Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

farrenkm t1_jbtmt9f wrote

Sounds like you're learning communication skills, which is good. I didn't see your first post, so I don't know how old your marriage or your kids are. But communication is essential.

I don't much care what my wife does, so long as she lets me know. Not to be controlling, but to make sure she's okay. Our classic story is, I used to work nights. I'd call her around 7:30 PM just to check in, see how her day was, etc. (This is before cell phones were popular, 1998.) 7:30PM rolls around, no answer. No big deal. 8:00PM, no answer. 8:30PM, no answer. I'm getting concerned, because she has a medical history. I was doing ambulance dispatching and had a good relationship with the 911 center, so I called nonemergency and asked if there'd been any medical calls at her work or around our place. No, nothing. 9:00PM rolls around and I still can't reach her. I call my FIL (same town), who offers to come pick up my keys. In the meantime, 911 offers to do a welfare check. I said yes to both offers.

My FIL and SIL come and get my keys and they head to our place. In the meantime, 911 calls home and finally gets my wife. "Hi, this is Washington County 911. Your husband is really worried about you, so we were checking to see if everything was okay." They called off the welfare check, but I couldn't call off my FIL (no cell phone).

I found out she'd had a busy day, she was relaxing watching the Olympics, and she turned off the ringer on the phone in the bedroom. By sheer coincidence, during a commercial, she heard another phone ringing. She was a little annoyed, but when I pointed out this was our pattern and now there was a break in it, she understood. In the future, if she wanted to go to bed early, she just told me that, and no worries.

If she's had a hard day, fine. If she were to want to go get pizza, fine. If she wants to spend time with friends until 2:00AM, fine. I don't care, she can do what she wants, and I fully trust her. I just want to know so I'm not worried about whether she's okay or not.

We've been married 25+ years and together for 30+ years, so something's going right.

Edit: This really makes it sound like it's a one-way street. It's not. I tell her where I'm going as well and what time I expect to be home. Bidirectional communication. We'd already had pretty good communication in the past, but due to recent circumstances, it's gotten even better in the last two years. I just need to know she's safe and she needs to know I'm safe.

7

harleyspoison267 t1_jbvvm46 wrote

Yeah to be honest I'm a young woman and I agree with this completely. I think to certain people on the outside it looks like my fiance is controlling because he'll occasionally call kind of intensely worried about my whereabouts. The reality is, we both have really weird and inconsistent schedules with our jobs, so if one of us doesn't know where the other is for an extended period of time or we miss our regular check-ins, it's easy to grow concerned (I drive a lot in the northern US for my job and he's a bartender so there is a small element of danger involved). I don't call as often, but I will text randomly when we're apart, and if I don't at least get a text by midnight, I do start to get concerned as well.

3