Nagging, bitchy women, and dealing with partners who don’t listen.
The first thing partners can do is stop using nasty words to describe women. Photo credit: Istock/Siphotography
The quickest way for anyone to get zero cooperation from a woman is to call her a bitch. After that vile word is spoken, she will take pleasure in sticking an imaginary knife into whoever’s heart and twisting it with glee. Even if you have a heart attack five minutes after calling her a bitch and are now wallowing on the floor, she will sit and floss her teeth, scroll the Internet, and order a few things from Amazon before she’ll pick up the phone and call 911. I have a story that goes along with this phenomenon …
In my first, very short marriage, my husband had given me a 1-karat diamond that had been in his family for years. When we decided to divorce, I always planned to give it back. I had absolutely no feelings about that diamond or the ring it was sitting in and just waited for him to ask for it. Mind you, he had run off in the night from Arkansas to Florida with his receptionist, but my love was so dead by then that I didn’t really care. The call came, and he said, “Kathy wants the ring, but I told her you’re probably too big of a bitch to send it back.” Damn. You know what? You’re right. Forty years later, I still have that diamond, which is now a pendant I rarely wear.
Why am I writing about people and the word bitch? When you blog as much as I do, you learn how to find subjects that have a demand, things that readers are looking to find and want to read about. Writing is no fun if no one reads your content, and though I often choose to write about what I enjoy and am interested in, occasionally, I peek at what readers are looking for. So, I scrolled through a list of topics in my niche and found a subject that got my attention — what to do about a bitchy wife. I thought, “Who is asking this question?” I visualized the readers asking this, and the visual wasn’t complementary. Several other things came to mind from reading that phrase — on one level, I couldn’t believe it and wanted to think that, as a culture, we were past that, and on another level, I’m pretty sure we aren’t. Female clients often tell me their partner calls them the B-word, and my response is always the same, “That’s unacceptable.” Why is it unacceptable? Because no one gets what they want when they call another person a…
Becky Whetstone is an Arkansas native and has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. She is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) in Texas and Arkansas. 
