I feel like there's a lot a brainwashing and manipulation even when spouses aren't physically abusive.
My wife tells me stuff that just doesn't make sense. When I sold my nice car and quit doing track days when we got married with plans to have kids, she kept telling me that I could've kept it and that the only reason I had it must have been to get girls. That simply wasn't true. And keep it? Using what money! I pay all the bills (and benefits, and retirement saving) except for her phone and car, while she spends as much or more every month on her hobby as I do on the mortgage. Or if I tell her that we should cut back on our toddler's screen time that day, she'll say it was only .5 hour, eventhough I witnessed 1.5 hours of TV time and .5 hour of phone/youtube time.
On top of this, she occaionally tells me that I'm mean to her. This is usually in response to me giving her instructions on how to properly perform some task. For example, she said I get the whites very clean looking when I wash them. I told her you have to pre soak them with bleach or oxiclean when they look dirty. Apparently this is mean to say? Or I mention that our toddler with a heart condition shouldn't be drinking iced tea with caffeine in it. Apparently this makes me controlling. I thought this would be common sense (drinking caffeine is the opposite of taking a medication to slow heart rate, which could lead to a bad outcome).
Many people have terrible social skills, and introspection.
There’s also the issue that many people choose mates because they want to have sex with them, or because they were young, or gave them attention, or were just around (or some combination of all these things).
People are awful at choosing long term mates and the discussion around this and the selection criteria is really bad.
If your partner has core value differences or just isn’t at some threshold of general intelligence the relationship will be filled with this kind of anxiety inducing misery.
This goes both ways too - I’ve known brilliant women who dated oafish/dumber, but very good-looking/fit men that were filled with similar insecurities. People should select more on core value alignment and intelligence than they do.
The brainwashing isn’t some secret truth of spousal relationships, except perhaps that people are bad at long term mate selection and select for the wrong things.
The values are mostly the same. The two big issued in this case are that she's never lived alone, so never learned many basic life skills. It's not terrible, but can get annoying when you're the one in a fulltime job and watches the kid on most nights and weekends, doing all the shopping, cooking, financial, legal, medical, mechanical, and property upkeep work.
The second thing is that she stated before marriage that she likes the country and wants to own a small horse farm. I, incorrectly, assumed that ment moving to a cheaper area. Who has $1M+ dollars for 10-20 acres in this area? Not to mention land in that amount is pretty rare as the county's population density metrics list it as urbanized.
My wife tells me stuff that just doesn't make sense. When I sold my nice car and quit doing track days when we got married with plans to have kids, she kept telling me that I could've kept it and that the only reason I had it must have been to get girls. That simply wasn't true. And keep it? Using what money! I pay all the bills (and benefits, and retirement saving) except for her phone and car, while she spends as much or more every month on her hobby as I do on the mortgage. Or if I tell her that we should cut back on our toddler's screen time that day, she'll say it was only .5 hour, eventhough I witnessed 1.5 hours of TV time and .5 hour of phone/youtube time.
On top of this, she occaionally tells me that I'm mean to her. This is usually in response to me giving her instructions on how to properly perform some task. For example, she said I get the whites very clean looking when I wash them. I told her you have to pre soak them with bleach or oxiclean when they look dirty. Apparently this is mean to say? Or I mention that our toddler with a heart condition shouldn't be drinking iced tea with caffeine in it. Apparently this makes me controlling. I thought this would be common sense (drinking caffeine is the opposite of taking a medication to slow heart rate, which could lead to a bad outcome).