Why Your Husband’s Behavior Can Take Over Your Whole Mood

“Sometimes the hardest part isn’t what your husband did. It’s realizing how much of your day now depends on what you believe it means.”

Robyn Lee

Your husband says something that irritates you. Or maybe it’s what he doesn’t say.

He doesn’t respond the way you expected. He seems completely oblivious to something that feels incredibly obvious to you. Maybe he does that thing you’ve already asked him not to do. Or he’s in a mood, and before long, somehow you’re in one too.

Now you’re upset.

It might last an hour or follow you around for the rest of the day.

I know this feeling very well.

There was a time when I felt as though my husband’s “bad behavior” was causing so much of my emotional distress. If he would just stop doing the things that upset me, or start doing the things I thought a husband should naturally do, I could feel better.

It seemed pretty straightforward.

He did something, and I felt bad. Therefore, what he did made me feel bad.

I was so assured of it that I started making a list of everything my husband could change in order for our marriage to work. I toted this list to therapy weekly, so me, the therapist, and my husband could work through each individual point.

But then I realized, if my happiness depended on him showing up differently, that put a lot of control within his hands. He could essentially decide if I was happy or in distress, and ultimately I didn’t want to be on that rollercoaster with him.

Realizing that has given me back more control over how I feel.

And that’s what I want to share with you in this post: an understanding that helped me gain more control over my reactions, even when my husband did something I didn’t like. It didn’t require him to change first. It started with understanding what was happening between what he did and how I felt about it.

How to Stop Letting Your Husband Affect Your Mood 

I don’t think it helps to start by pretending nothing happened.

Something did happen. Your husband said something insensitive, didn’t notice something you wish he had noticed, or responded in a way you didn’t expect. Maybe he didn’t follow through or didn’t seem to understand why something mattered so much to you.

And you had a reaction to it.

I’ve had plenty of those reactions.

The problem for me was that once I was upset, I often felt as though there was only one way for me to feel better: he needed to do something differently.

Maybe he needed to understand or apologize. I wanted him to change his behavior or finally see what seemed so obvious to me.

Without realizing it, I had tied the way I felt to what he did next.

That’s a difficult position to be in because I can’t actually control what another person does next.

What Happens Between His Behavior and Your Emotions 

One of the biggest shifts for me was beginning to notice the thoughts I was having about my husband’s behavior.

There was what he actually did.

And then there was everything I thought his behavior meant.

Those two things used to feel like the same thing.

If he didn’t do something I thought he should have done, I might think, He doesn’t care. When he didn’t understand why I was upset, my reaction might be, How can he possibly not understand this?

And if I had already explained something and he did it again, there was a whole story available to me about what that said about his consideration for me.

The story felt like a fact.

That’s the part I had to see differently.

George Pransky describes something similar in The Relationship Handbook: a thought can create a feeling that makes the thought itself seem true. I think that’s part of what made this so difficult for me to recognize. 

I wasn’t experiencing my interpretation as an interpretation. I was feeling the emotional weight of it, which made it seem even more like reality.

One of the realizations that changed so much for me was understanding that my thoughts were not my husband’s thoughts. No matter how much it felt like how I was thinking was right.

Something could feel completely obvious to me without being the only possible way to interpret what had happened.

I used to think reconsidering my interpretation meant I had to somehow convince myself that I was okay with what he did. I’m realizing those are two different things.

I can dislike what happened and still notice the difference between what actually happened and what I’m making it mean.

There’s a little bit of space between the two.

Sometimes that little bit of space is enough to change how I feel.

And I realized I did this automatically while driving. Someone would cut me off and part of me wanted to drive up to them and then cut them off (I know, I know, but I did say that’s what I wanted to do – not what I actually did).

The reason I felt this way was because I was angry. And the reason I was angry was because I thought the person in the car was inconsiderate.

What helped me was imagining that the person in the car in front of me was rushing their wife to the hospital to give birth to their 1st child. And then, my thoughts changed immediately.

All of a sudden, there was no more anger. It was just a kind blessing from me to them that they would get to where they needed to be on time (and safely).

It changed my whole mood.

I don’t want to act like changing your thoughts about your husband’s behavior can be that simple. There can be a lot of history and resentment that makes this harder to achieve.

And it takes practice to remove your interpretation of what happened from your immediate reaction. And that’s what you’re essentially doing. Giving yourself enough space to see things a different way, or at least think about how you’d like to show up when you feel distressed.

For me, one of the places this became harder was when something my husband did seemed so obvious that I couldn’t imagine there being another way to see it. That’s when I started noticing how often I was measuring his response against what my response would have been.

How Expectations Can Affect Your Emotions in Marriage 

I think this becomes especially interesting in marriage because we can expect our husbands to respond to situations the way we would.

Something seems like basic common sense.

You tell your girlfriend what happened, and she immediately understands why you’re irritated. Of course that bothered you. She might even agree that he should have known or that you shouldn’t have had to explain it.

Now you have even more evidence that your reaction makes perfect sense.

I’ve had those moments too.

But I’ve started noticing how often my expectations of my husband were based on what I would have thought, noticed, remembered, or done in the same situation.

I would have noticed that, so why didn’t he? I would have known that might hurt his feelings, so why didn’t he know it would hurt mine?

Before long, something that was obvious to me became something that should have been obvious to him.

Then the question becomes much bigger:

If he cared about me, wouldn’t he know?

At that point, I was no longer reacting only to the thing he did. I was reacting to what I’d decided his behavior said about how much he cared about me.

That’s a much heavier thing to carry around all day.

I’ve become more open to the possibility that my husband can care about me and still not think like me.

George and Linda Pransky use the idea of “separate realities” to describe this. Two people can experience the same situation and genuinely see something different in it. 

I’ve found that language helpful because it gives me another possibility besides one of us has to be wrong. Sometimes my husband isn’t failing to see something obvious. What feels obvious to me simply isn’t what the situation looks like from where he’s standing.

That doesn’t mean I automatically adopt his perspective. But it does make me more curious about what it is.

That sounds simple when I write it. It hasn’t always felt simple when I’m irritated.

Understanding Your Husband Doesn’t Mean Excusing His Behavior 

I think this distinction matters.

I’m not talking about convincing yourself that hurtful behavior doesn’t hurt, accepting mistreatment, or finding happier thoughts about abuse.

If your husband is abusive, threatening, controlling, degrading, or you don’t feel safe, that’s a different situation from the everyday frustrations and misunderstandings I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about ordinary marital moments that can create an extraordinary amount of emotional distress.

For a while, I think I confused looking for another interpretation with letting my husband off the hook. But considering another explanation for his behavior didn’t require me to declare the behavior acceptable.

There were still things I wanted to address or hoped would change. What changed was the idea that I had to remain miserable until they did.

That was new for me. And giving myself space between my natural feelings from my old thoughts, and allowing myself to be calm enough to see things from a different perspective, made all the difference in our marriage.

It allowed me to address what needed to be addressed without the energy that comes with blaming. I was more curious. Why did he do that? Why did he say that?

Taking Back Control Wasn’t About Controlling Him 

There is a lot of relationship advice focused on how to get your husband to do something differently.

How do you get him to listen? How do you make him understand? How do you get him to communicate or finally realize what he’s doing?

I understand the appeal of those questions. When someone else’s behavior is bothering you, changing their behavior seems like the most direct route to feeling better.

But what happens when he doesn’t change?

What if he doesn’t change today, or doesn’t even agree with your interpretation of the problem?

That’s where this became so important for me.

Instead of only asking, How do I get him to stop doing the thing that’s upsetting me? I began asking another question:

What is happening in my own mind that’s making this so painful for me?

That question gave me something I could actually work with.

I didn’t suddenly decide everything was my fault or that my husband was automatically right. I wasn’t trying to become so emotionally detached that nothing he did mattered to me either.

The difference was that I was beginning to see how much of my emotional well-being I had tied to getting another adult to think, respond, or behave the way I wanted him to.

I didn’t actually have control over that part.

But I was beginning to see that I might have more influence over my own emotional experience than I had realized.

That felt like getting some of my power back.

I Didn’t Have to Solve the Problem While Drowning in It 

This may be the part that has helped me the most.

When I could get some distance from the emotional distress and find a thought that felt a little better, I could often see the actual marriage problem differently.

At times, I realized the problem wasn’t quite what I originally thought it was. Other situations made more sense once I understood where my husband was coming from. There were also things I still wanted to address, but I could talk about them without all the additional meaning I had piled onto them.

And occasionally, I realized I didn’t need to do anything at all.

Feeling better didn’t necessarily make the problem disappear. It just meant I wasn’t trying to solve it while I was drowning in my reaction to it.

And I tend to see things differently when I’m not drowning.

I’m still practicing this.

Something can happen and my first thought can still be some version of, Why would he do that?

What’s changed is that I don’t have to treat my first interpretation as the only possible one.

What he did and how I feel may not have to be quite as connected as I’ve always assumed. I can dislike something without necessarily giving it the rest of my day. I can question what I’m making his behavior mean without blaming myself or excusing him.

I can also understand my husband a little differently without requiring myself to agree with everything he does.

I don’t need every thought I’ve ever had about my husband to be wrong. I just need enough room to consider that mine may not be the only way to see what happened.

Sometimes that tiny bit of space is enough.

It’s often where I find the better feeling and the better solution.