Too much chess?

This would be a particularly effective stratagem if he was playing chess with Robert Goulet.

Hm...sounds pretty silly to me.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that bigpoison is a strict behaviorist.

IM going to have to keep track of this thread for a long time

Well...obviously.  I'd have to pay a "professional" to acquire such insight.

What a prick thing to say.

First you'd have to get off your ass and hire one.

that doesn't sounds good. Too much of chess on a comp. screen is bad for eyes.

I think she's more concerned for her marriage than her husband's eyes.

Some consider that an ascent. 

I will said take same time alone with him and start to talk about this issue. Chess is not the problem here, in other cases is the playstation or tv or whatever.Get same family counseling will be a good idea

No comments for almost 48 hours?  I'm dying to get the updates...

And why is this in "off topic"?  This is very much on topic.  This thread incorporates all the basic fundamentals of life.

Hello all,

MrBarachess here.

For the benefit of the others on this thread, I can verify that Barachess22 is indeed a woman and is in fact married to me (so you can breathe easy, you other guys).

After twelve years of marriage, I have sadly become accustomed to these type of activities.  Mrs Barachess maintains a variety of online personas, run through various disposable Internet e-mail accounts,that mostly function to allow her to freely complain about me and cast aspersions on my character on various Internet sites incognito.  In person, I get a smile, a kiss, and (yes, surprisingly frequently) declarations of love.  Once my back is turned, out comes the laptop, and another opportunity arises to run down the husband online.  So far, she has not seemed to find any contradictions in this type of behaviour.

Yet as far as I know, this is the first time she’s ever done something like this in my own ‘back yard’, so to speak.

You guys have managed to raise a lot of useful points in my absence, though.  Why waste time appealing to total strangers on the Internet? Why not talk to your husband directly? Have you tried Relate?

From bitter experience, I’ve learned that trying to discuss our marital problems with each other simply does not work.  Mrs Barachess seems to find any opinion other than her own completely unacceptable, and quickly ends any attempt at substantive discussion between us with enormous eruptions of temper and threats of extreme action that effectively halt the conversation right there and then.  She says this is because she finds my point of view ‘upsetting’.

We tried Relate once.  Before we attended the very first session, my wife told me that if I didn’t go along with her point of view at the sessions, she would leave the country and take our children with her. Naturally this made me rather cautious and reserved about what I could say without triggering such extreme action.  She spent the whole of the first session spilling out all her anger towards me at the counsellor, who seemed rather shocked at this behaviour.  The counsellor told us to go away and find something nice to say about each other.  My wife wasn’t able to do it. After a few sessions, once it became clear that Relate actually wanted to hear my point of view, my wife suddenly lost interest, and wanted us to stop going.

I’ve been threatened with divorce during our marriage more times than I care to count.  I’ve never threatened it once.   My wife also fails to mention that she comes from a rather wealthy family background, and that her father just happens to be a lawyer who coincidentally is none too fond of me, so he would be more than happy to assist in such legal proceedings with money and free advice, should the opportunity arise.

So what about the depression?  Mrs Barachess was already prescribed anti-depressants by her GP in her early twenties, in fact before we even met.  Yet when the depression came back after our first child was born, which is fairly common as I understand it, I got the blame.

In those days, I was working as a freelance consultant, and earned quite a lot of money.  The birth went very badly, Mrs Barachess was probably fairly close to not making it, so I decided to do the decent thing, and turned down work to stay at home and look after her as she recovered, something her own parents weren’t prepared to do.  The money I had already saved up allowed me to do just that, and I assumed (foolishly) that if the boot was on the other foot, she would hopefully do the same thing for me.

Rather than this making me the good guy, instead I got the brunt of her post-natal anger and frustration.  She happily told me all of the things I was doing wrong as a husband and carer, and how I was a bad and selfish father, just because months after the birth I sometimes wanted our life to have some sort of resemblance to how it was before.  Nothing I did for her was ever good enough. She told me she would have been better off with no-one looking after her, even though that wouldn’t have been at all realistic.   Incidentally, I didn’t play chess in those days.

Mrs Barachess was so adamant that I was to blame for her mental state after the birth that I tried to make it up to her by agreeing to have another child, and doing things entirely her way – following her instructions to the letter.

Once again, I gave up my lucrative consultancy work to look after Mrs Barachess after the birth – I persuaded the hospital to give her an elective c-section, which at the time apparently made me ‘the best husband in the world’. Second time around I stuck to doing exactly what I was told.  Initially that seemed to work, but then things went wrong when Mrs Barachess chose to go back to work.

Her firm got into financial difficulties, and Mrs Barachess’s position at work became difficult.  At the time, we had agreed.I would stay at home and look after our two children, and she would go to work and earn the family money.  As things got more difficult for her at work, I tried to give her as much support as I could.  We talked exhaustively about the problems at work, I wrote e-mails for her to company management in her name, I even accompanied her to meetings with her bosses as moral support when she was looking for a quick exit.

For my reward for this support, she turned around and blamed me for most of her problems in her life, told me I didn’t do enough housework at home, or that the housework I did do wasn’t up to her standards, that I didn’t look after our children properly, and on top of all that, all my help with her job had in fact undermined her confidence to deal with the work problems herself.

After increasingly erratic behaviour, she admitted herself to psychiatric hospital.  She would telephone me regularly from the ward, to tell me what an awful husband I was, and inform me of all of the nasty things she was saying about me to the doctors, and what they were saying in return about me. Then in the next breath she would ask me to bring things up to the hospital from home, or do jobs for her around the house.  They discharged her within a week, and put her on a heavy dose of anti-depressants.

I have always been concerned about the possibility of my wife simply leaving the country with our children.  Her family have more than enough money to simply set her up with a new life elsewhere, and cut me out my children’s life completely.  So I have put up with all the trouble and anguish that our marriage has brought in order to try and be a good father to our children.

Even this seemingly noble goal, though, has put me frequently in my wife’s bad books.  I am alternately criticised for doing too much with the children, and then too little.   I am criticised whenever, in fact, I do anything in a way different to the way my wife would do it. This is where my interest in chess in recent years comes from – I have been teaching our children how to play. Our two elder children are now of national standard for their age, and regularly win trophies and prizes in tournaments.  My wife boasts about these achievements to her friends – and then in private criticises me for the amount of training involved in achieving these standards.

In case chess might be regarded as something frivolous, it is also true in mathematics – our son is quite gifted at maths, and over the years I have spent quite a lot of time teaching him  at home.  This has yielded good results – he is the strongest graded in maths at his school, even though he is not in his final year. One might have thought that my wife – a part time maths lecturer – would approve of this.  Instead, I am heavily criticised. My wife claims to love teaching maths to her students, but strangely has never been motivated to teach it to her own children.

My life has been further complicated in recent years by the fact that both of my parents have died, leaving me with a lot of problems.  I inherited a house 90 miles away about a year ago, but one in a dismal state of repair.  It should eventually be an asset to our family, so I have been trying to restore it to a decent state, using a combination of professional workmen, and work on it myself.  It has taken a long time to sort things out, though, and my wife has become impatient, because as always, she would have done things differently, and that means I am wrong.

Sometimes I need to wait for workmen to finish a job before I can return to the house and work on the next room myself.  None of this is my area of expertise, and I am learning as I do plumbing, decorating etc., to try and keep the repair costs down.   In the time when I can’t work on the house, either because someone else is working on it, or because I have to be elsewhere in the country because of other responsibilities, I often play chess online.

No-one is suffering from this, as far as I can see.   I still pay the household bills, from saved up money from my consultancy work and money I have inherited, whilst I sort out my parents’ estate.  I bought our family house outright years ago, again from my consultancy work. My wife, despite coming from a wealthy family, chooses to keep all her money abroad, and then keeps those aspects of her life totally secret, so she is not expected to contribute any of her family’s money to our family’s income.

After leaving the hospital years ago, my wife and her father demanded that she be allowed to simply stay at home, be a housewife and mother and earn no income,  again on pain of divorce, which I acceded to – I was simply given no choice.  We also paid for childminders for those children not already at school to keep the workload on my wife down. In recent years, though, my wife seems to have decided she’d actually really rather be back at university than be a full time mum, even though we have three children by now.

When I first voiced concerns that going back to university wasn’t a good idea, and that since she already had a Ph.D. I thought she could do better for herself, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was trying to control her and stop her doing what she wanted in life.  So I stopped expressing any sort of opinion on the matter at all, and told her she could do whatever she wanted, which she now is doing. 

Unfortunately, the same privilege does not seem to extend to me.  Even though I am not allowed to comment on my wife’s activities for fear of some sort of extreme behaviour on her part, she is apparently free to criticise how I choose to spend my time.

So in the spare time she claims not to have, she visits online forums like this one, and tells a highly selective version of events, seemingly in order to validate her negative feelings towards me and gain sympathy from strangers.   After all, if enough people comment ‘What a jerk your husband is’, then I must be, mustn’t I?

To the people that commented that repetitive playing of online chess represents low self-esteem – you’re absolutely right.  Then again, it’s amazing how low your self-esteem can become, when everything you do and everything you hold dear about yourself is criticised.  At least on a chess board, it’s 64 squares, 32 men, and your skill, and that’s it.   And despite now having an account at chess.com, my wife can’t actually play. So fortunately she doesn’t have much of a view on which variation of the Sicilian I choose to use, or whether I kept a bishop on the board wrongly instead of the knight.

Yeah, brohans, I loved this post!  Tell us more!

Gimmie a break.  Shit, you could at least make this farce entertaining.

MrBarachess, I'm pleased you've come on and given us your version of events - I am a bit fearful though your wife will come and and that this post will simply become a battleground for you.  I hope you can both sort your problems out one way or the other.

haywood ? oh give me a break will ya !

You need to see a Psychiatric doctor ASAP .Your wife look like has Bipolar disorder and You need to put your life in order.Get a Layer  or go to the court to prevent she take the kids away from You. You need to do something ,if she don't want to get help just divorce her ,You will get the kids .Is not good for your kids to live in that environment. Don't wait until is too late,family tragedy happens like that.