to think that micromanagement is an inherent part of marriage

I feel really bad posting this here, because I’m a grown adult and I’ve been married for awhile. I know that my marriage is in a really shitty spot, and it has been for a while.

For some background, my wife and I both recently completed graduate school. She completed her PhD in March this year, I completed mine two months later in early May. We had a lot of problems while we were both writing, but these problems briefly went away at the start of this year, when we agreed to help each other out and finish our dissertations one at a time.

Since I’ve finished my dissertation, I’ve started working on the book version of my dissertation, and my wife has been completely unwilling to let me out of her sight. If I make a post on Facebook, she’ll lecture me about using too much social media (for the record, I counted after the incident this evening, and I have a grand total of ten Facebook posts since the start of June - all but two of which were made in her presence, while she knew exactly what I was doing and what my responsibilities at the time were). Every time I go to the gym, she’ll scold me about how I should be working instead. If I take a day off of working on the manuscript, usually because she has a day off of work and I want to hang out with her, she’ll enjoy the hell out of the day and then when we’re about to go to bed complain about how my progress on my manuscript is too slow and how she didn't see me working at all that day.

Now, part of the reason I feel bad about this is because a lot of this is justified. I have ADHD and have always had extreme time management problems. The idiosyncratic time management system I used to get through my graduate course work, when I was living alone, looks like just pissing off to her eyes. In addition, in her words, she’s getting old and is worried about being able to have a baby. She will not have a baby until I have a tenure-track university job. She also works to supplement the income I still make from what’s left on my grad school fellowship, and we’re both EXTREMELY nervous about finding an alternate source of income by the time it runs out. This all makes sense to me, it’s quite logical.

The problem is, even when I DO work, it’s not enough for her. We had an argument several days ago, and she scolded me (justifiably) for slacking off over the past couple weeks. So, I’ve put in a good 4-6 hours of writing a day every day this week, until today. She’s leaving on a work trip tomorrow, and I wanted to spend time with her. We binged the new Stranger Things season, and we both loved it.

After it was done, I made a post about it to Facebook (my second Facebook post this entire month). Big mistake. She asks me when my manuscript will be done. I tell her I really want to have it done by the end of next month, but I don’t know. She goes into this lecture that I have heard a million times before about how I use too much social media, and says that I should stop doing everything, including going to the gym, until the manuscript is done. I reminded her we had this same discussion last week, and she said we’re going to have the same discussion every night until the manuscript is complete. At this point I snapped at her. It was not a nice argument.

Later, I sat down with her and told her that there’s nothing wrong with getting mad at me if I’m not doing my job, but that once she’s communicated to me what I need to do, she needs to leave off and let me do what she’s asked. I told her that I feel like she’s still punishing me for a slow week, and that it demoralizes me and makes me not want to work, because even if I work, I’ll still be in hot water with her.

This made her very angry, and she said that she won’t talk about my manuscriptat all until the end of August. If I have it done by the end of August, good, but if I don’t have it done, she’ll talk to my parents and ask them to make me go back to live with them (this sounds absurd, but makes a degree of sense in my wife’s culture, and would make more sense if I or my parents belonged to said culture). Basically, she’ll kick me out of the house / end the relationship without ending the marriage.

Aside from the attempted coercion, this sounds like a fantastic plan and exactly what I’ve been trying to get my wife to agree to for far, far longer than this latest episode of drama. However, it comes with the caveat that in my wife’s eyes, “we’re just roommates now,” because, in her words, “I can’t touch your personal life.” I told her that she’s right, she can’t, and that I also would not even think about interfering with HER personal life, and this made her more upset. According to her, we might as well not be married if we can’t control each and every aspect of how the other one spends every day.

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So, obviously, my marriage fucking sucks, and its days are probably numbered. However, I feel compelled to ask /r/relationships about it because I have three nagging questions about the dynamics at play here.

- First and most importantly, how can I distinguish what’s my fault from what’s her fault? Because, I know that a lot of it is me. She’s relying on me, she put her trust in me when she married me, and I’m coming up short. I’ve always been really bad about staying on task and getting stuff done, this is nothing new.

- Second, to what degree am I responsible for her pain and her problems? She’s from a conservative culture, so if I do end up leaving her, it will ruin her socially. She told me once that she can’t divorce me because it would mean that she’s now “spoiled goods” and nobody else will touch her. In addition, I KNOW she’s not well. She’s diagnosed with bipolar, but doesn’t take her meds because they make her sleepy, and she’s a self-described workaholic.

- Third, how do I bring up the idea that she should continue taking her meds or going with me to counseling without sounding like an abusive prick who’s trying to divert blame from my own shortcomings by calling my wife crazy? I am legitimately worried about her and can see how much pain she’s in on a daily basis. She hates her job, she’s constantly stressed, and I don’t think I’ve seen her willingly take a break in at least two years. Even when we’re home, she’s constantly texting people from work, not for fun, but to talk about projects. She REALLY needs those meds (they worked when she was taking them), but I feel like a huge asshole every time I bring them up.

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TL;DR - Wife has justifiable concerns about our family's future, but has a stated belief that unless she's able to dictate every aspect of my life (and vice versa) we might as well not be married

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EDIT: Grammar, spelling.

EDIT 2: Two important clarifications.

- First, I AM on the job market, and quite actively so. This is another sore point. I've applied for literally every job opening that remotely fits my field, which is a very small field, and she says she doesn't believe that I care about getting a job because she hasn't seen me work on an application - as if I hadn't literally spent the entire month of may doing nothing but preparing applications.

- Second, I AM treating my ADHD. I've been on Ritalin for two years now, I have a strict and regular work-out schedule that helps me stay on track (and which my wife wants me to stop, because she thinks it distracts me from my other work), and I have a psychiatrist on call who I can go to for further advice if either of these stop working.

Submitted July 07, 2019 at 08:17AM by micro_problems https://ift.tt/2Js3gkD