Dear Roe,
I don’t like my husband any more. We have been married for more than 20 years. I was in love with him and we had a great time together, but in recent years he has changed and can be quite anxious and down in himself. He can make cutting remarks about me and what I want in life. Everything is about what he wants. He won’t engage in loving and caring conversations any more, they always lead to conflict. I thought until recently that I still loved him but I am questioning this. Maybe I feel sorry for him. He has a very controlling family and always has to dance to their tune. But I see straight through them.
He is often told what to do by one particularly domineering sibling, who thinks she is some kind of family matriarch. I know she doesn’t like me and other in-laws in the family. My husband sees no problem with them and defends them and never stands up for me. As a result, I resent him, and don’t want to go near him for sex etc as I see him as weak and pathetic sometimes. The attraction to the strong, confident and caring man I married has died and I don’t know what to do. If I leave him, I will invariably get the blame from his side. How do I escape his controlling family, where no-one seems to be good enough?
[ Ask Roe: Send your sex and relationship questions anonymouslyOpens in new window ]
There are a few things going on here: your loss of connection with your husband, his interfering family, and your fear of being blamed if you leave. These issues overlap in a complicated Venn diagram, but they also stand alone, so let’s start with the simplest: the fear of blame. The truth is that you must let his family think whatever they want. If they have always been judgmental and unwilling to consider their own role in any conflict, then they were always going to blame you.
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Even loving, emotionally mature families often side with their own during a relationship breakdown simply because they hear more from them. You should not stay in an unhappy marriage to appease these people. If staying with your husband were enough to win their warmth, you would have it by now, but you don’t. So if you want to leave, let them create whatever one-dimensional narratives they like. Your truth will sustain you much more meaningfully.
That’s jumping ahead, of course, to a scenario where you leave your husband. But that scenario is not an inevitability. I understand how upsetting and heavy it must be to feel disconnected from and unhappy with the person who has been your life partner for two decades. That’s such a tremendous, upsetting shift. When you don’t feel loved, cared for or appreciated by a partner for years, are dealing with a consistently low mood in the relationship, feel they are putting you down, and have to deal with unpleasant family members without support, it’s no wonder that your feelings of love for your husband have dwindled. Your well is empty, and is not being refilled.
However, you don’t mention any attempt to raise this issue with your husband, to tell him the extremity of your unhappiness, to invite him back into connection with you. You mention that he has changed and has become very anxious and down, and any major change in mood and personality should be taken seriously. If your husband has been experiencing stress, anxiety, depression or other mental health issues for the past few years – perhaps without recognising it – it could explain his irritability, distance, and the loss of joy between you, in ways that have nothing to do with his commitment to you.
None of this will erase the cutting remarks or the withdrawal from intimacy. Hurt is hurt, and you’ve been hurting a long time. But if he has been quietly drowning due to mental health issues, it means that you can understand his behaviour in a different way, and that there are things you can both do to get him and your marriage onto surer ground. He could speak to his GP and a therapist, and you could attend couples’ counselling, seeking to reconnect him with himself, and to your relationship.
This is conjecture, but I imagine that a man who is consumed by anxiety and cows to pressure from an overbearing family might be someone who has never really learned to inhabit his own desires or use his own voice. And when you cannot hear yourself, you certainly cannot hear the person you love. Having a space to focus on himself, to think about what life he wants generally and what marriage he wants with you might make it easier for your husband to envision setting some boundaries with his family that could help you both.
But he does need to do that. You are not required to martyr yourself on the altar of his unresolved family dynamics. Compassion for his wounds does not mean indefinite tolerance of them. There is a point at which empathy becomes self-erasure, and from the way you write, it sounds as if you’ve been drifting dangerously close to that line. You’ve been shrinking yourself to avoid conflict, absorbing the sting of his family’s interference, and convincing yourself that if you just endure a little more, things will return to the clarity and connection you once had. But relationships do not improve through silent endurance. They improve through reckoning. That time has come.
So before deciding the love is gone, ask yourself whether it is gone, or if it has simply been starved. Anyone would feel their affection wither after years without tenderness or support. That doesn’t mean the marriage is irreparable, only that it needs attention neither of you has given it. Would you be willing to tell him, clearly and calmly, exactly how unhappy you are, perhaps in a counselling setting where you can both stay grounded?
[ ‘I’ve been through a trauma and my husband shows no empathy’Opens in new window ]
Can you frame this not as an attack on his family but an expression of vulnerability and an invitation to connection? If you do that as generously as you can and he still can’t hear you - if he minimises, avoids, or retreats into the comfort of his family’s narrative - then you will have the clarity you need. You won’t be leaving because of his family. You’ll be leaving because when offered the chance to rebuild, he didn’t take your hand.
As for escaping his family, the truth is freeing: you don’t need to. You only need to stop expecting fairness, warmth or approval from people who have never offered it. Their opinions have power only if you keep waiting for them to understand you. Step out of that arena. Whether you stay or go, their narrative doesn’t get to define your life.
The real question now is not “How do I escape them?” but “What kind of life do I want to return to when I wake up each morning?” Quiet, connected, honest? Start by listening for your own voice again, the one that has been silenced by years of tension and resignation. It’s still there, and it will tell you exactly what you need.
