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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Married 20-plus years. Got engaged after about a year of dating and married 8 months after that. Did not live together.

The biggest surprise for me was how deeply and pervasively the emotional abuse DH received from his father would affect a wide range of things in our relationship and DH's approach to parenting. I knew his father had died from alcoholism (long before we met), that the alcoholism was a major factor in his parents' divorce, and that his father had not been nice to his mother when drunk. But I was told repeatedly what a great father he was to DH and his brother.

After we were married, DH would tell stories that in his mind were funny memories but to me sounded cruel, like purposely continuing to do something that terriified a kid to see them freak out. DH was in deep denial, and it wasn't until we had been married several years that DH, after listening to a random podcast about a family with an emotionally abusive father, admitted to himself and me that his own father had been emotionally abusive.

DH tries really hard not to be his father, and on the whole, he is a good dad. But there have been times where he has overracted to kid behaviors, especially in the tween years.

There were also some financial things that we discussed before marriage where I thought we were on the same page, but after marriage he changed his tune. I felt coerced into some decisions but went along to keep the peace because it was obvious that he was (and still is) incapable of understanding that you can have a healthy marriage even if not every financial account is shared jointly.

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I really relate to this one even though we dated much longer and lived together for several years before marriage. The difference with us is that DH's abusive dad died about 5 years into our marriage and that is when the denial regarding his abusive behavior started. Before his dad died, DH was clear eyed about his dad's shortcomings as a father and a person. They often disagreed about things and DH would stand up to his dad. I think after he died, this guilt set in that he had not been kind or generous enough to his dad before he died (and he died from a painful battle with cancer, which I think compounded a lot of these issues because it's so hard to watch someone close to you go through that).

Suddenly DH decided that some of his dad's "parenting methods" that he'd previously known were highly problematic were maybe not so bad after all. This created a ton of friction in our marriage over parenting. I also had abusive parents and our relationship and decision to have kids was premised on the idea that neither of us intended to parent as we had been parented, and the importance of breaking those chains of abuse. DH also became weird about money in the same way his dad always was (part of the abuse pattern in his family was his dad taking "frugality" to an extreme that bordered on child neglect, sometimes refusing even to spend money on basic needs like food or shoes -- they were firmly middle class and this was a choice, not a necessity, plus his dad actually did not work for much of his childhood while his mom supported the family as a school teacher). Suddenly we were fighting over basic spending habits, like buying a bike helmet for a kid or buying a new bed after a kid had outgrown their crib. It was incredibly stressful.

I ultimately won that battle and now 4 years since his dad's death, we're back to a better place and on the same page with both parenting and money. But it really did feel like he became a different person there for a time, and it was particularly hard to co-parent with him when I felt I was often working against these new impulses of his to become a much more militant, unfeeling, emotionally closed off dad. He now acknowledges that it was his way of working through grief regarding someone with whom he had a complicated relationship, but it really took me by surprise. [/quote]

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