This Is Your Husband.. Your Emotional Punching Bag. Ouch!

He’s your emotional punching bag; work stress, home stress – you off load it all on him. But are you delivering the knockout blow to your relationship?

- Sasha Gonzales

At home one evening, part-time lecturer Stephanie Chia did something every married woman has done before: she bitched about her day to her husband.

She had to cover for two colleagues who were sick. Her mother had complained that she wasn’t visiting enough. And she was on the verge of falling out with a group of friends.

It was routine for her to share her gripes with her husband Francis*. His reaction that night, though, was anything but.

“When I was done talking, he sighed and told me that my constant negativity had become emotionally draining,” shares the 35-year-old. “I was dumbfounded.”

He then went on to accuse Stephanie of “making mountains out of molehills”, and said that all she did was “bitch and moan”. “He’d started to dread talking to me because he said that I complained about the same things all the time,” she adds.

Francis finished by saying that they never talked about anything positive. He felt like an “audience” for Stephanie’s never-ending outbursts.

Their cold war lasted a couple of weeks and they ended up seeing a relationship counsellor.

SOUNDING BOARD OR PUNCHING BAG?

Talking about problems. Analysing problems. These are the things women do to de-stress, says Ho Shee Wai, director and psychologist at The Counselling Place. “But for men, talking about a problem can create additional stress and helplessness, especially if he feels it can’t be solved,” she explains.

Nicholas John, 42, who is self-employed and married, agrees: “It feels a lot like being nagged at, creates unnecessary drama and gets tiresome. Are you just complaining for the sake of complaining?”