Silence is best way to tackle a sulker!
DEAR BEL
MY HUSBAND and I have been married for 55 years and during that time we have been having the same issue over and over again.
I’ll say or do something to annoy him and he’ll just stop speaking to me for a day or so. Then, when he’s ‘got over’ it, he’ll just start talking to me again as if nothing has happened. He won’t tell me what the problem is and says we should just forget about it and move on.
I think it’s not fair to punish me when I don’t know what I’m being accused of (even criminals get told the crime they’ve committed). But when I say I want to know what I’ve done, he says I’m prolonging it and should just let it go.
Am I being unreasonable to want to know, or is his attitude better and I should just ‘let it go’?
BEA
HOW I dislike a sulker! My late father had this tendency so I know it’s no joke when the atmosphere is poisoned.
My poor mother often had right on her side but sometimes I just knew she’d been deliberately winding him up. She knew exactly which buttons to press. Such are the complexities of marriage — which can be one of the hardest tests of endurance any of us have to face.
So here’s the thing. I find it quite hard to believe that after 55 years of marriage you have no idea at all what it is you have ‘said or done to annoy him’. Can this really be true? Don’t you have even a teenytiny notion of what’s triggered his long face? And could it be that when you cross-examine him, you are simply giving him a ‘result’ he secretly intended? His silent treatment had an effect. Victory!
I think it’s more effective to act as though nothing has happened. After all, silence can be golden and endless post-mortems leaden. Personally, I’d just smile and chill out — because it’s all over soon enough, just like life itself.