Wow. These are all very interesting situations.
My case does not seems that simple. I’ve been married 20 years and shortly after we got married I felt something was wrong. I worked and my wife was finishing up her undergraduate teaching degree in science. She graduated with high honors.
To further rewind the tape, I knew early on that my wife had issues with intimate relationships and that when we got closer her opening up to me attracted me to her even more. It was bliss and it felt like our needs were both being met.
The resent with me started some time between her student teaching and about three years after we had our first child. There was just no discussion about going to work or even seeking employment.
My Wife is not a yeller whatsoever. She holds it all in and has this infuriating way of stonewalling and ignoring me. I feel that if I press her on these important issues she will crumble like a china doll. So things just drift along and I got angrier by the day and at times verbally exasperated. You could call it abuse but it was truly like nailing a lemon marang pie to a tree. It’s incredible and when she eventually got upset, I felt terrible for even asking the question and guilty for losing my cool.
I actually said YEARS ago that our family felt like we had three children and one adult. I sought out therapy and soon peeled back some patterns which seemed obvious. My Wife grew up without a Dad, nor her Mother or Grandmother. I started to hear the nickel drop. It wasn’t all me, but i was still upset that nothing was going to change. Marriage counseling went just so far and my Wife simply chaulked the situation up as me being a moody crab and me needed medication to tamp that down.
Everyone loves my Wife. She is engaging, funny, caring, smart and loyal. She is also frugal.
She just shrinks, retreats and shuts down which makes me feel like I’m bearing down on a baby seal on pack ice. In other words, this ends the conversation and then the resentment builds since I am prevented from expressing my needs and fears. I’ve expressed myself lately in very concise, unemotional fashion and have been told that everything is about me. In other words I should just man up and get on with it. Discovering this web site has clued me into this behavior as code for really saying: continue taking care of me, and by extention, our children totally ignoring the fact that she bears as much of that responsibility as I do.
I just don’t see this changing and firmly beleive, as this article says that she is in need of years of psychotherapy.
I must confess that she did see a social worker last year, but because it was our former marraige counselor I was really put off and angry that my privacy was not being protected. A great therapist, but this was just unethical and I openly objected and said so.
In retrospect, that was a situation where I should have canned the beans and just let it play out. I probably was working against my own interests and regret even taking notice of that arrangement. My fear was being painted as the devil himself, whereas the counselor probably knew me better than that. A mistake.

How should a man deal with a Wife who has these characteristics, but does it in the image of the Easter Bunny?