Why would so many women carry an anvil of resentment rather than stand up for themselves? Because speaking up comes at a cost. But so does keeping the peace. That cost is just better hidden.
This really hit home for me. After 30 years of mental, emotional, and nearly physical gymnastics, trying to find contentment while accommodating my husband's thorough lack of involvement in our unbalanced marriage, I made the difficult decision to leave. I know this isn’t the right choice for everyone, and I completely understand why many women remain accommodating—the cost is indeed high. I lost a couple of friends, but only a couple. One of my children was devastated, which broke my heart, while the other said our separation made more sense than our marriage ever had. On a practical note, the bigger sacrifice for me was the security of my financial future, which is no small matter at my age. But I can honestly say that in the six months since I left, I’ve felt a sense of peace and what I can only describe as 'existential freedom' that I had never experienced before. The descriptions in your article really nailed it, especially regarding managing resentment and validating the inequity. It captured so much of what it feels like to live in that dynamic.
I was standing in line in my favorite bakery this morning, waiting to pick up something tasty. Furious, because last weekend, I'd finally been able to express my frustration with my partner's behavior and asked him to work on changing it. It's something that's been a problem for creeping up on 2 years now. I've tried tackling it several different ways, in varying degrees of indirect and direct communication. He told me he understood where I was coming from.
This weekend he showed me, with his actions, that he'd rather continue doing the thing I told him I wasn't okay with, only worse than normal. Instead of trying to do the work of being compassionate and understanding (I know why he does what he does, I know his background)... I decided that today, I would allow myself to feel as angry as this situation deserves.
While I was standing there, fuming, surrounded by the scent of delicious pastries and bread... I opened my news aggregate and found this post. So to say that it's perfectly timed is an understatement.
Almost all of my resentment comes from trying to accommodate people in my life, and waking up to realize that I don't know many people in my life who would, or even could, do the same for me. So it's time to figure out how much I'm comfortable bending.
It's time for me to figure out who in my life would bend for me and with me, who will also allow me to stand firm and show how I want, and expect, to be treated by people who say they care about me.
My sister says to me often, “Laura, you’re not actually really “nice.” You’re kind, and there is a big difference.”
I think that being nice is something that I was more often in my twenties when I wanted literally everyone to like me. Now that I am 37, I find that not everyone does like me, but the people who do call me very genuine and kind and appreciate that I am the type of person who does have boundaries for how I will let people treat me. I have grown more assertive, and with my 5 year old daughter always watching me and listening to everything I say I am extremely careful about modeling that balance between speaking in a kind and loving manner but also being assertive when the situation requires me to be.
Relatable! After 18 years of marriage, I divorced my husband for many of the reasons discussed in this article. Throughout my life, I’ve been labeled “opinionated,” and as a child, my father encouraged me to tone it down rather than celebrate my ability to think critically and express myself. This same dynamic often plays out in the workplace, where women encounter male colleagues who carry these outdated expectations with them. I’ve experienced the sting of not being taken seriously and even had my reputation questioned simply because I stood up to male co-workers—men who weren’t even in positions of authority over me.
Men really tell on themselves when they call women "masculine" as an insult. They don't even realize they're saying traits they hate & find annoying (too loud, annoying, obnoxious, opinionated, etc) are male traits/how men act 24/7.
Reminds me of how I felt after reading Gabor Mate’s “When the Body Says No.” I simply couldn’t un-see the number of very good people (parents and teachers—of course primarily women!) in my life who were stifling rage and grief literally all the time. Reiterating so much of what you’ve referenced here, the whole book is about the way we tend to avoid allowing ourselves to feel the extent of our own relational losses from childhood on because honesty with these overwhelming feelings feel SO disruptive to our lives and everything we’ve always known in the short term. But maybe if we begin to help each other see the truth more clearly earlier on, we won’t have to wait until the cancer diagnosis or autoimmune condition forces us to finally start saying NO!🙏🏻
"Don’t hold your breath for religion to tell you this, but the spiritual work of men is to lose the self, the spiritual work of women is to build the self."
It's true of all the major religions, including Buddhism which has taught me much. However, I recently left my sangha. I escaped an abusive same-sex relationship a while back, and I have come to realize the teaching was geared toward men looking to "lose the self," with the end result grooming me to accept unacceptable. The same was true, of course of the Christianity with which I'd been raised.
I do bristle, however at the "codependent" label, as it is used to pathologize what is deemed societally "normal" behavior for women.
Thank you for including the fact that women who decide to move on from that societal norm are not treated well. It's an important thing to know and to learn how to navigate.
This is so incredibly good!! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! After a lifetime of accommodating everyone, especially the men, I’m so very, very tired and worn out. How do we stop enabling? These patterns are so hard to break. It often takes a Goddess like Kali to pull the rug from under us and when we fall on our faces, sick and broken, then we wake up because we must lest we die. I’m sending this fabulous piece to every woman I know. Thanks, again, for speaking up for us. As Michael Moore says, we live under “gender apartheid” in this country and world. I’m afraid it’s about to get much worse. We need to prepare. Thanks for helping us do that.
You ask such a great question - how do we fix this? One way is to raise sons who understand that they must be an equal partner in their relationships. When my oldest son was born, I told my husband that he would learn how to cook and clean and iron plus manage the car and the yard. For the most part, my sons work as hard at home as they do at work. I want them to honor their relationships, not take advantage.
I’m surprised but not surprised that it is you, Celeste, that brought up the Jody Moore phenomenon and connecting thought work to the resentment and accommodation weight that so many women are carrying around. I found Jody Moore’s work years ago and actually went to her first ever lifecoach training in 2018. This is when I was losing my ward community for several reasons (one was me being relief society president and not being qualified to handle several heavy situations). I found Jody Moore and clung onto the group for community- then lost that community too because I didn’t want to go to the Lifecoach school (which Jody later said we had to do if we wanted to remain one of her trained coaches…unfortunately she changed the policies from when I went to her training and was so disappointed by being let down by another mentor).
After losing my ward and then my coaching community, I was feeling so sad but instead of grieving properly I gaslit myself with the thought work tools I had been trained in that would make me think positively about my crappy circumstances instead of really facing and confronting the systems that were unfair and unequal. It took some pretty big/heavy life circumstances for me to stop gaslighting myself and accommodating everyone around me. I’m just barely noticing how I have absorbed the discomforts of the people around me for years so they didn’t have to feel uncomfortable as well. I learned all these coping skills so that I wouldn’t be a burden or an inconvenience to those around me. Because if I did express my discomforts or want to make changes, I was met with being isolated from community and some dishonest & really mean behaviors from others.
It’s no wonder Jody makes $2 million a year from teaching women these skills. We really really don’t want to be an “inconvenience” or the ones who shine the light on the problems of the church/families/systems because we aren’t met with the most encouraging responses. So we pay lots of money to learn how to avoid the real/hard work and just keep doing mental and emotional gymnastics inside ourselves to make ourselves easier to be around until we explode or in my case- shut down and completely burn out. All of this to say, I feel so seen with this article. Thank you.
"It avoided the truth too, that in their showdown, Nancy was more afraid of divorce than Evan was." This part. There's nothing wrong, necessarily, with any particular arrangement. But any arrangement that makes it significantly harder for one partner to walk away opens up tremendous opportunity for abuse.
This all sounds painfully familiar to me. I ultimately chose divorce. I don’t recommend that to everyone, not at all. I believe in marriage. But for me, leaving saved me in every way possible.
This explains why I have finally had it with taking care of the family pet! For the last 15 years, I have been feeding, walking, petting, and picking up poop for one dog or the other. I’m so done. Now we have a geriatric standard poodle who requires assistance getting up and barks incessantly. I’m having thoughts of taking her to the vet to have her euthanized but after reading this, I’m passing the dog care baton to my husband and daughter. It’s not the poor dog’s fault; she’s old and suffering from dementia. I’m just completely finished looking after her needs. Amen.
I personally have massive resentment about our geriatric dog. I blame it on Christmas magic 14 years ago but I am so tired of cleaning up pee waking having a house destroyed. He was sickly this summer and I ask my husband if he would go put him down. He said can’t we do it together? I’ll take the day off. So I waited all summer and he never took action. My girlfriend says if the dog is peeking everywhere he doesn’t feel good either and not living comfortably he wouldn’t make it in the pack, take him and put him down. But I keep spinning making up stories;) All that to say thanks for sharing. I’ve tried for a year to pass the baton and I’m done now. So either I suck it up or say goodbye to the family dog.
In my experience, dogs are much more satisfying companions than men. Please do what’s compassionate for YOUR DOG —there are services that come to your home. Then don’t get another one. You are stretched too thin and have a selfish partner.
Susan Powell sorry about your dog. Have your husband/daughter try trazedone (it's a relaxant) for the incessant barking in the meantime so it doesn't drive you crazy until they figure out what they want to do. My very anxious German Shepard whines and paces all the time for no reason which is very annoying and it really helps calm him down.
Love these thoughtful takes. Makes me evaluate my own life as I struggle with these issues myself. Seeing the here and now and practical application more clearly elevates my life. Thank you Celeste!
I just stopped doing my husbands after 27 years. Exhausting how much I do for another adult. Stopping laundry is a start. And yes, it's incredible how much time that has added to my days/weekends and not having to be worried about the timing of it all and getting it all on hangars before wrinkles set etc. Now I hear him complaining about it on Sundays b/c all he wants to do is watch football.
I'm here. Deeply unhappy. Feeling unseen and unheard. I'm always sick. If someone brings germs into the house I'm sick for weeks. I'm tired. I'm isolated. I'm done. I have no more fucks. I can sit and stare for hours.
I so want to send you supportive words. I don't know what the right ones are. Please reach out to a friend or a hotline. Change is hard. The end result can be so much better than staying in an unhappy situation. Best wishes.
Powerful. Love it. Thank you. My play “Adaptation: Enough Already” speaks precisely to these themes. And just to add Dr Gabor Maté’s data that we are 51% of the population but account for 70-80% of auto-immune diseases, which he attributes to a handful of factors, a main one being suppression of our anger (which he equates to suppression of our immune system in the long run). Will try to join you - I’m London based - will have to see if timings work for your zoom. Are you in Utah? Many thanks. Sam.
This really hit home for me. After 30 years of mental, emotional, and nearly physical gymnastics, trying to find contentment while accommodating my husband's thorough lack of involvement in our unbalanced marriage, I made the difficult decision to leave. I know this isn’t the right choice for everyone, and I completely understand why many women remain accommodating—the cost is indeed high. I lost a couple of friends, but only a couple. One of my children was devastated, which broke my heart, while the other said our separation made more sense than our marriage ever had. On a practical note, the bigger sacrifice for me was the security of my financial future, which is no small matter at my age. But I can honestly say that in the six months since I left, I’ve felt a sense of peace and what I can only describe as 'existential freedom' that I had never experienced before. The descriptions in your article really nailed it, especially regarding managing resentment and validating the inequity. It captured so much of what it feels like to live in that dynamic.
I was standing in line in my favorite bakery this morning, waiting to pick up something tasty. Furious, because last weekend, I'd finally been able to express my frustration with my partner's behavior and asked him to work on changing it. It's something that's been a problem for creeping up on 2 years now. I've tried tackling it several different ways, in varying degrees of indirect and direct communication. He told me he understood where I was coming from.
This weekend he showed me, with his actions, that he'd rather continue doing the thing I told him I wasn't okay with, only worse than normal. Instead of trying to do the work of being compassionate and understanding (I know why he does what he does, I know his background)... I decided that today, I would allow myself to feel as angry as this situation deserves.
While I was standing there, fuming, surrounded by the scent of delicious pastries and bread... I opened my news aggregate and found this post. So to say that it's perfectly timed is an understatement.
Almost all of my resentment comes from trying to accommodate people in my life, and waking up to realize that I don't know many people in my life who would, or even could, do the same for me. So it's time to figure out how much I'm comfortable bending.
It's time for me to figure out who in my life would bend for me and with me, who will also allow me to stand firm and show how I want, and expect, to be treated by people who say they care about me.
I think about the need to be a nice woman SO much lately and I needed this!
I’m always surprised how much backlash and anxiety I get when I’m not “nice”. Why? 😅
My sister says to me often, “Laura, you’re not actually really “nice.” You’re kind, and there is a big difference.”
I think that being nice is something that I was more often in my twenties when I wanted literally everyone to like me. Now that I am 37, I find that not everyone does like me, but the people who do call me very genuine and kind and appreciate that I am the type of person who does have boundaries for how I will let people treat me. I have grown more assertive, and with my 5 year old daughter always watching me and listening to everything I say I am extremely careful about modeling that balance between speaking in a kind and loving manner but also being assertive when the situation requires me to be.
Relatable! After 18 years of marriage, I divorced my husband for many of the reasons discussed in this article. Throughout my life, I’ve been labeled “opinionated,” and as a child, my father encouraged me to tone it down rather than celebrate my ability to think critically and express myself. This same dynamic often plays out in the workplace, where women encounter male colleagues who carry these outdated expectations with them. I’ve experienced the sting of not being taken seriously and even had my reputation questioned simply because I stood up to male co-workers—men who weren’t even in positions of authority over me.
I've had these same labels: opinionated, too passionate, too loud, too masculine.
don't forget "intimidating"
Oh yeah.....
Men really tell on themselves when they call women "masculine" as an insult. They don't even realize they're saying traits they hate & find annoying (too loud, annoying, obnoxious, opinionated, etc) are male traits/how men act 24/7.
Yes. Once again, of course, YES!!😭
Reminds me of how I felt after reading Gabor Mate’s “When the Body Says No.” I simply couldn’t un-see the number of very good people (parents and teachers—of course primarily women!) in my life who were stifling rage and grief literally all the time. Reiterating so much of what you’ve referenced here, the whole book is about the way we tend to avoid allowing ourselves to feel the extent of our own relational losses from childhood on because honesty with these overwhelming feelings feel SO disruptive to our lives and everything we’ve always known in the short term. But maybe if we begin to help each other see the truth more clearly earlier on, we won’t have to wait until the cancer diagnosis or autoimmune condition forces us to finally start saying NO!🙏🏻
This part resonated:
"Don’t hold your breath for religion to tell you this, but the spiritual work of men is to lose the self, the spiritual work of women is to build the self."
It's true of all the major religions, including Buddhism which has taught me much. However, I recently left my sangha. I escaped an abusive same-sex relationship a while back, and I have come to realize the teaching was geared toward men looking to "lose the self," with the end result grooming me to accept unacceptable. The same was true, of course of the Christianity with which I'd been raised.
I do bristle, however at the "codependent" label, as it is used to pathologize what is deemed societally "normal" behavior for women.
Thank you for including the fact that women who decide to move on from that societal norm are not treated well. It's an important thing to know and to learn how to navigate.
This is so incredibly good!! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! After a lifetime of accommodating everyone, especially the men, I’m so very, very tired and worn out. How do we stop enabling? These patterns are so hard to break. It often takes a Goddess like Kali to pull the rug from under us and when we fall on our faces, sick and broken, then we wake up because we must lest we die. I’m sending this fabulous piece to every woman I know. Thanks, again, for speaking up for us. As Michael Moore says, we live under “gender apartheid” in this country and world. I’m afraid it’s about to get much worse. We need to prepare. Thanks for helping us do that.
You ask such a great question - how do we fix this? One way is to raise sons who understand that they must be an equal partner in their relationships. When my oldest son was born, I told my husband that he would learn how to cook and clean and iron plus manage the car and the yard. For the most part, my sons work as hard at home as they do at work. I want them to honor their relationships, not take advantage.
I’m surprised but not surprised that it is you, Celeste, that brought up the Jody Moore phenomenon and connecting thought work to the resentment and accommodation weight that so many women are carrying around. I found Jody Moore’s work years ago and actually went to her first ever lifecoach training in 2018. This is when I was losing my ward community for several reasons (one was me being relief society president and not being qualified to handle several heavy situations). I found Jody Moore and clung onto the group for community- then lost that community too because I didn’t want to go to the Lifecoach school (which Jody later said we had to do if we wanted to remain one of her trained coaches…unfortunately she changed the policies from when I went to her training and was so disappointed by being let down by another mentor).
After losing my ward and then my coaching community, I was feeling so sad but instead of grieving properly I gaslit myself with the thought work tools I had been trained in that would make me think positively about my crappy circumstances instead of really facing and confronting the systems that were unfair and unequal. It took some pretty big/heavy life circumstances for me to stop gaslighting myself and accommodating everyone around me. I’m just barely noticing how I have absorbed the discomforts of the people around me for years so they didn’t have to feel uncomfortable as well. I learned all these coping skills so that I wouldn’t be a burden or an inconvenience to those around me. Because if I did express my discomforts or want to make changes, I was met with being isolated from community and some dishonest & really mean behaviors from others.
It’s no wonder Jody makes $2 million a year from teaching women these skills. We really really don’t want to be an “inconvenience” or the ones who shine the light on the problems of the church/families/systems because we aren’t met with the most encouraging responses. So we pay lots of money to learn how to avoid the real/hard work and just keep doing mental and emotional gymnastics inside ourselves to make ourselves easier to be around until we explode or in my case- shut down and completely burn out. All of this to say, I feel so seen with this article. Thank you.
"This is a lie patriarchy likes to whisper in the ears of women" ~ beautifully stated and dead on. Thank you for sharing this message. It's so needed!
"It avoided the truth too, that in their showdown, Nancy was more afraid of divorce than Evan was." This part. There's nothing wrong, necessarily, with any particular arrangement. But any arrangement that makes it significantly harder for one partner to walk away opens up tremendous opportunity for abuse.
💯💯💯
This all sounds painfully familiar to me. I ultimately chose divorce. I don’t recommend that to everyone, not at all. I believe in marriage. But for me, leaving saved me in every way possible.
This explains why I have finally had it with taking care of the family pet! For the last 15 years, I have been feeding, walking, petting, and picking up poop for one dog or the other. I’m so done. Now we have a geriatric standard poodle who requires assistance getting up and barks incessantly. I’m having thoughts of taking her to the vet to have her euthanized but after reading this, I’m passing the dog care baton to my husband and daughter. It’s not the poor dog’s fault; she’s old and suffering from dementia. I’m just completely finished looking after her needs. Amen.
I personally have massive resentment about our geriatric dog. I blame it on Christmas magic 14 years ago but I am so tired of cleaning up pee waking having a house destroyed. He was sickly this summer and I ask my husband if he would go put him down. He said can’t we do it together? I’ll take the day off. So I waited all summer and he never took action. My girlfriend says if the dog is peeking everywhere he doesn’t feel good either and not living comfortably he wouldn’t make it in the pack, take him and put him down. But I keep spinning making up stories;) All that to say thanks for sharing. I’ve tried for a year to pass the baton and I’m done now. So either I suck it up or say goodbye to the family dog.
Oh my gosh, someone else with my exact situation! Thanks for commenting, Jessica.
In my experience, dogs are much more satisfying companions than men. Please do what’s compassionate for YOUR DOG —there are services that come to your home. Then don’t get another one. You are stretched too thin and have a selfish partner.
Susan Powell sorry about your dog. Have your husband/daughter try trazedone (it's a relaxant) for the incessant barking in the meantime so it doesn't drive you crazy until they figure out what they want to do. My very anxious German Shepard whines and paces all the time for no reason which is very annoying and it really helps calm him down.
Love these thoughtful takes. Makes me evaluate my own life as I struggle with these issues myself. Seeing the here and now and practical application more clearly elevates my life. Thank you Celeste!
I did my ex-husband's laundry up until the day I moved out of our marital home. Co-dependency is the most insidious threat to relationships.
I just stopped doing my husbands after 27 years. Exhausting how much I do for another adult. Stopping laundry is a start. And yes, it's incredible how much time that has added to my days/weekends and not having to be worried about the timing of it all and getting it all on hangars before wrinkles set etc. Now I hear him complaining about it on Sundays b/c all he wants to do is watch football.
I'm here. Deeply unhappy. Feeling unseen and unheard. I'm always sick. If someone brings germs into the house I'm sick for weeks. I'm tired. I'm isolated. I'm done. I have no more fucks. I can sit and stare for hours.
I so want to send you supportive words. I don't know what the right ones are. Please reach out to a friend or a hotline. Change is hard. The end result can be so much better than staying in an unhappy situation. Best wishes.
Powerful. Love it. Thank you. My play “Adaptation: Enough Already” speaks precisely to these themes. And just to add Dr Gabor Maté’s data that we are 51% of the population but account for 70-80% of auto-immune diseases, which he attributes to a handful of factors, a main one being suppression of our anger (which he equates to suppression of our immune system in the long run). Will try to join you - I’m London based - will have to see if timings work for your zoom. Are you in Utah? Many thanks. Sam.