Never Marry a Man Who Shows These Warning Signs

My friend Marsha called me on a Tuesday night while I was wiping down the stove. Her daughter Jenna has been dating a man for about eight months. Marsha could not say what was wrong with him. She just had a feeling in her stomach every time he came to Sunday dinner. She asked me if I would talk to Jenna, since Jenna has always liked sitting in my kitchen. I told her I am not a counselor. I am a woman who has been married to the same man for more than thirty years and raised three kids. That is all I have.

But I do have readers. So that night I put a question up on the blog. I asked women to tell me about the warning sign they ignored before they got married, or the one that made them walk away. I expected a handful of replies. I got a stack. I printed every one of them and spread them out on the kitchen table. It took me two weekends in October to sort them. Tom raked leaves on both Saturday mornings and came in for coffee between loads to see how the piles were going.

By the end there were fourteen piles. I do not like telling anybody what to do with their own life. Every marriage is different and I have said that on this blog many times. But when a hundred women you have never met say the same fourteen things, you pay attention. Here is what was in the piles, and what I told Jenna.

He is rude to the waitress

The first pile was the biggest. I had not expected that. Letter after letter was about restaurants. Carol B., 59, from Lincoln, Nebraska, wrote that her first husband snapped his fingers at a waiter on their second date. She laughed it off at the time. She said he snapped his fingers at her for the next eleven years.

I thought about Tom. On our first real date he knocked over a water glass and spent five minutes apologizing to the girl who came to mop it up. I did not think much of it then. I think about it a lot now.

Jenna told me later that her boyfriend sent back his steak twice at a nice place and called the server “sweetheart” in a voice she did not like. She had told herself he was just particular.

A man who is rude to the help will be rude to you once the shine wears off.

Every ex was crazy

The second pile was about old girlfriends. Not that he had them. Everybody has a past. The pile was about how he talked about them.

Denise W., 47, from Erie, Pennsylvania, wrote that her ex-husband had three former girlfriends and every one of them was “crazy.” She said it took her six years to notice she had become the fourth crazy one. The stories never changed. Only the name did.

I read that one out loud to Tom while he was pulling off his work gloves. He said, “Well, somebody has to be the common thread.” That is about as deep as Tom gets, but he is right.

If every woman before you was the problem, he has never once looked in the mirror.

He keeps score of every dollar and every favor

A dozen women wrote about ledgers. Not real ones. The kind a man keeps in his head.

Joanne K., 58, from Dayton, Ohio, said her husband could tell her, to the penny, what he had spent on her birthday in 1994. He could also tell her every time he had driven her mother to a doctor’s appointment. He brought these things up whenever she asked him for anything. She said she stopped asking for things around year four.

I have been married a long time. I could not tell you what Tom spent on my last birthday. He could not tell you either. That is how it should be. A marriage is not a loan.

If he counts what he gives you, he expects to collect.

He makes fun of you and calls it joking

This pile was thick and it made me sad to read. It was all about little digs in front of other people.

Gwen T., 61, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, wrote that her ex used to tell everyone at parties that she was “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” When she got upset in the car he said she could not take a joke. She said she spent twenty years trying to learn how to take a joke. She never did. She finally figured out it was never a joke.

Jenna went quiet when I read her that one. Her boyfriend has a bit he does at her family dinners about how she cannot cook. Marsha hates it. Jenna had been telling her mother to lighten up.

A man who needs a crowd to laugh at you is not teasing. He is practicing.

He cannot say he was wrong

This one came up in all sorts of ways. Wrong turns on road trips. Wrong dates on calendars. Wrong names at parties. The common thread was the same. He never once said the words.

Patty D., 52, from Fort Collins, Colorado, said her husband once drove forty minutes in the wrong direction rather than admit he had missed the exit. She said that drive was their whole marriage in one afternoon.

Tom is not a saint about this. He has argued with me over a map more than once. But I have heard him say “I was wrong” plenty of times, and not through gritted teeth. That is the whole difference. Not whether he makes mistakes. Whether he can own one.

If he cannot admit a small thing now, he will never admit a big thing later.

Everyone walks on eggshells around him

This pile I handled carefully. Some of these letters were about more than a bad temper. If you are reading this and the man in your life frightens you, please call a hotline or talk to a counselor. That is not something a blog can fix. I want to say that plainly before I go on.

Most of the letters were about something quieter. A mood that shifts without warning. A house where everybody learns to read the weather before they speak.

Renee S., 39, from Tucson, Arizona, wrote that her ex never hit anyone. But she could tell from the way he shut the car door whether the evening was going to be good or bad. She said her kids learned the same trick by age five. She said that was the day she knew.

I told Jenna to ask herself one thing. When she hears his truck pull in, does she feel glad or does she brace?

If you have to manage his moods to keep the peace, there is no peace.

He picks at your friends

Carla M., 55, from Wichita, Kansas, wrote one of the longer letters in the stack. Her husband never told her she could not see her friends. He just had a comment about each one. This one was a gossip. That one was a bad influence. The other one was jealous of her. One by one she stopped calling them. By the time her marriage fell apart she had nobody left to call.

I read that one at the table and had to get up and refill my coffee. I have a group of women I have known since my kids were small. I cannot imagine Tom having a word to say about any of them. He has driven me to their houses in snowstorms.

Jenna admitted her boyfriend thinks her best friend is “a lot.” She has seen that friend twice since summer.

A man who wants you all to himself does not want you. He wants to own you.

He wants your passwords

The phone pile was all younger women, which makes sense. Marcy L., 44, from Boise, Idaho, said her ex asked for her phone code on their third date. He said it was about trust. She said that if it were about trust he would not have needed it.

I asked Tom if he knew the code to my phone. He said no, and why would he. I asked if that bothered him. He looked at me like I had asked if the sky bothered him.

Beth A., 47, from Erie, Pennsylvania, put it better than I could. She wrote, “Trust is not something he checks. It is something he either has or does not.”

If he needs to search your phone to feel safe, nothing you do will ever be enough.

His promises keep sliding

This pile was about small things that did not happen. He said he would call. He said he would fix the gate. He said he would come to her sister’s wedding. Then he did not, and there was always a reason.

Helen P., 63, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, said her husband had a good excuse every single time for twenty years. She said she finally understood that a man with a good excuse every time is just a man who does not do what he says.

Tom said he would rake the leaves every Saturday in the fall when we bought this house. I have never had to remind him. That sounds like a small thing. It is not. Thirty years of small things is what a marriage is made of.

Watch what he does, not what he says he is going to do.

He drinks and gets touchy when you mention it

I want to be careful with this one too. If drinking is tearing up your life or his, that is a job for a doctor or a program, not for a blog post. Several women in this pile said exactly that, and said they wished they had made the call sooner.

What struck me was not the drinking itself. It was how he reacted when she brought it up. Lorraine B., 56, from Topeka, Kansas, said the first time she mentioned his drinking he did not drink for a week. He also did not speak to her for a week. After that she did not mention it again for fifteen years.

Jenna said her boyfriend drinks on weekends and it is fine. Then she said he got very cold at a cookout when she asked him to slow down. I did not say anything. I let that sit in the room.

If you cannot bring something up without being punished for it, that something will never change.

He hides money

Sharon M., 60, from Spokane, Washington, wrote that she found out about her husband’s credit card debt from a letter that came to the house. They had been married nine years. He had three cards she had never seen. He said he was handling it. He was not handling it.

Tom and I have had one checkbook since the week we got married. We have fought about money. Every couple does. But we have fought about the same money, out in the open, on the same kitchen table I was sorting these letters on.

I told Jenna that she does not need to see his bank statements to know if he is honest about money. She just needs to notice whether he changes the subject when it comes up.

A man who hides money from you is practicing hiding everything else.

He lets his family run over you

I expected the mother-in-law pile to be about mothers-in-law. It was not. It was about the men who stood there and let it happen.

Gail T., 57, from Asheville, North Carolina, said her husband’s mother criticized her cooking, her clothes, and her parenting for twenty-two years. Her husband never once said a word. She said she could have handled his mother. She could not handle him not having her back.

Tom’s mother and I did not always see eye to eye. She passed years ago and I miss her. But there was one Christmas early on when she said something sharp about how I was raising our oldest. Tom set down his fork and said, “Mom, that is enough.” He did not raise his voice. He did not have to.

If he will not stand up for you with his own family, he will not stand up for you anywhere.

He has no friends who have lasted

This one surprised me. I had not thought of it. But eight or nine women wrote about it, so into its own pile it went.

Janet R., 50, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, said her ex did not have a single friend from before he was thirty. Every friendship had ended in a falling out. Every falling out was the other guy’s fault. She said she wished she had asked herself why nobody stuck around.

Tom has a buddy he has known since they were boys. They do not talk every week. They do not need to. When they do get together they pick right up. I used to think that was just men. Now I think it tells you something about the man.

A man who has not kept one friend for the long haul may not know how to keep anyone.

Your gut knew before anyone else did

The last pile was the smallest and the one I kept coming back to. These were the women who said they knew. Not from a list. Not from a friend. They just knew, and they talked themselves out of it.

Patricia G., 64, from Macon, Georgia, wrote that she stood in the church bathroom on her wedding day and thought, “I should not be doing this.” She said she told herself it was nerves. She said it was not nerves.

Marsha, Jenna’s mother, had a feeling in her stomach. That is why I had a stack of letters on my table. But the feeling that matters most is Jenna’s. I asked her, at the end, if she had ever had that bathroom moment. She did not answer right away. That was an answer.

If something in you keeps saying no, you do not need a reason. The no is the reason.

Jenna sat at my table for a long time after I finished. She did not cry. She did not argue. She asked if she could take the folder home. I told her it was hers. Tom came in from the yard, nodded at her, and went to wash up without asking a single question. He is good at that.

I do not know what Jenna is going to do. That is her life and her choice, and I meant it when I told her I am no expert. Some of those fourteen things can be worked on in a marriage. I have worked on a few of them myself over the years. But a woman standing at the front end of a marriage has a chance that a woman twenty years in does not have. She can still choose.

What sign did you see early on, and did you listen to it?