I’m sharing this story because I think my wife has gone insane! We’ve been married for three years and we have a baby boy. We dated all through school so after we were done, we didn’t see the need to waste time in settling down. My siblings and I are into farming. My wife works as a receptionist in a company. We’re just a young couple trying to build our lives. Every relationship or marriage comes with some friction and misunderstanding. We know that’s normal and part of the journey. But when your wife is so obssessed with fictional characters in the series she has been following to the point of comparing those characters to you, then you know there is a problem.
The funny thing is, my wife wasn’t even following Korean series until a year ago. One of her friends started suggesting the shows to her. It was initially mexican soaps, but that one was even ocassional. From last year, ‘her eyes were opened’ to Korean series and since then I have not had any peace of mind. I read about my brother whose pregnant wife was complaining that football is destroying their marriage. I was even laughing when I was reading that story because in my case, my wife has taken over the TV at home. When I come home, I can’t watch what I want to watch. It’s the football season too. If I go out to a pub to watch it too, she will say I’m acting irresponsible and ‘………’ will not do that if he was her husband, thus referring to a character in a Korean series.
My wife follows them like it’s a religion and at this point, I feel like I’m competing with the perfection they portray on the screens for her to see. On Saturday mornings, I go and play football and I leave my boots and jersey on the porch for a while because of the sweat. My wife complains that I should stop playing football on Saturdays and I should sit with her so we can both watch Korean series and in her own words ‘learn from the men’. The first time she told me this, I asked her what she meant by I should ‘learn’ from them. It wasn’t even a joke anymore. I asked her if knew these things are all fake and the men are not perfect in real life. She said movies and TV shows are potrayed to help us emulate what they do so we can improve our lives. I get her point in regards to the moral lessons and all that. But I’m not going to copy a character to make her feel good.
The Saturday football became a serious argument between us to the point where she told me she hates it when I come home all sweaty. So now, when I return, I hang the jersey on the drying line far from our door and wash it myself because she has refused to wash them even when she is washing her clothes. Another thing too is that, I can cook rice and some basic stews, but I can’t cook soups although I have tried. My wife has been insulting me with that when we argue. She told me I’m ‘useless’ when it comes to house chores and all I know is to go to the farm and work. One time I told her we can cook groundnut soup together and she asked me if I was now coming to learn this at my age. Sometimes I wonder if she is in love with me. When I try to touch her in bed, she’ll say African men don’t make s*x nice at all and this person (referring to a character in a korean series) knows how to get his girl in the mood.
I have gone as far as asking her what she likes in bed so I do it for her, she just looks at me and says nothing. We were s*xually active when we were dating and she never complained at that time, so I don’t know what she has seen in the movies that is making her behave like this. I have dated her for years. She really wasn’t like this. No one is perfect and the only issue I had with her when we were dating was that she easily gets disgusted at minor things. Example, when I’m brushing my teeth, she doesn’t come near because she hates to see the site of phlegms and the saliva even though we do that in a sink. My own wife waits for me to finish brushing my teeth before she comes to bath because it’s in the same room and she hates the sound I make when I brush. There are a lot of things that I’m now discovering about her that is so surprising that I’m wondering if we can sustain this marriage till death do us part.
I’m 28 and she’s 26. I’m trying hard to be the man and be patient with her but everyone has a limit and she’s just pushing me to mine. I’m not claiming to be perfect or anything. I have my faults, but the way she even communicates my faults to me is so painful. She once threw my boxer shorts away because she said it smelled and she didn’t want to wash it. My boxer smelling is understandable because I wore it to play football in the morning when I hadn’t taken my bath yet. I removed it when I returned from the field before taking my bath. But putting it in the bin because you claim you can’t wash it is too much of an overreaction. If you can’t wash it, tell me so that I can wash my own thing. Are all women this petty and disgusted by us men? Sometimes I just wonder. How can I match up to fictional characters that are perfect? I don’t know what to do to please my wife. She has a problem with everything I do and if I say I will give more examples, I will not finish writing, so let me end here and ask for your advice.