The Psychology Behind Scornful Wives

There is a pattern I keep encountering in my sessions with men whose marriages are falling apart. Different men, different marriages, yet the same disbelief at the apparent vindictiveness of the women they have loved for years.

This is an echo of the online trend where women post reels detailing their husbands’ failings with bared teeth and curled lips, sometimes announcing their imminent divorce filings to a choir of moral support. What breaks my heart in dealing with these cases is that the men just want peace.

They desperately search for their own shortcomings with devastating honesty, hoping that if they can just identify what they have done wrong, they can put things right and go on as before. By the time they come to me, they are willing to do practically anything.

Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, they plead, convinced that one final concession will save their marriage. The extraordinary lengths to which some of these men have already gone to; admitting psychiatric diagnoses that are obviously wrong and relocating to places nobody should want to live, makes one thing increasingly clear.

The goalposts keep shifting because the demands are punitive in nature. Somewhere…