21- I Loved My Husband, But I Didn’t Like Him

I tell the truth many couples whisper: you can love a kind, present partner and still not like them when the mental load makes you feel alone. I share how invisible labor and “holiday magic” quietly create resentment, then explain why redistributing the mental load can ease anxiety and bring connection back.

• admitting the shame of “I love him but I don’t like him” 
• describing bedtime teamwork while craving distance afterward 
• noticing that wanting space from a partner is important data 
• protecting the image of a “good marriage” while feeling lonely 
• unpacking the dissonance of being “lucky” and still drowning 
• naming holiday planning as a heavy, long-running mental project 
• explaining why this loneliness shows up in good marriages too 
• linking invisible labor to anxiety and future-focused worry 
• seeing anxiety shrink when the mental load is shared 
• validating listeners as not too sensitive or ungrateful 
If you’re experiencing this, let me know. Please stick along for this series.

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1) If you are the primary mental load carrier, click here

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Transcript

Showing Up While Self Conscious

1:16

Hey if you haven't tuned in yet, this is Angela. I am in Seattle and a mental load coach for couples who are struggling in their relationship. I look like I got into a bar fight and I have my teeth missing, but I'm actually going through orthodontic treatment for my sleep apnea. So you're probably gonna see me with some sort of gap in my teeth for a while. And yes, I did question whether or not I should make these videos because I feel so self-conscious about them, but I figured I'm just gonna do it anyways. And so here it goes. This is me doing it. I wanna start off by saying that. I have struggled to say this publicly, but I think it's important to my term because I think a lot of people are experiencing this too. And so if you're experiencing this, let me know. I loved my husband. I genuinely love him, but for a long time I did not like him. Not because he was mean or he was malicious, or he was really domineering or absent even. He was not a bad father. He's actually a wonderful father. He showed up for the kids every single day. He just was someone who was completely present and. If that sentence, I loved him, but I didn't like him resonated Somehow, I hope that you can feel you're not alone in the experience and this video is for you. Okay, so I wanna go there with you because I think a lot of people need to hear the specifics of. How this came to be, how I am able to love someone but not like them. And a lot of people are wondering what is the version of my life right now and how is that different than what it was before? So let me paint a picture for you about a typical Tuesday night years ago, before mema husband basically reorganized our marriage and did a lot of, in our work around the mental load. A typical Tuesday night looks like both of us putting the kids to bed, which we did together. We have three kids. At that time we had two. So we were both pretty tired at the end of the day and made good efforts to round up the kids, read them the story books. We don't really do bath time typically at night. I think we need to get better with the hygiene, but. Basically the hard part was putting them down and doing, brushing their teeth and they have a DHD, so it's really hard for them to take initiative on their own. So we have to like, babysit them every leg of the way to help them with their transitions and stuff. F and we genuinely made it a team with how we. Watch the time and we really were on it, putting them to bed at a certain hour. Of the time in the summer we went late. But the thing is, I, after the kids went to bed, what I craved was that I would be alone. And I know what you're thinking. Like a lot of people crave that. They crave being alone and they crave, watching Netflix after bed. But I did not crave time with my husband. I craved time by myself after bed and I couldn't get away from my husband faster. And I think something that, we did often after we went to bed was we went to our separate corners in the house and he watched his own shows. I watched my own shows and we basically both had a lot of alone time and I was relieved that I didn't have to do anything, perform any togetherness at the end of the evening. And I think he was relieved too,'cause he really enjoys his time decompressing by himself. And it took me a long time to realize when you are craving a distance from your partner, something is already very wrong and the craving is the data. And so it's a small house. We're both physically close, but feeling really far apart and that specific combination is something that being close in space, but being. Gone in that connection is its own flavor of aloneness. And I think a lot of parents understand that, right? Because you can't even name it. You are already there and he's there and there's a sense where I'm wondering, saying to myself, what am I complaining about? He's so present. He doesn't go out at night, he doesn't do his own thing. Why am I complaining? And so what was I telling people? I was telling people that my husband was really helpful, which he was. And that's the thing, he didn't not do all the physical tasks around the house or the dishes. He was really present with the kids doing the bedtime routine, cooking breakfast genuinely attentively present with the kids. And from the outside he looked like. An incredible father, and we look like an incredible team together. And I was protecting that image. I was protecting the image of being with someone, with having a good marriage. And I think I was protecting myself because as I say, out loud, it becomes real. And I didn't have language for it yet. I didn't know. What to call it, what to call, that specific flavor of loneliness that I experienced. And all I know was something, there was something wrong and I couldn't put my finger to it. And it just felt like its own flavor of crazy making. So someone would say, oh, you're so lucky to have. Such a supportive husband because my husband, runs in ultra marathons and he never really shows up and he just leaves the kids with me with the assumption that I'll take care of him. And I didn't have that kind of marriage. My husband really showed up for me and the kids, and I did felt lucky, but as I say that, and. As I heard myself say that out loud, I would often cringe, like some feeling would move through my body after when someone says, Hey, you're so lucky that you are married to someone like that, I would just cringe and be like, oh my gosh, thank you. And confusion and. Dissonance because I knew I was lucky, but I often didn't feel lucky. I felt like I was drowning quietly, and those things could be true. At the same time, I have to be grateful for my partner and drowning, and I think I wanna ask about something specific. I wanted to ask something specific to myself, which was. What is the thing that I carried the longest that I had no idea about? And that thing was for me, the holiday magic. Like I, for over 10 years planned every single piece of it alone. And it was the gifts, the traditions, the wrapping, making the tree happen. And we don't do Santa at our house, so it's not something that. Sometimes I wish we did'cause it feels a little bit more magical. But the family experiences that we're experiencing was because of my orchestration. And for over a decade, Hermo would show up. On Christmas morning, genuinely delighted and excited for the kids, but realizing that I did it alone and I'd be exhausted before I even started and dreading it. And I would just tell myself, oh my gosh, I'm not doing anything next year. And I even told the kids, I remember telling kids like, I'm not doing Christmas next year. You're getting gifts throughout the year, and we're gonna call it Christmas 365 or something. I forget what I said. I just remember thinking, oh my gosh, I can't do Christmas every year like this. This is way too exhausting. And the funny thing is around me, everyone does Christmas this way, like the, my female friends orchestrate everything. So I just thought, why am I struggling more than my friends are and why can't I get it together? The loneliness of doing the holiday magic on my own cost me. The ability to be present in my own life. It cost me the ability to be delighting in my kids the way Herman, my partner, delight, delighted in my kids on Christmas, whenever I'm, a person's carrying the mental load. It's hard to be present while you're closing out the projects that you've been managing for months on Christmas Day, and. And that Christmas day morning, I just remember I was just like moving to the next thing. Okay, we open the gifts and then we had to move to the meal that I prepared and it cost me the feeling of also being someone's partner. I just remember feeling oh, partners share the weight, but I was carrying it alone and I often didn't feel like I could ask for more because I was working so hard to. Be present in our family and going to work every day. And I didn't feel like I had a right to be alone. To be complaining. So here's what I wanna name is because it's important. Herman is not a bad man. Herman is not malicious. He's genuinely one of the most. Kind people. I know. And the funny thing is we went to his birthday party, we Herman plan's own birthday party, his own 50th birthday party.'cause he was like, really trying to be considerate of my emotional labor. And it worked. It was an amazing birthday party by the way. We had a DJ and we went to. He rented out this brewery and we had to bring, hire our favorite DJ that had r and b hits from the nineties, and it was just a dream, and he has a lot of friends. He celebrated and brought over a lot of friends, and this is a dissonance, is that he's not a bad person, and it's actually the part that nobody talks about is the specific loneliness that isn't reserved for bad marriages. Because we were not in a bad marriage and he's not a bad person. So it happens in the good marriages, the good partnerships where you love each other and where everyone is watching you look like a great team, but the loneliness isn't dramatic. It's not. Loneliness. That's a result of fights and there's no one that's cheating on each other. And there's just two people who drifted into the roles that we were socialized in. And one of the roles leaves people feeling invisible. And the other role leaves people the, the partner feeling misunderstood and it feels. The visibility feels like you are not being loved. And I have anxiety, which is a whole nother layer, and which I thought was just part of why I just couldn't complain because I was always thinking about the future and always living in the future, which is what anxiety does. And I was like, oh man, I just need to take anti-anxiety medication when I start putting things together. And. When we start redistributing the mental load, I was able to notice what is different, which is the anxiety disappeared, but it clarified, it became smaller and it was less like a system that I, a cloud that I was over. And I still have anxiety about a lot of things, but. I think it was better after redistributing the mental load because I was able to feel like we were worrying about different things, but we were doing the worrying together and it was less lonely, at least on the other side of it. So now I am on the other side of it, and I think what I wanna say to people who are inside of that cloud, inside of that. Lonely space inside that dark space is that you are not too sensitive. You are not ungrateful. You are not failing at being appreciative of finding a good person. You're carrying something invisible that's heavy and real. You're carrying the mental load and. The fact that there isn't a name yet doesn't mean it's not there. It's the loneliness you feel inside a marriage that looks fine from the outside with a person that's a very genuinely kind person, but there's a loneliness that is in there because you don't even feel like you're allowed to say it. So I just wanna name. That you can say it. It's somebody can name.'cause it's real. Just'cause it's invisible and you, it doesn't have to stay this way. It doesn't have to stay this lonely forever. And things with a source that even it's hard, even if it's hard to name, can be changed and. That's what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about next week or in my next video podcast to name what you've been carrying because I'm just stress it's not, the whole story and the mental load is real. It's measurable, even though it's been invisible, and so I. I love my husband, but I did not like him, is something that I will probably be embarrassed to say for a long time or just have guilty feelings about. And if this is your story too, if that resonates with you, please stick along for this series and I look forward to sharing more of my story with you. Take care.