I don't complain when I'm ill, but my husband never stops

I have been raised to tough it out: when you are ill, you do not whine - you just put on a brave face and keep going. I have a high pain threshold and never take any days off sick. My husband is the exact opposite. Whenever he has a cold, headache or toothache, he acts as if he is dying. He stays on the couch or in bed, pleads with me to give him aspirin and care, and expresses his anguish all day long. In addition, even though he knows it is not a good solution, he insists on taking antibiotics. While my last antibiotics prescription dates back years, he takes about four courses a year.

I am now eight months pregnant and have many of the usual symptoms: a sore back, sore feet, cramps and so on. I am still working full-time and I make sure that my colleagues are not bothered by my pregnancy. At home, when I tell my husband that I am in pain, he frequently says things such as, "Oh, but that's normal in pregnancy," and "In six weeks, you will have a child and all your problems will be gone." However, his own attitude to pain has not changed one bit.

I feel I cannot take his complaints seriously any more. I am becoming increasingly annoyed by his attitude. At some level, I even suspect that he is overdoing it during my pregnancy because I am, naturally, getting more medical attention than him.

Act now, before this gets worse

Like you, I have a stoical, "struggle-on-regardless" approach to illness and what I consider to be a hypochondriac husband. The contrast between us also became more apparent when I became pregnant.

Pregnancy is only the beginning of the differences that can build up between you. The advent of a baby brings many more opportunities for disharmony and resentment, particularly given your different approaches to illness - compounding factors such as sleep deprivation, possible post-natal depression and the massive upheaval in your lives.

My husband and I bickered incessantly about how best to care for the child, with each of us feeling the other was critical and unsupportive. He felt he was not getting the attention he was used to and I felt that since I was the one who had endured a traumatic birth, I was entitled to a bit more care than usual. In the end, we separated for two years and only got back together when we realised the stupid mistakes we had both made. We are now raising a happy teenager, who is neither a stoic nor a hypochondriac.

I hope you can prevent your situation deteriorating in the same way: ask for help when you need it and appreciate that your husband's concern about health in general may be beneficial for the baby.
SL, Oxford

Illness is not the issue

This isn't really about how your husband acts when he's ill - it's much more to do with how much support he gives you and, more to the point, how much he will help out when your lives are turned upside-down by the arrival of your baby. Have you discussed this at all? If you fear he will not be particularly supportive, it is even more important that you start looking after yourself now - should you still be working full-time at this advanced stage of pregnancy? If your baby comes only three or four weeks early, you may end up having no rest, which will make it much harder for you to recover your strength afterwards. Talk to him about these important things, and ignore petty irritants.
NR, York

Your standards are too high

Gosh, it must be nice to feel so certain that your position is the right one. You seem to be making an automatic connection between illness and moral weakness. Your comment about "never taking any days off" shows that you see health as some kind of competiton, where "toughing it out" is the macho and correct thing to do. Heaven forbid that your new baby ever gets ill and expresses any "anguish", or requires your care. I hope you don't make your new child feel inadequate for not meeting your exacting standards.
Name and address withheld

What the expert thinks

No doubt you're right when you suspect your husband of overreacting to pain just now. It sounds like he loves being the centre of attention, so if you're taking that position away from him, he'll try to regain it by exaggerating - probably without realising it. This in turn will irritate you, so you'll both be feeling stressed - and, therefore, more likely than ever to repeat well-entrenched habits.

To make matters worse, neither of you approaches pain very adaptively. By overreacting, your husband risks being ignored if he ever has a really serious problem. He's also likely to irritate others. You, too, risk being isolated when you really need help because of your determination not to bother anyone. And just like your husband, you also risk irritating others - because they might regard you as upholding impossible standards. If your condition is contagious and you go to work, you also risk passing your malaise on to colleagues.

In truth, an approach somewhere between these two extremes would be better for both of you. Tolerating symptoms you know to be transient - such as you are doing just now - is admirable. But when your condition means you can't do what's expected of you well, or when you're carrying something infectious, then it's wise to take time out and perhaps to ask others to pamper you.

Could it be that your irritation stems partly from jealousy? It sounds like you were brought up very unsympathetically. Don't you wish that someone had cosseted you sometimes, rather than always insisting you "keep going"? If you can accept this element of your response to your husband, you may feel able to curb your irritation, because you can recognise that it's more about what you didn't get when you were younger than what he is asking for.

Your antagonistic feelings are likely to ease once you're no longer receiving regular medical attention. Nonetheless, the problem won't have disappeared, so it would be helpful to consider how to encourage him to change. The key is to get him to want to do so himself, because if he feels he has to alter how he responds without appreciating why, it will only create new resentments between you.

The best way to encourage someone to behave differently is to help him understand how his behaviour makes you feel. As things stand, your husband probably thinks you don't mind his complaints or that you hardly suffer from any ailments yourself, because you so rarely admit that anything's troubling you. Perhaps you need to ask him to help you more often, and also to let him know he's made a difference. That way, he'll realise that you, too, suffer, and moreover that he can help you feel better. You could request that every time you respond to his complaint, he must reciprocate by helping you out with something that's troubling you. That way, he'll become aware of the frequency of his complaints. You'll also begin to redress the imbalance in your relationship, if you both help each other on a more equal basis.
Linda Blair

Linda Blair is a clinical psychologist and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society.

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