My [40f] husband [40m] is ...too generous? I don't know if there's anything I can do to help him understand it's not about material things.

Sorry if this is kind of all over the place, I'm not sure how to explain it without having it come off some way I don't want it to.

TLDR: My husband is one of the kindest and truly sweetest people ever. But he seems to have some kind of insecurity or something where if he doesn't shower us (kids and I) in expensive gifts all the time, we won't love him or something?

He does fairly well money wise but obviously not well enough to afford the extravagant amount of items he buys. I have been politely declining lately whenever he offers to buy me something by saying I love him no matter what and I want him to keep his money so he can do something for himself once in awhile and he seems to get very flustered and frustrated with me. Like, "Why can't I just do something nice for you? Why do you have to ruin it?"

But here's the thing. He's had this broken, painful tooth that needs to be root canaled for MONTHS and he never has enough money to get it done because of all of the stuff he buys for everyone else. He injured his finger and can't even bend it anymore but never got help for it because he can't afford it but he does stuff like this - For instance, our toddler wanted to go to Disney World. He took us to Orlando for 8 days, bought us dinner out to the tune of $100+ dollars every single day, and couldn't go into a single store in the place without coming out with some giant stuffed animal or something. We don't even have enough room to house all of this stuff at this point. We got home and LO started crying that she wanted to go back to Disney. The following week, he took us all back and repeated the same thing again. Now she's complaining about missing Disney again and he's wracking his brain how to get us back over there and I'm like OMG. It's okay to say no!!! She will still love you, I promise!!!!

When we were first together (10+ years ago) I noticed that he seemed to expect me to leave him at any time, and if he did something even innocently thoughtless (like forgetting to hold a door for me), he would apologize profusely and act like he was just resigned that I was going to dump him over it. It's like he doesn't believe he, himself, to be good enough. Like he has to bribe everyone to keep liking him, including the kids. It breaks my heart but he doesn't seem to see it as an issue, while I am upset by how he neglects himself to buy all of these unnecessary items etc. How can I help him see that I have his best interests at heart, and that we all love him no matter what, and that all of this material stuff isn't buying love, it's just unnecessary? Without seeming ungrateful or just making him get all flustered about it?

Submitted September 28, 2019 at 10:25AM by Cealdi https://ift.tt/2ofYoYT